As a management consultancy with a vision tied to helping companies GROW REGARDLESS, you can imagine, we get frequent inquiries to help companies train their teams (sales, business development, managers, service staff) so the employees can perform better.
I’ll let you in on a secret—most of the time, training is only a very small sliver of what the given population needs to perform at consistently higher levels. In fact, in many cases, when we survey and interview employees to take inventory of what training has been done, and what training content exists, there is actually too much training that has been done.
That’s right, I said TOO MUCH.
I love the story about a little boy who played a game of baseball. During a game, the boy goes up to bat and strikes out. When he went back to the dugout the coach looked him in the eye and said, “Next time, I want you to get a hit. Swing the bat like this, (he demonstrates) and be sure to keep your eye on the ball.” Next time at bat, the boy strikes out again; on three straight pitches. When he arrived back at the dugout the coach got down on a knee, eye level with the boy, and said in a louder voice, “OK. When you go up again, this time, I mean it. HIT. THE. BALL.” He again demonstrated the swinging motion and told the boy forcefully, “WATCH THE BALL!” The boy again struck out.
What’s the point, you ask? Saying it louder, repeating it, or even demonstrating it, isn’t always the answer. In organizations, especially when we work with sales teams, we have sales managers or VPs who say their team can’t prospect, or can’t successfully make calls, or can’t advance opportunities to closure, or can’t get referrals. They subsequently tell us how many times they’ve trained their people, and how many field rides have been done…you get the point.
There can be many things at play which lead to a lack of results. Here is a short list of elements that accompany subpar production. If your team is not achieving consistent levels of high performance, take an inventory to see if these factors exist:
• Sales managers or senior executives that have been promoted because they performed their previous role well (top performing sales person gets elevated to sales manager).
This is often a dangerous move, because the mindset, skills, and attributes of a great sales manager are very different than that of an individual contributor. So, no matter how much you ‘train’ the sales manager, if he doesn’t have the right perspective, skill set, and ability to produce the needed results, all the training in the world will only result in marginal improvements, at best. Oh, and a by product is that it will be clear that this is a poor fit, and as a result will become more disengaged.
• Misaligned incentives or goals.
Think about intentional and unintentional messages sent. Sales contests, while good in theory, can narrow the focus of the reps and unintentionally direct sales people to do things that could harm the business. For example, if your firm has a contest for new appointments set (which we may see when appointment levels are low), it is likely that you’ll get just what you asked for: a spike in appointments, that may or may not be qualified. Then what happens is you and other team members waste valuable selling time that could have been spent with qualified prospects, centers of influence (who could give a referral), or existing clients. We see clients invent pipeline growth. Again, if you focus on it you may get it, but you’ll also get inflated unqualified-opportunities in your pipeline. We see companies that spend training time and money on qualifying opportunities, when that really isn’t the core issue. We’ve seen companies send clear messages that new business is the core focus, and then hold meetings and spend the sales team’s (and management’s time) talking about why client retention is slipping. These mixed messages kill productivity and create confusion. This often results in leadership thinking that the teams must need more training, since production is low.
• Lack of role clarity.
You might be surprised, but we often see folks in a given role who are not really clear on what the definition of success is for their role. They may have a job description that details task level items, but nowhere in the role description, on boarding, training, or performance reviews does leadership clearly state, across the role population, what good looks like. The result? Wide disparity in production across roles. Think about it in your company. Pick a role, any role. Do you know who the high performers are? Do you know who the low performers are? When each person was hired, the employee and hiring manager thought the match was a good choice, and that there was a high chance of mutual success. What happened? The employee didn’t turn into a dolt overnight. Could training be a part of it? Sure. Plus, clarity of expectations is a usual culprit as well.
So before you invest more time, money, energy, and opportunity cost on additional training, spend some time analyzing what is really going on. Get to the root of the issue.
Then when you develop an approach to learning and development, you can focus directly on the content that will move the needles to drive production and growth.
