Want staff training that actually brings about change?

Does Your Staff Training Consistently Improve Sales Figures?

You might be surprised at how often staff training has little or no impact on sales figures. Even more surprising is that some business owners and management seem almost … resigned to this fact.

Staff training days rank consistently well for team building and professional development points but rarely do training agencies put their money where their mouth is and guarantee increased sales as a direct result of staff training or staff coaching.

It's simple: the best staff training WILL increase your sales

The only staff training and staff coaching that Prosell is interested in is that which improves performance of your team and sales.

Uplifted total sales by 35% - Halifax

To find out more about how we have helped businesses increase their sales and profits, read through our case studies.

The three biggest mistakes most staff training programs make

1. Too much content, not enough practise

   Most training has 95% content and 5% practise. Prosell has 60% content and 40% practice. Staff training is only effective when it is action based. It’s like training a swimmer. While there is a certain amount of theory that is useful, the only way to become a better swimmer is to be in the pool – day after day.

2. Staff training that goes for too long

   The average attention span for a concentrating adult is around 40 minutes. After that, no matter how interesting the content, it becomes harder to focus and more difficult to retain information. Staff training that demands many hours of information intake, over a number of days is simply not effective. Even the most diligent staff members will forget key learning points once they are overloaded with too much information.

3. Assuming a one size fits all approach can work

   For sure, it would be easier - in some ways - to create a staff training package and sell it to every business around. But the other word for staff (that we like to use!) is PEOPLE. Your staff are people, individuals, with different strengths, career ambitions and varying team dynamics.

    

   The skills that sales people need are dependent on their products, market, customers, type of sale (transactional, one or two calls does it, longer term and more complex sales that may take a year or more) and environment (on the phone, face to face, in a retail store).

   Consider the example of a sales person from a computer design tools company who went on a training course. The only exercise she did was a role play selling contact lenses. When asked how she was going to apply this method to her job, she said, 'I have no idea.'

   This is why staff training that intersects with staff coaching (tailored to individual needs) is so powerful, and our unique process offers a combination of both.

A typical staff training scenario

Let's look at what typically happens when someone attends a training course. Imagine that Jane attends a three day training course to improve her negotiation skills.

Jane is experienced and has been negotiating for five years so not only will she have to learn new skills on the training course, she will have to break old habits if she is to really improve. That’s going to be hard - she's been doing things 'her way' for years.

Jane is a good team member. The training course itself is effective, Jane enjoys it and her performance on the course proves it - she leaves enthused and determined to apply the news skills and techniques she learnt.

The problem is that back in ‘the real world’ the habits built up over years quickly replace the new skills. The reason this happens is not surprising when you put the three day training course in the context of the five years that Jane's been a negotiator - it appears as no more than a blip on the radar!

Unless something else happens, training on its own is almost certainly not going to have the desired effect.

In order for Jane to feel comfortable enough to use her new skills, and so make them part of her normal repertoire, she will have to be motivated and supported to do so. Managers often underestimate the time and effort it takes for an individual, especially one with established patterns of behaviour, to sustain even the slightest behavioural change in the workplace. This is where staff coaching comes in.

To find out more and hear about real life solutions to these common problems, please get in touch.

If you would like to get started with your own internal analysis, please download our Sales Effectiveness Measurement Tool.