For every sales transformation programme we undertake at Salestrong, we undergo the process of sales trainer selection. The success of the programme depends not just on the design of the suales effectiveness interventions, but the successful delivery of those interventions.
Sales Trainer Selection Criteria
We seek out the sales trainer selection criteria from our clients. Typically they find it hard to articulate criteria, so we suggest the following:
- Industry experience
- Sales experience
- Client experience
- Language skills
- Cultural fit
- Personality type
- Geographical location
- Availability
Criteria Prioritisation
The very obvious temptation is to tick all of the boxes above. But invariably some of the sales trainers will have be stronger in some areas than others. For example, two sales trainers may be equal in all areas except both industry and sales experience. One has stronger sales experience and the other stronger industry experience. So how do you choose between them?
Prioritising the sales trainer selection criteria is equally as important as defining them, and we do this through weighting. An easy way to do this is to weight each criteria from 0-5. Given that most clients want trainers with all of the criteria, we sometimes need to perform a head to head battle where we trade one criteria off against the other. For example, which criteria is more important, industry experience or client experience?
Sales Trainer, Sales Coach or Sales Consultant?
Sales trainers typically driver training interventions in the classroom. Not all sales transformation interventions are training based. It is not necessarily the case that a sales trainer will make a great sales coach or sales consultant. It is important to perform the same process for sales coaches and sales consultants.
Validating Your Choice
It’s important to validate the selection and this can be done in a number of ways:
- Interview
- Observation of a session
- Pilot
- References
The choice of these depends on the resourc s available and typically it is down to the sales training company to minimise the client investment at this stage. Please take a moment to see the Salestrong pre-selected range of sales trainers that we work with regularly.
