If you have been out busy coaching in the field over the last few weeks, you may very well have noticed that some sales people consistently outperform compared to others. And you may have wished that there was a way to transfer skills across….
Actually, it is a vital part of any sales director / manager’s job to work out who the ‘experts’ are and who could benefit from their expertise – in other words to map supply and demand for knowledge. This could include product / service knowledge and / or skills and attitudes.
The “sales learning curve” can be reduced by rapidly mapping knowledge requirements and acting on them in simple, pragmatic ways. Here are some simple ideas to help:
– buddying in the field between sales people
– Short product training sessions at regional meetings
– Virtual classroom briefings early evening
– Sales people create short “how to sell” videos and circulate them
– Identify common objections and provide answers to them in a pdf
However you do it, it is vital to manage peer to peer learning in a sales force as it is in the field where success and failure is most accurately enacted.
Also, social and peer to peer learning methods are very powerful socialising approaches: Aren’t we very motivated to copy those we perceive to be succesful?