Is Your Sales Training In Vain? Ask Henry Ford
(By Rick Fink) Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay!”
What is the value of training your sales team? Is it a waste of time or is it time well spent? Study after study after study continues to show that most company meetings are unproductive and a waste of time… Harvard Business Review, 71% of senior managers said meetings are unproductive and inefficient; Inc. Magazine, 90 percent of employees feel meetings are “costly” and “unproductive; and the list goes on and on.
Let’s be honest. It’s rare when someone says they enjoy and look forward to regular sales or training meetings, including the person responsible for putting the meetings together. Creating good, productive training sessions, especially on a regular basis, is not easy.
There are a few key elements to conducting more productive meetings so that your employees get more out of them, and also to help you make them more enjoyable.
One of the most important rules to follow regardless of whether it’s in person or via video is to lighten up. Make them fun, informative, and entertaining! The main reason meetings are so unpopular is that they are no fun, they’re boring, redundant and unfortunately, most reps will say, they are a waste of time.
The irony is that properly planned and focused training meetings can be one of the most productive, unifying, and motivating uses of everyone’s time in your organization.
Your people are one of the most valuable marketing assets you have, yet many businesses treat employee meetings with these resources as necessary evils rather than opportunities to enhance productivity.
Properly planned training will achieve four major objectives for you:
- Communication
Planning to always communicate something new, or re-profiling old subjects to make them appear new at every meeting, dramatically reduces staff boredom and encourages enthusiastic attendance. - Knowledge
Your best people are hungry for knowledge and your investment in their education makes their jobs more rewarding. Better-trained people generate more sales and contribute to higher customer satisfaction levels. - Motivation
Your regular employee meeting is also the ideal place to consistently reinforce and promote your company’s vision or mission. - Entertainment…. yes, that’s right. Entertainment!
Entertainment, or a “Fun Factor”, is the secret ingredient to making sure the attendees are engaged.
Planning and executing effective training/sales meetings is a very difficult task to do on a regular ongoing basis. If your meetings are productive and effective, congratulations! If not and you would like some free tips, ENS Media has a list of “Do’s and Don’ts of Employee Meetings” which offers tips to help make your meetings more productive and entertaining.
The litmus test is to ask your staff how they feel about sales meetings. If they say you have too many or they are too long, they are in the 70 to 90% that think meetings are “usually a waste of time”!
If you would like to see our 9 Do’s and Don’ts for Productive Employee Meetings, click here to let us know and we will send it to you.
Train them and create a culture where they never want to leave.
Better Training = Better Sales!
Rick Fink from ENS Media can be reached by phone at 605-310-2062 or [email protected]. Read Rick’s Radio Ink archives here.
