Scoring Big Gains Is All About Consistency

It’s the beginning of football season, and we all love rooting for teams that pull together and chalk up wins that no one thought possible. Building a winning team isn’t always about having naturally gifted star players but rather a great coach who has a consistent training plan and coaching approach for the team. His or her unfailing attention to developing skills can turn a mediocre team into champions.

Sales trainers and coaches can work with their sales teams in the same way to reach year-end sales goals. Athletes don’t practice hard initially and then relax in a start-and-stop pattern. Rather, they keep up the momentum and hard work throughout the whole season by reinforcing skills all the time and fine-tuning their approach for each opponent.

When coaching your team, first, make sure everyone is familiar with and competent in the basics. Run some drills for initial sales conversations, and reinforce the knowledge of which play to run next to move the ball (buyer) down the field. That is the foundation. Then, add consistent repetition and practice so the sales teams retain this learning to improve and change behavior.

According to the Aberdeen Group, only 44 percent of organizations use continued learning reinforcement to support their sales teams after initial training. Results are noticeably better when learning is consistent and repeated. ValueShift, BigTinCan, and Salesforce report that organizations with a training process show up to 45 percent to 50 percent higher net sales per rep.

Consistency is the key. Brain science has shown that much of our learning is lost after the first 90 to 120 days if we don’t review the information in some way. Fortunately, in business, we have the benefit of technology that makes it easy to encourage repetition and practice automatically. Continuous training reinforcement will keep your sales team improving. The successes that follow will be exciting and motivating, helping the team reach even higher goals.

For four tips for incorporating continuous learning for your sales teams, check out the original article, published on TrainingIndustry.com which you can read here.