The selling profession wasn’t always this complicated. Sales used to be agreed to with a handshake. Salespeople would meet prospects or talk over copper-wire landline telephones. They delivered skilled sales pitches, telling customers what they needed to know.
But that was then. The context of selling and the tools of the trade have been forever transformed by technology, globalization and always-on connectivity. The sales cycle, too, has changed, with customers conducting web searches before contacting a salesperson. These changes have clear implications for salespeople and the customer-engagement competencies they must master.
Even with these transformational changes, foundational sales skills are as relevant today as in decades past: preparation, needs dialogue, consultative selling and so on. What we need today is for learning and development (L&D) to align organizational initiatives with the selling skills necessary for success in the current dynamic environment.
But is this happening? Are organizations truly helping their salespeople succeed? Are they aligning sales competency strategies in L&D for a 21st-century selling environment?
Training Industry, Inc. and Richardson recently conducted a study to find some answers. The responses of 228 participants touched on the relative importance of various sales competencies, effectiveness at developing these competencies, and commonly experienced challenges to successful alignment between L&D and salespeople’s learning needs.
Among the insights that emerged were two foundational elements: engagement in the sales cycle and consistency in training across departments and regions.
Engagement in the Sales Cycle
With customers having more control over the sales process than ever before, salespeople must be able to engage them at every point in the cycle. This reality is reflected in survey responses that identified several stages where first interactions with customers can take place: the prospecting stage, when identifying customer needs, when forming product or service solutions, when delivering the pitch, when closing the sale, and even during the follow-up stage.
The results suggest that salespeople must be skilled at both identifying a customer’s stage in the sales cycle and effectively engaging customers at every stage. They need to possess the sales competencies to establish rapport, initiate a dialogue, understand customer needs, position the solution, negotiate and close, and maintain the relationship. Only by leveraging these competencies can salespeople move the customer from one stage to the next.
The message for L&D is that competency training must be aligned to address the sales skills necessary to navigate customer engagement at any point in the cycle. While this point seems basic, the survey revealed a gap between the importance of each sales competency and the effectiveness of training in each one, which received lower marks. The largest gaps between importance and effectiveness were for the competencies of targeting buyers and prospecting opportunities, both with an 18-point difference.
Consistency Across Departments and Regions
The research revealed a number of challenges in sales training implementation and obstacles to training effectiveness.
Only about one-quarter of companies rated their sales training as “always effective,” which means that at the remaining 75 percent of organizations, some, if not all, learning initiatives are falling short. The most frequently cited impediment was the inability to provide consistent training across departments and regions. Half of respondents cited this lack of consistency as an implementation challenge within their organizations. Other, less prominent, challenges that respondents noted included lack of leadership support, issues with evaluating and sustaining the impact of training, low learner engagement during training, and resource limitations.
When asked about the reasons sales training fell short at their companies, respondents identified an assortment of barriers. Implementation of sales training is often hampered by operational complacency; trouble identifying employees with skill gaps; and issues concerning culture, sustainment, and learner motivation. Fourteen different obstacles were cited by 50 percent or more respondents as standing in the way of training effectiveness.
While the challenges are numerous, they are not insurmountable. The survey responses of 228 companies make one thing perfectly clear: For salespeople to succeed, they must possess the competencies necessary to meet customers on today’s new and constantly changing playing field. A handshake alone won’t close the deal anymore. Instead, it takes engagement. Customers need to be engaged at various points along the selling process. Salespeople need to be engaged in learning new skills, and L&D needs to be engaged in aligning the necessary competencies into their training strategies.
Download the full report, “Aligning Sales Competencies in Learning and Development,” from the Richardson website.
