Evaluating Your Sales Force
Sales training is expensive......especially if it doesn't fit the needs of your salespeople. Before investing time, money and resources in a training program, smart managers want to know the answers to some tough questions, like:
- Do I have the right people?
- How much better could they be?
- Are they trainable?
- What training do they really need?
- How long should it take?
- What would be the return on investment in training?
The Sales Force Evaluation provides answers to these, and other questions so the training can be tailored to the salespeople. Sometimes we actually recommend against training someone when it's clear from their evaluation that they wouldn't improve enough to justify the expense. For more information, contact Darrell Skramstad at 763-473-0235.
Our sales staff is composed primarily of engineers. Darrell quickly discovered that we prepared too many expensive proposals, therby becoming unpaid consultants. This caused our salespeople to lose control of the selling process, and be boxed in by prospects.
As a result of our Sandler training, customer requests for proposals are now fielded differently. Sandler active listening and questioning techniques, and confirming our expectations with our prospects have helped our staff stay focused on our primary goals. We reduced the number of published proposals and saved approximately 20% of our annual proposal cost. Prospects return more of our proposal follow-up calls with less inclination to hide from us.
Our sales level results show a 21.9% increase over the sales goal we had set for this year. Thanks to Darrell, we are making progress towards improving our close ratio and making more effective use of our sales staff.
Thomas Acheson National Sales Manager Dynamic Air, Inc.