Training Your Sales Team – How To Create Personalised Learning Paths

A big part of the sales leader’s job is to determine the measurable behaviours that will lead to success for a given salesperson, and to evaluate the numbers that connect to those behaviours.

But it’s important to remember that your responsibility as a sales leader or manager does not stop there. Once you know what someone needs to do to be successful in their current sales position, your job is to find out what they will need to do to move into the next position.

This next position in their career needs to be one that makes sense for both them and the organisation.

A learning path maps out the new skills each member of your team needs to support them achieving their unique goals.

Ask yourself . . . 

1). How will I assess this team member against the most important benchmarks? How can I train and coach this person to close the gaps?

2). What mindset should they have; meaning, what are their habitual ways of looking at issues that are likeliest to lead to success?

3). What experiences should this person have, and what results do they need to generate in order to be successful at their current job (and prepare for the next job)?

4). What tactics do they need to master to create those results?

5). What behavioural plan should they be following so that they stay ahead of the curve, and so that nothing falls through the cracks?

6). What is the next career step for this person?

Be careful...

Learning paths cannot be team-wide or company-wide. They are job-specific and employee-specific. What Salesperson A needs to learn next is probably not going to be what Salesperson B needs to learn next.

Different people on your team will have different dreams, goals, strengths and weaknesses. Always assess what makes a given team member different from everyone else on the team. Note too that...

It’s vitally important that salespeople co-create their learning plan. Let them participate in creating their plan!

Instead of telling people what they should or could be getting from their development path, help them discover it for themselves through the questions you ask when you’re meeting one-on-one.

That way the learning path they commit to will have more potency and what they eventually learn will be far more likely to stick.

Learning will then be an important personal priority for them – not some edict from the boss that they resent as ‘extra’ work.

That’s the way you want everyone on your team to be thinking about their personal and professional development: like it’s all about them.

Tom Mallens is training director at Birmingham-based Sandler Training, Heart of England*.

Want to discuss improving your sales team's performance?

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Tel: +447917 005 938

tom.mallens@sandler.com

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*He's also somewhat obsessed with exercise. You can get his book 'The Lean & Mean for Life Formula' on how middle-aged men can lose 10kg and within 90 days >>> here.