When it comes to sales, strategy as it is in many other things is the name of the game. A key question in sales is - does your company have the strategic sales advantage. In the case of most sales teams within organizations, the status quo is their enemy.

No one wants to relax and rest on their laurels while their competitors play catch up, which will happen if their sales team is not aggressively working to improve their company’s market position. With the rapid pace of our current business environment, no company can afford to lose ground in sales.

What about embracing change as a strategy to stay ahead of a constantly evolving sales environment? This means taking a very proactive role in the development of your company’s sales organization. It also often involves ‘thinking outside the box’ especially in order to give your sales team a competitive edge.

Next comes the all important sales training because continued development is a vital element in any skills-based initiative. A key question here thought is, how to use sales training to improve the strategic effectiveness of your sales teams.  Ask yourself; are you sill training new sales people with the ‘old-school of thought’ which may not be applicable to today business and economic climates? 
Also, are you simply sending your experienced sales people back to the same sales training courses they have already attended before?

For many organizations, selecting a sales methodology and the ‘right’ training program are proving to be bigger challenges than they previously thought. How does one balance the various opportunity costs (such as time, money and content) with the nagging knowledge that it is extremely difficult to recover from a bad training experience?

Ultimately, choosing the type of sales training that will your sales teams will reap the most from, depends on the type of problem you are trying to solve. Ask yourself the following questions: Are you looking to improve your sales teams’ overall effectiveness; Have you set what you are trying to accomplish in the sales process and how you are going about achieving this?; Do you want and need to redefine your organization’s sales processes? Remember that there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a predefined sales process or wanting everyone to be on the same page relative to steps of the sales. After all, having a structure is definitely better than simply having a random sales approach.
Process definition is seldom a problem companies’ face. The main challenge they often face if the execution of their processes.
The successful execution of the sales process is what ultimately separates top performing sales companies from those who are less effective. Bearing this in mind, the desire for sales training has moved from simply defining the sales process to actually enhancing the selling skills and strategic effectiveness of the sales organization. What most sales people want to understand and achieve now, is how to penetrate more new accounts, especially in the current landscape where potential customers tend to be more cautious than before. They also want to know how to pique their new prospect’s interest, how to discover what they need and meet these needs. They want to know how to get prospective customers to call them back, to ask questions, to differentiate their value proposition from their competitors’,  be able to deal with possible objections effectively, and increase the prospect’s send of urgency to come to a decision.

Don’t let sales training become your organization’s double-edged sword. Understand the sales problem you are trying to solve, know if you need to more specifically define the steps of your sales processes and raise the productivity and strategic effectiveness of your sales organization.

By Shanti Anne Morais