Tell your ValueStory! The fall seems to be flying by and it is already time to announce the October Richy. This month’s Richy goes to Alinean’s ValueStory™. ValueStory™ is an interactive selling platform that communicates and quantifies the value of your solutions to buyers. The program includes sales methodology and value message consulting services, tool customization, SaaS licensing, and skills training. We liked the product so much, Richardson recently partnered with Alinean to improve sales force effectiveness, providing sales teams with the right content, capability, and credibility to deliver personalized value messaging and the right financial justification to each decision stakeholder. Click above to view ValueStory Demo ValueStory™ is designed to get purchase decisions moving faster from "Do Nothing" to "Yes," with less discounting and with higher win rates. Beyond that, here’s why our team thinks ValueStory™ deserves a Richy: Personalized Buyer Interactions — Recommends the right value messages based on client information and profile, roles, and challenges. Divvies up the right parts of your story to deliver the right amount of value, increasing your sales effectiveness. Easy to Use and Create — Allows the team to quickly create value-selling and marketing tools from the bottom up with pre-made templates and default metrics. You also have the ability to freely roam between chapters of your value story, making it easy to jump to what interests your client or prospect. Prioritizes Your Proposal — Quantifies the benefits of your solution against the "Cost of Doing Nothing," allowing your prospect to easily see the true value in your solution. Have it Your Way — Being that this is your story, you have a variety of options to personalize it and communicate your value proposition the way you want to, with drawings, graphics, animations, and more. Mobile Convenience — Tablet fever is in full effect, with 59% of sales organizations currently implementing a company-sponsored initiative to assess and deploy tablets for their sales force. Your team can access ValueStory™ at any time on a desktop or a tablet — whichever is most convenient for you. Provocative Engagement — with personalized detail, compelling and credible analysis, and an interactive framework, ValueStory™ supports a provocative engagement style between you and your client or prospect. Congratulations to Alinean’s ValueStory™ on being awarded this month’s Richy. To view a demo of ValueStory tool, click here. Do you have a great product that will improve sales effectiveness and want to be considered for a Richy? Just e-mail us at jim.brodo@richardson.com and tell us your story. ————————————————————————— Want to jump start your next sales meeting? Help your team bring insights to customers that change the conversation with Richardson’s Selling with Insights® Workshop. It’s the perfect fit for your next sales meeting. Learn more!   The post Tell your ValueStory! appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Social Selling: A Few LinkedIn Best Practices Over the last few years, LinkedIn has rapidly evolved beyond a professional social networking site. Today, the LinkedIn network is becoming the hub of social selling. It allows members to leverage relationships with clients, participate in customized groups, and collaborate with your marketing team. Join us as Jim Brodo, Senior Vice President, Marketing, offers his executive tips for getting the most out of your LinkedIn membership and how to your social selling efforts. Download our Complimentary Social Selling Report To learn more about Richardson’s 2013 Social Media in Sales Survey, please click here to download the report.   The post Social Selling: A Few LinkedIn Best Practices appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Dialogue: The Oldest New Killer Sales Skill   The World of Buying and Selling Has Changed Few people disagree that professional selling has changed. The internet has disrupted standard selling approaches because it has changed buying behavior. Request for Proposals (RFPs) are more frequent, as buyers do their own research and engage suppliers much later in the buying process. Buyers attempt to drive us toward commoditization while sellers strive to differentiate. With closer budget scrutiny, senior executives and procurement professionals are more involved and the number of decision makers has increased. "Selling has changed because buying has fundamentally changed." Brian Fetherstonhaugh - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, OgilvyOne Worldwide Everyone is talking about content marketing, and some, content selling. Social selling is all the rage. Selling with insights is a hot topic, and Richardson’s Selling with Insights® program is one of our most popular new courses in our recent history. Cold calling is dead, or it’s not, depending on who you listen to. Inside Sales is growing and predicted to overshadow field sales. Decision makers are buried in email and voicemails often are not returned. Smartphones might as well be surgically attached to us and there is no downtime. Sound familiar? Are you dizzy yet? But Some Things Remain the Same As much as the landscape has changed, and forced new behaviors for sales professionals who want to remain relevant, there are some key things that have not changed, or changed very little. People still buy based on some combination of emotion, logic, and credibility (or if you’re a fan of Aristotle: ethos, logos, and pathos). They make decisions based on a combination of business and personal needs and wants. Organizational politics, positioning, and posturing still linger. While the Millennials and the digital natives of Generation Z may have different values and approaches toward working, social interaction, and digital connectedness, they remain human beings with all of our best traits and worst foibles. Emotions, kindness, decency, altruism, helpfulness, and trust still matter a great deal. Researcher and author Dan Pink posits that purpose, autonomy, and mastery remain our intrinsic motivators. We evolve and are influenced by our environment, but our hardwiring makes change slow. People are still… well, people. Dialogue and discourse remain foundations of effective human communication, whether in marriage, friendship, learning, or business. The open, respectful exchange of ideas around a shared interest or a common purpose, and the willingness to listen, learn, and share with others is powerful glue for relationships of all kinds and can generate the impetus for the positive changes we all seek. Dialogue: The Oldest New Killer Sales Skill It is for these reasons that we, at Richardson, believe that dialogue is the oldest, new killer sales skill. Whether you are opening a sales meeting, leading a needs discussion, exploring solutions, or establishing next steps,  it’s all about (or should be all about) engaging your client in an effective dialogue. Are you ready for this? (Perhaps you should sit.) It is also a critical skill when selling with insights. If you have been thinking that selling with insights is simply a way to use data, information, or expertise to shock and awe your prospects or clients with your brilliance or show them the error of their ways, you might want to rethink that. We have found this to be one of the many possible traps that sales reps unwittingly get snared in, that completely undermines their effort and objectives.. The Sales Conversation Pendulum Instead, we think of the sales conversation as a pendulum that swings back and forth from question-led dialogue to insight-led dialogue, based on the context of the conversation and desired outcomes. In our Selling with Insight® program, we teach that listening, observation, and judgment are necessary to help reps recognize the cues and clues that indicate which approach will produce the best results. Hmm.  Insightful Dialogue. What a Concept! In fact, the pendulum swings even within our model for delivering a personalized insight message. We teach sales reps to use the same Checking skills and The Six Critical Skills (communication skills) that have been a core part of our Consultative Selling Skills  course for years.  And when reps use an insight and have the desired effect with it (perhaps trigger a new idea, pique interest, or create urgency), this is just the beginning of a longer sales conversation where the rep and client explore possibilities together. This requires… [dramatic pause for emphasis]… dialogue, the new, yet oldest killer sales skill of all. Want to Have a Conversation about Dialogue with Insights? We speak with clients weekly who are struggling to scale an insight methodology across their sales organization. Often, they are falling into common traps and want to start to use insights in an effective manner. In other cases, they are having some success but want to improve the effectiveness of their efforts. If you would like to explore any of these things, or just have a dialogue and swing on the Sales Conversation Pendulum with us, reach out and let us know or comment below… we’d enjoy hearing your thoughts. Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insight Solutions  If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more. The post Dialogue: The Oldest New Killer Sales Skill appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Selling With Insights: When is the Best Time to Provide insight? Insights can be provided through any phase of the sales process. Today, selling with insights is about the value you are able to bring to your client or customer through the solutions you offer. Your sales team members need to become a source of ideas and insights for their customers to add value while building credibility and awareness of how they can help. In this video blog, Richardson’s Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer, talks about some of the  best times to provide insight and how to do so when that moment presents itself. {Please click the following link if you are having trouble viewing the video blog: Selling With Insights: When is the Best Time to Provide Insight?}   Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insight Solutions  Richardson’s Selling with Insights® sales training program teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, challenge the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more. The post Selling With Insights: When is the Best Time to Provide Insight? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

5 Strategic Applications of Richardson’s Selling with Insights ® Since launching Richardson’s Selling with Insights® program just over a year ago, we’ve seen incredible excitement and uptake from our clients, and we’ve learned a few things along the way. Selling in this era of an ultra-prepared buyer requires a seller to be even more skillful and prepared than ever. While interpersonal, communication, and consultative selling skills are still relevant and important, sellers need new skills to share value-creating ideas that shape and create opportunities with buyers. Sellers also need insightful content to share, which requires even greater alignment between the sales organization and other functions that may be the keepers of subject matter expertise, such as R&D, Product Management, and Marketing. Another unexpected outcome has been that many of our clients are using the program to rally the entire organization behind an important strategic initiative. They recognize that their new initiatives will require different customer interactions and conversations, and Richardson’s Selling with Insights® ensures that everyone knows what to say, how to say it, and why. Here are just a few examples of how our clients are applying Richardson’s Selling with Insights® in some very powerful and innovative ways. 1. Bringing new ideas or innovation to market Our client invested heavily in R&D, but their sales team often sold on price. Richardson’s Selling with Insights® program got their subject matter experts aligned with the sales team, giving them an Insight Blueprint™ to capture and communicate innovative ideas for the sales team at the right level of detail. The sales team then learned how to take the blueprint, research customers, develop customized Insight Messages™, and share the insight at the right time during a customer conversation. 2. Launching a new product, service, or solution Our client is a relatively new but fast-growing company in the telecommunications industry. They have been developing disruptive solutions to enable mobile operators to keep pace with growing demand for bandwidth and increasingly demanding costumers who expect fast, flawless connectivity at any time. Their sales force is very technical. Richardson’s Selling with Insights® gave them a standard template to position the benefits of their new solution from their buyer’s perspective and the skills to leverage insights with discovery and need dialogue. The content and the skills kept their sellers aligned with their customers and minimized tendencies to dive deeply into technical details too soon in the sales conversation.  3. Breathing life into underperforming products, services, or solutions Our client is well known as a global manufacturer of personal computers and has also built a strong service organization. They recognized significant growth and profit potential in services and sought to get their sales teams focused on realizing this potential. At a national sales meeting, they used Richardson’s Selling with Insights® to clarify their unique differentiators and value proposition and train their sales teams to position this value in conversations with customers. Sales leadership is confident that driving focus, content, and skills across their sales force will make a huge impact. 4. Making "Big Data" more meaningful to customers Lately, we have been doing a lot amount of work with media and advertising companies. Innovation is rampant, competition is fierce, and buyers expect measurable impact or they will try something else. Our client had reams of granular data to make a compelling business case to a customer, but customers didn’t have the appetite or the patience to sit through a 50-page PowerPoint deck filled with charts and graphs. Additionally, our client saw a need to up-skill their sales force to be more competitive in a rapidly changing market. Through Richardson’s Selling with Insights®, we gave their market research team a simple but effective format to keep their sales team informed of the latest market trends. Sellers learned to customize this information for client and prospects and deliver insight in a much more natural and conversational manner. 5. Delivering a compelling "Total Cost of Ownership" business case Our client is another global technology manufacturer. The product managers of one of their hardware divisions built a powerful "Total Cost of Ownership" model that proved beyond a certain time period it was far more cost effective to replace aging equipment than to continue to try to maintain it. They trained the sales team on the TCO, but they were never really sure if the training "stuck." Additionally, the training focused on the TCO model itself rather than the skills needed by the sales team to position and communicate the model with customers. Richardson’s Selling with Insights® helped to unite product management and sales, reinforcing both the content and the skills. The big takeaway is this: Richardson’s Selling with Insights® is a very powerful program that can help an organization get marketing and product groups aligned with sales, provide a standard approach and language to connect a customer’s challenges with your unique capabilities to help them, motivate your sellers to be more assertive and proactive with buyers, and round out the skills necessary to succeed in the age of the informed buyer. Complimentary Webinar To learn more about the applications of Richardson’s Selling with Insights ®, we encourage you to contact us or register for an upcoming webinar. Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insight Solutions  Richardson’s Selling with Insights® sales training program teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, challenge the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more. The post 5 Strategic Applications of Richardson’s Selling with Insights ® appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? Using social media in the sales process to drive leads, build relationships, and accelerate revenue is a hot topic, but it requires an expert balance of art and science. Deciding which social selling  tools you use will depend on what stage in the sales process you are in, what tools you have available, and of course which tools you are most comfortable with. In the realm of social selling, Twitter is changing the game. It is now an avenue for sales people to build a personal brand in the social field and the sales field. Please join Jim Brodo, SVP Marketing of Richardson for today’s video blog, Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? Jim will review the use of Twitter as a very valuable social selling tool on three fronts: Providing insights Listening to what is being said about your company, industry, prospects, clients, or products Interacting with your selling ecosystem Please click the following if you are having difficulties viewing our video, Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com. The post Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Customized Sales Training:  Why It’s Important and How We Do It About a year ago, we published the results of a survey that found that customization increases the odds of a sales training initiative being effective.  This reconfirmed what we’ve believed for years and how we work with clients.  But, some buyers push back on customization, hoping to take a cheaper and easier path to success.  With this in mind, here’s a primer on why customized sales training is so important and how we do it. Why does customization make for a better sales training program? Clients often come to us with a particular business objective that they want to achieve, such as accelerating organic growth or growing market share.  Changing behavior is one of the paths to achieving that business objective.  To change behavior requires people to break old habits and learn the behavior. We find that in order to really learn new behaviors and change old behaviors, you have to practice.  It is best to practice in as real-world a situation as possible so that sales reps see clearly how the training is directly applicable to them.  The training must be relevant and challenging, and this is why customization is so important. Think about learning a new skill.  It is a leap to learn a new skill and apply it back to the real world.  You have to build that bridge for your sales reps by customizing your training and helping them to learn that new skill in an environment that is like the real world.  They do not have to make the leap on their own back in the real world. How we customize sales training for clients One of the best ways to customize sales training is to talk to the people who do the job day in and day out.  We like to really work with top performers in particular.  Certainly, we want to talk to sales leaders and learning leaders to get the overarching objectives of what they are really trying to achieve, but when it comes down to actually customizing training content, you really want to work with the people who are doing it in the field and doing it well. You want to gather from them real stories that you can use to teach concepts to other participants.  You don’t want the outliers.  You want real stories that are challenging to participants but are also going to be something that they see in their everyday world.  It is not an outlier that they would say, "This does not feel real to me." Finesse is required in working with top sales reps to really find that right balance of a challenging scenario that you can apply and that is also something that they would see in the course of doing their business every day. Developing customized sales training is hard work that requires instructional designers with some serious expertise.  Our instructional designers will typically interview clients to first learn all their overarching objectives.  What is it that they are trying to achieve?  What are the business outcomes?  What current behaviors and skills do they want their people to capitalize on?  What new behaviors and skills do they want them to acquire?  Then, our designers will craft and design a program. It could be a classroom training program.  It could be a full solution starting from before the classroom, to classroom training, and then to some sustainment pieces, all linked to those business objectives that client is trying to achieve.  Then, once the designers start to lay out what the design is going to be for each component, they will start building them.  That is when they are work with top-performing line leaders and sales reps to gather real stories. The designers start to build in custom activities, such as role plays, case studies, group discussions, and learning activities, that help sales reps to gain those new skills.  Through observations, interviewing, and sometimes ride-alongs,, we learn from our clients what it is they are doing well.  The designers will incorporate the best practices from the client organization that they want replicated across their sales force, along with best practices and models that we continually research and refine across our client base. Finally, the program is reviewed by the client to ensure that it meets their requirements and expectations.  The entire process takes six to eight weeks.  Although we do most of the heavy lifting, we need our clients to help us line up interviews with the right stakeholders so that we can incorporate their perspective into the solution.  It is also important to have commitment from the executive team and sales management to sustain the impact of the training and drive true behavior change.  It is a bit more work and commitment upfront, but it really makes a difference in the success of the initiative. If you are planning a sales training initiative, we encourage you to contact us to learn how we can create a customized solution that will help you achieve your objectives. New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com   The post Customized Sales Training: Why It’s Important and How We Do It appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Creating the Skill and the Will to Unlock Sales Manager Coaching Power Sales managers are the force multipliers of productivity and key players for supporting change in your frontline sales force. Research from the Corporate Executive Board indicates that when training is complemented by in-field coaching and reinforcement, productivity is quadrupled from 22% to 88%. However, many sales managers are promoted based on their ability to sell, and the characteristics that contribute to a sales manager’s success as an individual contributor run counter to their role as a developer of others. Some sales managers lack coaching know-how and skill, while others don’t make time to coach. So, how do you create both the skill and the will to unlock the power of coaching in your organization? From our perspective, it comes down to three factors: Following a common sales management process Developing strong sales coaching skills Holding managers accountable for coaching Following Common Sales Management Process Many companies do not have a clue of how sales managers use their time and what they really need to do. Sales managers get very frustrated when everyone is throwing coaching training at them as a "magic bullet," but they don’t coach because they can never find the time. A sales management process is a summary of the activities you need your sales managers to do, along with timing, frequency, and expected outcomes that you can verify. It helps break this "chicken and egg" cycle of not coaching and having poor time management. But, a sales management process is more than setting aside time for coaching — it gives your sales manager guidance for what they should be doing each day, week, month, quarter, and year. A sales management process should also clearly identify performance measures, best practices, quality criteria, and verifiable outcomes. The process should not be overly rigid and should give you sales managers the latitude to use judgment and have flexibility with the sales reps and situations they face. We also find that some sales managers simply don’t know what questions to ask their sales reps beyond "how are you doing?" We help our clients create high-impact questions for key activities in their sales management process to get more and better information from their sales reps and inspect more consistently across their teams. This helps sales managers more precisely pinpoint where their sales reps need help, which ultimately saves time and improves coaching performance. Developing Strong Sales Coaching Skills Many organizations train their sales managers in coaching skills, but too often, we see this more as a training event rather than a commitment to a continuous improvement process. So, it is essential to have the right level of commitment and mindset before you even get started. Any learning will be accelerated by a great learning experience, mastering knowledge, and accountability. Organizational support is essential to kicking off a great learning experience, and the experience is bolstered by a well-designed program delivered by exceptional facilitators. To really understand how you want your sales reps to sell, your sales managers should go through the same training as your sales reps. Then, sales managers should go through a sales coaching program that is tailored to your sales management process and customized to reinforce the way you want your people to sell. Learning to coach to a process is much easier and real than learning a skill and not knowing when and how to use it. Time in the classroom is an opportunity for your sales managers to practice new skills in an engaging and supportive environment. Emphasize real-life scenarios and applications with lots of activity. Insist on a facilitator who has real-life experience managing sales teams — scars and all — and can relate to the challenges your people face each and every day. The classroom is really the starting point of coaching skill development. The renowned psychologist Ebbinghaus estimated that 87% of learning is forgotten within 30 days. You need to address this reality head on and start the reinforcement process immediately to push your managers to master the knowledge they just gained. Managers need to know your sales management process, your coaching framework, and your high-impact questions. This can be supported by job aids, but you want sales coaching to become second nature. The time to drive knowledge mastery is immediately after your sales managers go through coaching skills and sales management process training. Without mastery, sales managers will not benefit from the opportunities to coach in the moment when inspecting. Without high-impact questions, sales managers won’t have consistent coaching criteria that is aligned to your sales process. Even with great coaching skill, they may end up missing an important aspect of the sales process to inspect and support. We help our clients drive knowledge mastery through a process of spaced repetition, testing, and gamification powered by our QuickCheck™ application. QuickCheck™ utilizes a learning algorithm developed and used at Harvard Medical School to help ER nurses and residents recall and apply best practices under high-stress situations. QuickCheck™ has proven to be a very popular and useful tool to remember what was learned in class. The process takes less than five minutes twice a week for about eight weeks. Your sales managers will receive an e-mail with a scenario on their mobile device or laptop, and they select the best response. It harnesses your sales managers’ competitive drive by using a "game" approach, with real-time tracking of results on leaderboards. Holding Sales Managers Accountable for Coaching Well Holding sales managers accountable for coaching well implies that you are holding them accountable for coaching in the first place and that you are motivating them to continuously improve their coaching skills. As with developing strong coaching skills, holding sales managers accountable for coaching is much easier if you follow a sales management process. If you set clear expectations and inspect, then there is a much better chance of sales managers following through on their coaching commitments. One way to verify if they are coaching is to survey your sales reps. Ask your sales reps how much coaching they’ve received over a set period of time, the nature of the coaching interaction, and the effectiveness of the sales manager. Then, ask your sales manager the same questions. If there’s overwhelming evidence that coaching isn’t happening, isn’t effective, or there’s a major difference in perception between the sales rep and the manager, this is a red flag to examine further. It is also very helpful for your sales managers to meet on a periodic basis to share success stories, challenges, and solutions. These are very busy people, but an hour a month can go a long way to building a coaching culture. The bottom line is that your sales managers can play a pivotal role in your sales effectiveness initiatives. Consider your sales managers’ ability to reinforce the changes you expect in sales reps, and give them a path to succeed. New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com The post Creating the Skill and the Will to Unlock Sales Manager Coaching Power appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Sales Training: The Importance of a Great Classroom Experience In sales training, the classroom experience is a big differentiator. It’s simple, adults learn best by doing. If you are pulling sales people out of the field it is critical to make sure the classroom experience is customized and interactive through activities such as role playing for practice. Please join Richardson’s Andrea Grodnitzky, SVP Global Performance Solutions, for this video blog where she discusses the importance of the classroom experience in training the sales team. If you are having trouble viewing this video, please click the following - Sales Training, the classroom experience is a big differentiator.  New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com The post Sales Training: The Importance of a Great Classroom Experience appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

What Makes a Good Sales Training Reinforcement Strategy? A good sales training reinforcement strategy requires early planning. One of the biggest mistakes I see our clients sometimes make is waiting until after the training is over to think about the actual reinforcement plan. You need to be thinking about your plan well in advance. And ideally, you should split it up into three phases. What do you want to do for short-term reinforcement?  What do you want to do in the medium-term?  What do you want to do in the long-term?  Each of those three sales training reinforcement buckets should be a little bit different. In the short-term, for example, you may want to focus on knowledge mastery by drilling participants in the concepts they learned in the main classroom training. We do this through our QuickCheck process that involves spaced repetition, testing, and competition for about eight weeks following the initial training delivery. Participants are e-mailed two questions per week. They answer the questions, and even if they get the question wrong, they will see the correct answer and try to answer the question right the next time. Results are captured in a database and reported back to sales managers for additional coaching. Many clients also elect to post results of the top ten performers on a leaderboard to fuel competition and accountability. All of this activity sends a message that the skills learned in the classroom are not going away. In the medium-term, you might start doing assessments to see how salespeople are doing and gauge and flex what it is you are reinforcing. Assessments could take place as a result of sales managers inspecting a sales rep’s call plan or observing the rep in action. This activity identifies strengths and gaps and enables rich developmental sales coaching discussions to create additional awareness of gaps and suggestions to close gaps. You might be giving more on-the-job training to really make sure that the new behaviors are embedded into their daily work stream. Then, in the long-term, you want to see the needle for a rep’s key performance indicators start to move in the right direction. If they know what they need to do, and if through inspection you see that they are doing it, then you would expect positive results to follow. If KPI’s aren’t moving in the right direction, then that’s a red flag requiring a closer look. You need to ask yourself if this is a trend you are seeing across the sales force; in isolated pockets, such as a territory or vertical; or something very unique to the rep in question. If you have issues in pockets or territories, it could be an indication that sales management is lagging in their role to reinforce the training. Leadership must hold management accountable, just as management must hold the rep accountable. A big part of any sales training reinforcement program is coaching, and I think organizations have gotten the memo: coaching is important. They have seen that it has business impact. For years, those of us in the sales training space have been trying to get people to understand how important coaching is. Organizations get it. I think managers get it. But that doesn’t make it any easier for managers to actually do it. They have a lot of things on their plate. If their organizations are not teaching them how to do it or pushing them to do it, it may fall down on the list. What we are trying to now have discussions with our clients about is that coaching is a learned skill. It requires just as much, if not more, attention in terms of a training plan as sales skills. It is sometimes harder for sales managers to learn how to coach and to acquire coaching behaviors — true developmental coaching behaviors — than it is for a salesperson to pick up new sales skills. The best, or one of the best, ROIs on your training investments is to not only expect your managers to coach, but to teach them how to do it. Help them build the skills to have true developmental coaching discussions.     The post What Makes a Good Sales Training Reinforcement Strategy? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.