You find a consultancy, discuss your needs, agree on a programme, invest time and money, skill your people up, and see an instant result. It all seems to have been a worthwhile investment!

But then you start to notice the sales figures dropping. Perhaps you put it down to a temporary blip? After all, we all go through periods where our sales numbers drop a bit. Unfortunately, six months later, you’re back to pre-programme levels and no sign of them improving.

What’s going on?

A Lack of Internal Support

Too many businesses assume that they can bring in a consultant to deliver a programme and everything will be taken care of for them. However, when the consultant leaves, who is going to ensure your team don’t slip back into old habits?

Successful sales training programmes always involve internal support. Some companies, for example, will appoint Ambassadors who work with the consultant on the preparation, design and delivery, and most importantly, post-programme review and analysis. They’ll conduct appraisals and evaluations throughout the programme, as well as post-training reviews to ensure that skills aren’t being forgotten.

Involving Ambassadors in preparation and design also ensures that your sales training programme is relevant to your industry and market. An off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all training programme is little different to buying a dozen copies of a random sales book on Amazon and handing them out to your team. The information won’t be entirely useless, but it won’t be as relevant as it could have been. That relevance can significantly improve your margins.

Expecting Standalone Programmes to Work

We learn through repetition, just as we maintain and grow our skills through repetition. Roger Federer and Serena Williams didn’t win Wimbledon once and figure they never needed to train again to stay on top. They trained almost every day because even if you’re a prodigy in a given field, you still need to practice and hone your skills as much as you can.

When a company books a one-off training programme, they might see a quick result, but without the support in place to ensure continued development, it’s akin to someone learning how to do something in Photoshop once and expecting to remember how to do it forever.

Ideally, although more costly, sales training programmes should take the form of an academy or multi-session programme with review sessions and linked modules. The academy approach doesn’t just teach new skills with each module, but it embeds and reinforces previously learned skills by offering a wider variety of applications.

A Failure to Supplement the Programme

The most effective sales training programmes make use of a variety of supplemental materials to help embed and reinforce the learning outcomes. This can take the form of surveys, quizzes, bespoke short-form videos, reading lists, and follow-up sessions.

Some organisations we’ve worked with have even embedded the training materials into their own Learner Management System (LMS) used by E-Learning platforms such as ours to provide their people with easy access to refresh their memories. By combining such an approach with regular reviews, leaders can be assured that their people are actively engaging with the training months, even years, after the final module.

Too Much Theory

We’re realistic, many people approach training with a “Do we really have to?” mentality. Nobody really wants to be stuck in a room being lectured on how to do their job better. Often leaders don’t appreciate the importance of querying prospective coaches on what approach they favour, and this can lead to serious disappointment with the outcomes. People shouldn’t be bored when learning something because if they are, they’ll switch off.

When we deliver a training programme, we want to ensure that every delegate gains something from the session, and keeping people engaged is paramount. To this end, we favour a mix of theory, practical exercises, role-plays, case studies, discussion, online polling using tools such as Mentimeter, brainstorming, word clouds, and other visual aids.

An investment in sales training shouldn’t be a risk. Finding the right coach, developing the right programme, and working with your consultant to cover all the bases is the best way to ensure that you don’t join the many organisations with buyer’s remorse.

If you’re interested in what we might be able to do for your business, check out our Sales Training page, or Get in Touch!

The post Four Reasons Why Sales Training Can Fail appeared first on Robin Lines Associates.

Uncertainty about COVID has led to changes in customer decision making, a restructuring of the decision-making hierarchy, and a tendency for ‘wait and see’ or ‘do nothing’ to become the default approach.

Furthermore, as more people work from home, the initial novelty has worn off. Business leaders that fail to adapt their style to leading teams remotely are finding morale slipping and productivity waning. It is perhaps more vital than ever to put compassion and empathy at the forefront of leadership. Instead of adhering to tired stereotypes about home workers being happy and carefree, we should seek to understand that not everyone thrives in a more isolated environment.

Contrary to prevailing beliefs about home workers having a better work/life balance, in truth, a significant number are unable to ‘switch off’ – they feel uncomfortable, as though they’re cheating, by taking a break from the computer from time to time.

We have found that there is a ‘silent minority’ of people who feel isolated or burned out working from home. Lacking the guidance of understanding leaders, they often feel that they are kept in the dark and directionless, which is taking a toll on their mental health. Engagement levels have dropped in many businesses due to poor communications, a failure to communicate vision, and a lack of consideration to the Hierarchy of Needs.

The bottom line is that the skills that got us where we were at the start of the year are nowhere near sufficient to take us through into the next one.

That is why we at Robin Lines Associates have spent the year developing our remote training programmes. We have spent time listening to a variety of clients, developing bespoke programmes based on their immediate needs to get them over the initial obstacles and ensure that they are productive and well-set heading into this uncertain future.

We are confident that our programmes, specifically tailored towards Winning Business and Keeping People Engaged in the New Normal can add significant value to any business struggling in these difficult times.

You can find a brief rundown of our new programmes here. All of our programmes are modular and flexible to suit your team’s requirements, can be run over a variety of video conferencing applications, and can be scheduled in bitesize chunks to give your people proper time to absorb the content. We provide recordings of sessions on request, and we favour a practical approach using interactive roleplay scenarios to fully recreate sales and leadership in the new normal.

The post Leadership and Sales Training in the New Normal appeared first on Robin Lines Associates.

Additionally, we’re proud that Ultrapolymers have been kind enough to offer their thoughts on our work with them, and we look forward to many more years together. If you’re wondering how professional coaching can help your business reach new levels, then the video above might help answer some of your questions.

If you wish to discuss your own training requirements and how Robin Lines Associates might be able to assist, please Get in Touch.

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