Shortage of B2B Sales Talent and Sales Training

VQXYE2ZEHCThere was a very interesting article on the lack of tech sales reps in the KW-Toronto corridor. One of the organizations talked about the challenges of recruiting internationally. The comments on the article highlighted thoughts on where B2B sales training was missing. As with any in demand job there needs to be many different strategies to fill those open positions. The great thing about sales is that you can teach someone with little background to contribute to the team. This can be a time consuming process for managers and is also dependant on selecting the right candidates.

Here are a few thoughts on how to develop your own sales talent.

Select the right people

Hiring junior people for sales jobs, that don’t have a lot of experience can be challenging. However, these future employees can be trained on the tactics and tools. When hiring, you can’t ask situationally questions on past sales experiences like you could with a more senior sales person. Instead, you can ask them questions that may highlight their intelligence, hard work, and determination. These are all great attributes for a sales person.

Onboard sales people

Creating an onboarding program for sales people has many benefits. Organizations that have onboarding have a 58% higher chance that employees will be at the same company in 3 years. The benefits for onboarding are numerous with the most important being that the reps can help contribute to the company as soon and as efficiently as possible.

Experiential learning

One of the challenges for sales is that there are many interactions with many people. This can make it challenging, as some customers act at least slightly different, sometimes significantly different, than other customers. There is a lot of learning that takes place as a sales person grows and gains experience. Sales also allows for training with experiential learning so reps can practice sample emails, old calls, and meetings as part of their training.

Ongoing training

One of the keys to long term successes for sales people is ongoing training. Reps should learn through the year with bite size chunks of information. This will allow for better retention and skill transfer.

If you are interested in getting help as you build and hire out your sales team contact me and we can talk about how the VA Partners approach can benefit your organization.

Shortage of B2B Sales Talent and Sales Training