Training budgets in most industry sectors have been slashed – we all understand that, and we understand why.

Now, more than ever, companies need to ensure that they are achieving the best return for their reduced investment, but how should they go about choosing the right company to match their needs?

Let me begin by saying that most sales training companies have a unique philosophy and therefore a specialised approach. Perhaps they are strong in the area of selling business value to board level members at the expense of competitive positioning. Perhaps attention on strategies for winning very complex sales situations dilutes their efforts toward working with students on the details and tactics that they need to execute in order to win—down to the actual words they need to be saying and to whom.

A training company that specialises in one or more areas of sales expertise will not necessarily perceive or look for your requirements in other areas. If the training/consulting provider is left to define your approach, there will more than likely be a gap in the methodology, and of course a resultant gap in the subsequent training.

One way to handle this is to employ two independent providers. One would assist in assessing your situation, defining your requirements, and perhaps in building your methodology. The second would provide the training and would be evaluated and selected based upon their ability to meet your specific (and complete) requirement set. That would insure that the first provider would not be defining your requirements to meet their expertise.

In my view the best alternative is to employ a firm that is completely independent of any training or sales consulting provider and can offer the proper guidance throughout these steps to achieve the best possible result.

Important to any company that makes an investment in sales team development is measurement.

Benchmarking current levels of performance, setting reasonable goals and objectives based upon a careful assessment of the situation and measuring progress against those goals is a necessary, but for the large part overlooked component of most training initiatives.

When progress is at or above plan, everyone is encouraged, motivated and continue to perform and excel.

If expectations are not being met, the opportunity exists for immediate problem diagnosis and adjustment, assuring that the initiative will get back on track and provide the return on investment expected.

It would be negligent of me not to highlight two important services offered by the JF Consultancy – first, we do offer independent and impartial advice, when it comes to diagnosing traing needs – here

We also offer organizations the opportunity to conduct their own sales team audits – here

Today’s News: Over at Top 10 Sales Articles, Diane Helbig has taken a commanding lead, but it’s still early days – have you voted yet?

If you missed yesterday’s post, I have some free places for tomorrow’s excellent TSE Masterclass, presented by Harlan Goerger – simply scroll down.

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