Every company can benefit from training and investing in their own employees, and that goes double when that training helps make the sales department better at their jobs.
More customers and more money is never a bad thing. Sales management training is a special niche, and it’s one that provide a lot of benefit, but only if the right type of coaching and training is found.
There’s no question that management is important on every level. In fact, it can be considered downright critical. Many recent studies have shown that people who quit their jobs in office settings often weren’t necessarily upset with the work itself, but they couldn’t stand their supervisor. A single bad supervisor or manager can cause enormous damage to a company by chasing off young talent, creating a stressful mood at work, and hurting the overall production of his or her team.
Sales Success Starts With Management
Good sales managers are very important for another reason: they’re the most likely to coach individual members of their team. While coaching the top performers rarely has much of an effect, and coaching the worst ones often doesn’t do much better, for the middle 60% of sales employees in most companies some good coaching can have a tremendously positive effect on those individual sales people.
The best coaching programs are those that focus specifically on things like:
– Learning to coach specific skills
– Understanding how to communicate with different personality types
– Setting the tone for their team
– Knowing when to manage and when to step back
These are specific skills that are important to management. Many sales managers get their jobs from being good at sales, but that does not always translate into being a good manager.
What Types Of Training To Avoid
Companies need to avoid generic training that doesn’t focus specifically on management skills and the unique challenges that come with managing sales. After all, if those managers earned their positions through selling, they already were the cream of the crop and know how to sell. Learning to pass on that knowledge and manage members of their team who use different tactics or have different personalities is much more critical to their success, and that of the company’s, as well.
Most general programs for training managers in sales is pretty weak and watered down. If the main presentation is just basic sales training that’s re-packaged then that really is not going to be very useful. On the other hand, excellent sales management training has been shown to have an even better ROI for companies than solid training for their individual sales people.
Taking the time to locate a good training program, or great outside trainers who know what they’re doing, can make this type of sales training a huge benefit for the company. Bad training, on the other hand, will have very little effect.
The potential returns are worth the risk, but some early research is always a good idea by any business to make sure they get the right training for their managers in the sales department.