There are nowhere near enough good commentators and very little real debate about corporate training in Ireland, it is unfortunately all too rarely that I am struck by what Irish trainers have to contribute.

Recently however, I came across a letter in the Irish HR and training magazine First Train which is published by www.corpoaratetraining.ie The letter referred to an earlier article on so called team building activities and events such as abseiling, paintballing, quad biking etc etc, which are proving to be increasingly popular with Irish business.

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I’m often asked for the reason or reasons behind why corporate training so often fails so here goes:

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A client of mine called me the other day looking for some advice. He owns and operates a small distribution business and as he put it is considering investing in CRM technology, with the aim of helping his business through automating his sales and customer reporting.

The catalyst event for this call was that one member of his sales team had recently left the company taking with him a long list of contacts, and presumably with time customers.

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I got talking to a senior salesperson recently,  and was literally gob smacked when he told me about the amount of admin work that he is expected to produce on top of his sales target. He was having to spend roughly half his working week doing paperwork.

It got me to thinking that when you consider other unavoidable tasks such as travelling to and from sales meetings , the amount of time that he could possibly be spending in front of prospective clients actually selling must be tiny.

Wanting to see if there was any available information on the web, I came across an international productivity study from Proudfoot Consulting, which made for quite astonsishing reading.

This 2002 study revealed that sales people on average spend just seven percent of their time actively selling.

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Designing an incentive plan that gets balance right in terms of cost versus performance can be a difficult task . The challenge being to create a structure that includes sufficient attainable rewards to motivate the team while at the same time creates enough challenge and fail safes that the company doesn’t end up paying over the top for performance.

Get it right and you end up with a highly motivated sales team, high levels of performance and sustainable growth and costs. Get it wrong on the other hand and you end up with a demotivated team, disjointed performance levels and unpredictable growth with high costs.

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A recent survey by prominent corporate architecture firm, Gensler claims that half of all employees would work an extra hour per day if they had a better workplace. In fact many workplace studies have shown that a well-designed office is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to both retain employees and increase productivity.

While many large organisations know about and reap the benefits of designing great office spaces, smaller companies too often expect their people to work in badly lit, poorly ventilated, cramped and simply downright ugly working environments.

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The Top 10 Sales Articles is a website that I have been meaning to post about for a while and they gave me a good reason this month when they featured one of my articles Ten Reasons to take Notes during a Sales Meeting.

Thanks a lot guys, needless to say that I have been a fan of the website since it started in April 07. It is top quality on-line resource for anyone who is interested in sales and business development knowledge and advice.

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We recently undertook a re branding exercise including changing our name from Real World Sales Training to Beyond the Boardroom, primarily because the list of services that we now offer has increased and the old name Real World Sales Training didn’t reflect this. As part of this re branding, our website moved to a new domain www.realworld.ie to www.btbtraining.com

A big concern when you have to move is that when you move sites you affect your site performance in Google and for a business like ours that depends on the web for enquires and leads, this is very bad news.

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Here is a fab article on the management of high performing teams from Martice E Nicks Jr. Martice is a Partner at Applied Concepts Institute, LLC, A Professional Speaker, Master Sales Productivity Consultant, Coach and Trainer. You can join the sales productivity discussion at his blog

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Usually when I talk to clients who are looking for a training solution for their employees, one of the first things that I need to do is to get the client to decide and agree on the training objectives and to have them evaluate how realistic these objectives are in relation to both their budgets and timescales.

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