Sales Training Courses – how to choose one that is suitable for you.
Sales training courses are workshops or classes that aim to increase the sales performance of one or more salespeople. There are open sales training courses, off the shelf sales training courses, tailored sales training courses and bespoke sales training courses.
Open sales training courses
Open sales training courses are open to the public and anyone who is willing to pay for a place. The benefits of open courses are largely around convenience. If you’ve been asked to source training for anything up to four or five sales people, you’ll probably be looking at open courses. If you’ve been asked to supply sales training courses at short notice, open courses may also be an option. The down side to open sales training courses is that the sales training will not be tailored to your individual situation. If you sell computer hardware, you may be sat next to people who sell anything from aircraft engines to agro chemicals. The point here is that the sales training will be about the concept of selling. It will come down to you to figure out how to apply that to your world. This may sound straight forward but sales training is useless unless it can be applied in the field, so the risks of it working or not are considerably higher.
Off the shelf sales training courses
Off the shelf sales training courses are provided by sales training companies for groups of sales people and are not open to the public. A number of sales training companies provide off the shelf sales training courses such as Miller Heiman, Huthwaite and Franklin Covey. SPIN Selling is a good example of such a sales training course. Many of the best known sales training methodologies are provided as off the shelf sales training courses. Off the shelf is where a programme is delivered with minimal or no (0%) changes to the framework and content. The reason for this is that when sales training first came into fashion in the 1980s, it was thought that what salespeople needed was a sales methodology, in other words, the right way to sell. The traditional sales training companies who provide off the shelf sales training courses still do so because it is extremely lucrative. They typical charge licence/ intellectual property/ delegate fees on top of faculty fees. It is more profitable for the traditional sales training companies because they only need to train their faculty once. So they gain economies of scale here and on the course materials. The costs should be lower than tailored or bespoke courses, but typically these economies of scale are not passed on to the client.
The upside to having such sales training courses is the IBM effect. ‘No-one ever got fired for hiring IBM.’ It’s unlikely that anyone would get fired for selecting Miller Heiman, Huthwaite or Franklin Covey. The downside is that, as for the open sales training courses, the sales training will be about the concept of selling. It will come down to you to figure out how to apply that to your world. This may again sound straight forward but sales training is useless unless it can be applied in the field, so the risks of it working/not are considerably higher.
Tailored Sales Training Courses
Tailored sales training courses are provided by sales training companies for groups of sales people and are not open to the public. A number of sales training companies provide tailored sales training courses, but the degree to which the sales training courses are tailored. Tailored design means that the framework is largely already designed and may vary up to 25%. Interventions are based on existing content but adapted to the audience particularly in vocabulary, terminology and role-plays. Almost all training companies sit in this space whilst claiming to deploy bespoke interventions. This allows a cost effective approach but the trade off is that audience fit and experience comes second to cost. The reason there is not more than 25% change in tailoring is because at that point it no longer becomes cost effective to change, it is actually more cost effective to start again. It’s a little like renovating a house; sometimes it’s just easier to knock the old house down and start again.
Tailored courses are more likely to be applied in the field as there is a component of customisation to the environment. There is still risk however that this can be achieved as the interventions are designed as much around existing course content as they are around the needs of the audience.
Bespoke Sales Training Courses
Bespoke sales training courses start with a blank canvas and build the framework from scratch around the audiences and stakeholders. Interventions are based on new content with some (5%) content from existing concepts but such content being adapted to the new audience and environment.
There are a number of advantages to creating a bespoke sales training courses:
1) Need to be specific to the audiences to maximise audience buy in
2) Need to be specific to the audience’s customer to produce the most effective possible outcomes in terms of sales effectiveness
3) The sales training course material or intellectual property can belong to you, the client, and so can be used in an unrestricted way.
You may be thinking that the cost of bespoke courses is more than all of the other types of sales training courses. But when it comes to Salestrong, you could not be more wrong. Bespoke sales training courses from Salestrong actually work out to be a lot more cost effective than any of the other types of sales training courses. To learn more about this please contact Salestrong sales training courses.
