How much business has your company left on the table over the years because your salespeople weren’t performing up to their full potential?
Don’t even consider the enormous value of all the new customers your sales force might have brought in if they were acting like true professionals. Think only about the additional business they might have gained from your existing client base. How much more revenue would they have reaped if their full potential had been realized and tapped by the very best sales training programs and sales coaching efforts?
Sara Blasing is director of training and development for SpartanNash, the giant Michigan-based food distributor and operator of grocery store chains. Here is a story she heard from a SpartanNash salesperson who gained new sales skills in an Action Selling ® sales training course, and began to use them in dealings with one current client:
“I had the relationship with the customer for 23 years; my company had the relationship for 50 years. We knew price was going to be a touchy subject in a pending deal, so we focused on identifying needs for quality. When we presented our solution, price never became an issue. As a direct result of the sales training program, we are up $680,000 in sales with this customer.”
That’s how much money this single salesperson was able to scoop off the table because his untapped potential had been released by greatsales training and great sales coaching.
It’s all about ROI
Blasing passed on that anecdote to Selling Power magazine when the magazine surveyed the clients of sales training companies to determine winners of this year’s awards for the Top 20 Sales Training Companies in the nation. Action Selling ® once again won the Top 20 award.
The award is based on several criteria, but the key one is “strength of client satisfaction.” Client satisfaction is not just based on the reactions of salespeople and sales managers to the training, but more importantly on the tangible results that companies see following the sales training program.
Like Blasing, the best training directors and sales executives know that the ultimate value of any sales training course or sales coaching effort lies in the return on investment it achieves: the tangible, measureable ROI. To get that ROI, a sales training program has to teach the key sales skills that are, in fact, crucial to achieving tangible results. But it is the ROI that finally matters, not the sales skills per se.
Action Selling ® wouldn’t earn awards if our clients didn’t rave about what our sales training courses did for them. What they rave about, specifically, is that by building sales skills that unlock the very real untapped potential in their sales forces, we help them make a lot of very real money.
For information about how to improve sales skills and make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.