Training Your Sales Team: The Hardest Part

Sales training has one goal: train employees to perform in a way that increases revenue through sales - in other words, to have business impact. But traditional corporate training often falls short of this goal. Maybe that’s because learners find the learning content unengaging or the training delivery method inefficient.

But have you ever considered that the problem may lie within your sales team’s perceptions of themselves as learners? What if that perception is inaccurate?

A study by Action Selling showed that sales people perceive themselves to be more skillful in critical sales skills than they actually are. Sales people were asked to rank themselves in critical selling skills like call planning, questioning, presenting, and closing. When these survey answers were compared to the results of tests of these critical skills, the data showed only 60% consistency. This discrepancy between how skilled sales people perceive themselves to be and how skilled they actually are is a perfect example of unconscious incompetence. It might be the biggest hindrance to your sales training. When learners think they know something (when, in fact, they do not) they’re less likely to pay attention to training and therefore won’t realize they don’t know what they don’t know.

Is Your Sales Team Unconsciously Incompetent?

Data from Area9 clients shows that employees can be unconsciously incompetent, or not know what they don’t know, in critical competencies that they are required to master in order to perform their jobs. If your sales team is unconsciously incompetent about important skills like working the full funnel, upselling new product releases, or appropriate timely follow up, they are a huge liability to your business’s bottom line.

Until now, traditional corporate learning was not capable of identifying unconscious incompetence in employees, and it was certainly not capable of correcting it. But Adaptive Learning can.

Adaptive Learning uncovers your sales team’s knowledge gaps and corrects them. In the process, your sales team improves their overall competence, liability to your business is reduced, and (therefore) revenue is increased.

In other words, Adaptive Learning succeeds at sales training’s most important goal: training your employees to increase business revenue through sales.

Download this E-book to learn other ways Adaptive Learning makes sales training easier and impactful to your business.

References: https://trainingindustry.com/magazine/issue/big-data-driven-sales-training/;