National Sales Meetings: How and Why to Set Proper Expectations for Training

by Steve Gielda, Ignite Selling’s CEO

If you plan to deliver sales training at your national sales meeting, it’s critically important to set proper expectations across all levels of your sales organization.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve participated in hundreds of our clients’ national sales meetings as trainers, coaches and observers. When it comes to training at such events, we’ve seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t. We recently pulled our collective learnings into the following “7 Unbreakable Rules for Delivering Effective Training at Your National Sales Meeting”.

 
Download Our eBook

 
This guide drills into these rules a bit deeper to give you some practical guidance to get the most impact from your efforts.

Rule 2. Setting Proper Expectations

Getting value from training at national sales meetings requires you to set proper expectations with sales leaders, managers and representatives for what they will do before, during and after the event.

Before the national sales meeting, people need to know what training they will be doing, why they will be doing it, and any preparation you require in advance. If you’ve done a good job creating strategic relevance, this part should be easy. If you haven’t, you should reconsider your training topic.

If there are any tools or technology involved in the training, take care of the administrative details well in advance. Rather than simply positioning the opportunity as “training”, create a bit of excitement by positioning it as a competition. Be clear that you expect full participation and that results will be made public, to help drive accountability.

Always plan a follow-up activity that requires the team to apply what they learned immediately, and let everyone know in advance that there will be follow-on assignments.

For example, we often help clients introduce new sales processes at their national sales meeting. Since everyone’s together, it’s an ideal time. After the introduction, we ask participants to use the new process to scrub their pipeline. This may involve taking the top 20 accounts in their pipeline, aligning them against the new milestones, and reassessing their likelihood and timing to close. We give them a short-term deadline to complete the task, often coordinated with a coaching session with managers a week or so after the national sales meeting.

Immediate application reinforces learning while driving adoption and accountability.

 

 

Using Sales Simulations to Deliver High-impact Training at Your National Sales Meeting

We believe that sales simulations are the most effective approach for delivering high-impact training at national sales meetings. Sales simulations create a high-energy, competitive, active learning experience that helps salespeople and managers overcome the common obstacles they encounter in the market every day.

For more information on how we can help you, please call us at (703) 234-5275 or email [email protected].