Build a world-class sales academy

2 minute read

 

One of the things I love about this business is that we get the opportunity to learn from lots of very capable people on a a continuous basis. These folks are, of course, our customers. Just last week one of our customers, gen-i (a 3,000 employee, $1.6Bn New Zealand / Australia IT and Telecommunications company) received recognition from the Sales Executive Council for providing one of “the most effective ever’ sales academies worldwide.

I thought that you might want to know the items the SEC listed as main criteria in their assessment.

  1. Training content aligns with corporate goals and strategy.
  2. Training targets role-specific skill gaps.
  3. Regular coaching sustains and builds on gains from training.
  4. Certification requires demonstrated performance.
  5. Success metrics are tied to business outcomes.

And what about the role of Sales 2.0? For me, Sales 2.0 has a very particular role to play in items 3-5.

To maintain consistent adoption, coaching and ‘anywhere-anytime’ learning needs to be technology supported. Otherwise it’s gets too hard or too expensive or both.

4&5 are really both tied to metrics – if you can’t measure it … and so on.

If you want to measure to the level necessary to achieve meaningful analysis beyond just simple close ratios or revenue achievement you need to process a lot of data, interpret and then uncover trends and insight. Advanced tools (i.e. Sales 2.0) need to play their part to (a) alleviate the rigor of a task that isn’t meaningful unless it’s rigorous, and (b) to at all costs obviate the need for sales people to enter more data into their CRM systems.

Maybe it’s just because they’re so far ahead in time-zone, or perhaps it’s just because they seem to be far less stressed that many of us … but we continue to learn a lot from our antipodean friends. G’day!

 

 

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