Training for the sales mind

The post linking to the press release is on the sales training blog.

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Are you leveraging your Web 2.0 resources? If not, read the post by the start up sales training guru Karl Goldfield.

In his post, http://salesblog.karlgoldfield.com/2008/04/training-integrating-crm-sfa-into-the-sales-team-part-1-a-cry-for-web-20-and-now-sales-20.html, he cries to management to leverage the tools of Web and Sales 2.0 to maximize their coaching ability and help their teams reduce non selling activites.

Refreshing post from the spring and sales mentors and representatives should give it a read.

Lately I have been thinking about starting a TV show. Perhaps a 30 minute Web TV show that airs weekly and focuses on sales training. Maybe my forum users will speak up, but I ask you, what time and what format should I use?

Think about places like Mudulus.com and Ustream.com.

Thnk about how I should selll the show?

"The sales evangelist: Sharing the wisdom of the sales gods"

Help me out, will ya. I am really curios as to how I can help you learn how to sell better.

Also, news on the slinger front.

The message slinger blog on effective newsletters is live. We are serving up posts on how to deliver better messages. With 20+ clients and the beta going smoothly, we are ready to turn the engine on and jump to the next level. Be sure to get on the bus before we come out of beta and raise the rates.

 I started a forum and people are not joining fast enough to make me happy. So, I will give someone cash to post on my forum.

Sales training for cash

Treat that team of six like 200,000 in Berlin. I do not care what side of the room your partisanship lies, or how you feel about politicians being rock stars. Sales trainers should be rock stars and the game is on 24/7 bub.

Be charismatic or get out of the profession. Sales training must inspire. Your content is only going to matter if you first grab your audience. The easiest way to do this in the business world is to talk to what they know. Look, rock starts play songs that people have heard on the radio for months. They sing along and love every moment of the experience. So imagine walking into the room and being familiar with someones "bread and butter" pitch. What do you think is going to happen if you already know their top three objections, or the problems they have with marketing materials.

In short, get the team you are training on your side, get them lighting lighters at the end of the session, and humming the tunes you played the week after at there desks.

This will guarantee an encore performance. It may get you a standing gig every month/quarter/year. After all, everyone wants to be around a rock star.

Why hire a sales trainer? To get your sales people to become more effective.

How many trainings out there actually track how well they performed?

From AllBusiness.com " Participants in sales training forget half of what they learn within five weeks, according to a survey of more than 6,000 sales professionals by Charlotte, NC, consultants Sales Performance International. "Without regular reinforcement, sales training's half life is a median of just 5.1 weeks, which is even shorter than we suspected," said SPI Senior Consultant Bob McGarrah. "Indeed, for 44 percent of participants in the study the half life is less than a month." READ MORE HERE

This is a great point made and what we need to do as educators and executives is practice continued education. Have training for the reps and the maangement team. The managers should learn how to reinforce what happened in training and use benchmarking tools to maintain effectiveness.