[MUSIC] Originally, we had a couple of people, and we would be like, all right, your territory is Massachusetts, this is our cider, go for it, good luck. And, fast forward, we now have a director of sales training whose exclusive job, we have a sales manager. But sales training, his job is to work with our sales people as if he were a coach on a football team, working on technique. He doesn't manage them, sometimes just selling, but it's mostly just training. >> because what you want to do is you want to make sure that that salesperson is not practicing on your buyers, but they are actually practicing with their coaches and their managers. And when they're in front of a buyer, they're really ready. >> Training is almost legendary for not producing results, so it's doing the training and then having some type of plan. >> Hey, it's Kyle from HubSpot Academy. Sales training gets a bad rap and it probably deserves it. Think about the sales training events you've been to, how engaged were you and the other trainees? >> It's really easy to lose people in a group training environment. Think about it, at any point, somebody's bored, because they think they already know everything, somebody's lost because some things over their head. And then others are learning and they're really engaged, but the people who aren't learning, they're really bringing the energy down in the room. >> It's easy to think that this means sales training isn't worth the effort and you should just give up on it, but you definitely should not do that. Good sales training is the only way to improve sales performance at your company. >> When companies run their development, typically what their dashboards are looking at are typically financial, okay? And what a lot of people lose sight of is the fact that the numbers themselves aren't going to change on purpose unless you actually make a change in the behavior of your people, your sales force. So if they see a change, and what they see is they're not putting a lot of money into the development of the other people, it's by accident that they're seeing a positive change, okay? It's the market forces that are actually driving the change for them. Perhaps it's some sort of a product mix, again a market force, products that actually appealed to the market at that particular point in time, but it's not necessarily because of the sellers. That's what I call the difference between hope casting and forecasting, okay? Hope casting is when you say, gosh, I hope that we can improve ourselves about 3% or I hope I can make my 15% cater. And forecasting is when you say, I know what I have as far as the skill sets and competencies are in my salesforce. And I know that we can get them to here, give them a small stretch goal and we're going to be there. That's the difference between forecasting and hope casting. And when it comes to hope casting, typically a sales organization, I'm just going to say it. More often than not is dependent upon how well the frontline sales manager can crack the whip on their sellers toward the end of each quarter, okay? At the beginning of the quarter it's all kumbaya, yeah, how you doing? Let's do a little bit of learning and that kind of thing. But as the quarter starts to push on, and the numbers are looking for the numbers. That's when things turn less about the development of the sellers and much more into what have you done for me lately. >> Aside from being good for your company's revenue, an effective training program will help your reps in a variety of ways. For one thing, it helps them remember the things they might otherwise forget to do. >> You can definitely learn and I think sales is many times you know what to do but you forget it or you skip it. I mean everyone knows that you should use reference when you sell but you forget it because you don't have the reference easy to get and easy to access. But if you sales amendment tools that actually allows you to get informed with that information all the time. You become a better salesperson. So try to help them to not forget the important things. If you sit down and ask them, they know exactly what to do, but you need to get it into the structure process. >> That's one benefit of sales training, but there's an even bigger one. We live in a time when everything is changing all the time and good sales training helps reps stay on top of that. >> But when you spend that many hours of training, you know what happens? You get good at learning new things. Well, salespeople in today's world, not only have to be great at a lot of things. Next month, they're going to have to be really great at something that hasn't even been invented yet. How are you going to get great like that? You've got to learn things quickly. How do you learn things quickly? because that's a skill, you learn things quickly. There's only one way to develop that skill, training. Training is the art of learning things quickly. Not training is the art of not learning things quickly. Not training means that we're still training, we're practicing doing everything the way we've always done it. Well, that's great except the world keeps changing. So you want to do things the way you still do them in 2010, how's that working out? Because nothing else is the way it was in 2010. So today's sales people have to be really good at learning new things and the only way they're going to get there is ongoing training and practicing. There's no shortcut to that. And so I encourage sales people to remember training, especially sales training, it's not about what you know, it's what you do. You don't even need training to learn how to close a sale, but do you know how can you actually pull off hitting that increased goal every year? I can, you know how come? No matter what the economy is, sometimes the economy is good, sometimes the economy is bad, training shows me how to adjust in either scenario. Without training, you're always going to be frustrated and you're not going to have the success you want. >> So continuous learning is absolutely critical to do a couple of things. First, it creates that perpetual readiness cycle so that we look at what competencies does the salesperson need to demonstrate expertise in? And how do we make sure that they're actually getting ready to develop those competencies? So we're going to be feeding them that salesperson micro learning programs on their mobile devices, maybe it's integrated into their CRM. But on an ongoing basis that salesperson is getting continuous learning, to develop those competencies that they lack. We put them into assess cycles, where we do that video assessment and then lastly we get their managers to do that third level of assessment. Can they actually demonstrate this in the field? The other component of continuous learning obviously is change, everything is always changing. The pace of change and the pace of innovation is just accelerating. And so a big challenge for enablement leaders is keeping their sales people up to date. Product enhancements, new product introductions, competitors, the competitive landscape, what's happening in the marketplace? What's happening even from a geopolitical perspective? It can all have an impact on the conversation that a salesperson is expected to have. And we want to make sure that that salesperson is always ready with the most up to date information, to have the most impactful conversation with those buyers. >> So invest some time into creating an ongoing training program for your reps and get ready to see excellent returns on that investment. [MUSIC]
