How to Know If Your Sales Force Needs Sales Training

Is your sales force consistently achieving your sales goals? If they are, do you attribute that success to the effectiveness of the sales organization itself, or to other contributing factors? If they are not consistently achieving the goals, then your team is not optimized—and the best way to know if a tool is effective is to calibrate it. We have an evaluation method that calibrates your sales team: the STAC acronym measures the four points of sales force effectiveness.

Payroll is the biggest investment in any sales organization, and because of this fact, you need to know if your sales force is optimized.

The first thing to check for is this: are you consistently achieving your sales goal?

1. If so, do you attribute that success to the effectiveness of the sales organization?
2. If so, do you attribute that success to other factors like these? Great economy, competitor failure, good weather, windfall from a key customer….

We have a simple evaluation process that demonstrates how you STAC up. STAC is an acronym that stands for the four points of sales force effectiveness:

Strategy

Have you established strategic objectives for the various types of sales calls that your team makes? Buyers take the same, predictable journey each time they consider making a change. Your sales force should understand the Buyer’s Journey, and be able to locate where the target is on the journey. When they know the buyer’s location, then they can easily identify the objective of the call.

The objective of the call depends on where the target is in the Buyer’s Journey: are they in the Top, the Middle, or the Bottom of the Sales Funnel?

Tactics

Do your sellers know how to achieve the strategy? Providing tactics mean that you share with your salespeople the way to reach their objectives.

In the instance that your target is at the Top of the Sales Funnel (TOFU), we know that the strategy is to establish trust. In conjunction with the sales objective, we have also provided the tactic: in order to establish trust, we execute the Educational Briefing.

Accountability

If you gave a strategy, and if you gave them tactics, the next criteria of evaluation is execution. Even if your sales force has the strategy and tactics, if they are unable to execute, then they will fail. Accountability insures that the strategy and tactics are in fact moving the organization to its sales goal.

Coaching

Finally, when the first three criteria—strategy, tactics, and accountability—have been met, your sales force needs coaching. Coaching provides assistance in helping the seller refine his or her process. This assistance not only helps guide the sellers who are trying to execute execute more efficiently, but it also helps the frontline manager find out which sellers are not trying at all, and how to redirect them.

Conclusion

If your sales force does not achieve their sales goals consistently, or if they do achieve them, but you suspect that they do so because of outside factors, then your team is not optimized. The STAC method is the simplest way to calibrate your team.

Photo by Jeffrey Betts.