Paul McCord, sales guru, trainer and author of  “Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals” is frankly someone I have come to admire greatly, while I don’t necessarily always agree with his position, his knowledge, honestly and calling it as he sees it is entirely refreshing and his blog is a must for anyone involved with sales.

While browsing some of his recent blog posts, I came across “From Classroom to Pay check- Making Sales Training Work” in which he raises some very interesting points.

Paul starts by explaining that a complaint he hears again and again from salespeople is that sales training has little or no real impact, going on to say that many studies back up this observation. Considering the ROIs, who is to blame for this? Blame could be affixed to everyone involved, but as Paul points out maybe that’s not where it ends, perhaps we are missing something more obvious.

As Paul puts it “Sales training is not simply an intellectual activity; by its very nature it demands behaviour change.To be effective, sales training requires that negative or ineffective behaviour be replaced with positive or effective behaviours”

Because of this, Paul believes that “sales training has more in common with sports coaching than it does academic teaching” and I have to say I’m inclined to agree.

When it comes to selling, knowing how to is useless unless that knowing translates to doing (behaviour), that’s why for sales training to be truly effective it must be accompanied by sales coaching. This premise is also true of any results focused training such as management courses etc.

With respect to the Irish training community, we are light years behind in this regard. Millions of Euro are spent every year on corporate training solutions that deliver nothing in terms of genuine ROI.

In the current economic climate, a obvious danger being is that Irish companies who have suffered as a result, may choose to use previous training experiences and lack of any real ROIs to now justify turning their back of staff training completely.

This may be an unfortunate consequence, as investing in effective training solutions could actually end up giving your business a very real competitive advantage. Why not learn from people like Paul McCord? and together deliver training that really works.

Tags: business training, corporate training, management training, sales coaching, sales courses, sales training

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under business training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.