Winning teams are always looking for ways to improve.  For sales organizations, that means investing in sales training and sales coaching programs.

Many such companies who have made the switch to training in Customer Aligned Selling and have seen improvements in their results; though some haven’t seen as dramatic an increase in sales as they had hoped.  These “good, but I was hoping for better” results can generally be attributed to a handful of missed opportunities in how the training is executed and how what it teaches is implemented afterward.

Here are four of the most common sales training pitfalls, and what you can do to avoid them:

Many sales managers have become frustrated with sales training programs and have largely given up on pursuing training for their reps.  They have paid thousands of dollars for training in the past and received little or no return on that investment.

Unfortunately, instead of trying to find the root causes behind why the training didn’t work, they sometimes default to assuming the trainer they hired didn’t do a good job.  They may even conclude that sales trainers are all hype.  Or they may decide that their people just don’t have what it takes to be really stellar sales reps.

The reality is that most sales managers in this situation are unaware of the ways in which their own decisions and actions set them up for failure from the beginning. 

Many organizations unwittingly suffer from a bad habit that greatly diminishes sales performance:  sales managers who spend too much of their time trying to manage a sales rep's outcomes.  You may ask, "Well, isn't that a sales manager's job?"

Trust

Steven M Covey in the book The Speed of Trust states that companies that have high trust outperform low trust companies by as much as 286%. To get that level of performance, the employees are fully engaged. What does trust have to do with engagement? Everything! Trust is the foundation from which everyone builds relationships. 

According to  Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy, the first things people subconsciously think during first impressions are: 1) Can I trust you? 2) Can I respect you?  Trust is the beginning and the mortar of a relationship. Warren Buffett comments that it can take 20 years to build trust, but trust can be lost in 5 minutes through an untrustworthy act.

Trust is the foundation from which all relationships are built. People are not judging you on your competence first; they want to trust and respect you first, then they are open to learn about your competence. Trust is personal first. Then trust can be on the competence level, i.e. Are you competent in what you do?   

As you begin 2017 do you believe your team is fully committed? Is your leadership team all in? Are your sales reps all in? Is your customer support team and operations team all in? 

Employee engagement and team dysfunctionality are two areas that suck the life out of a leader. The leader knows that his/her people are not giving it their all or are not working as a team, but he/she may not have the knowledge to solve the problem. 

The Tyranny of the Trivial