National Sales Meetings: How to Properly Leverage Sales Managers in Sales Training

by Steve Gielda, Ignite Selling CEO

If you plan to deliver sales training at your national sales meeting, it’s critically important to properly leverage sales managers and coaches.

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”.

 

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

Rule 6. Properly leverage sales managers and coaches

Too often we focus on training at the national sales meeting on front-line salespeople and the role of sales managers is an afterthought. Sales managers play a crucial role in the adoption of new sales behaviors your sales reps need to successfully execute and win.

Don’t just have your sales managers sit on the sidelines while their people get drilled by a trainer. Instead, give them a role at the table to drive a coaching conversation, practice coaching to a new process or framework, and develop their own coaching skills specific to reinforcing new behaviors.

If managers don’t have a role and if they think that the sales training is for the reps and not them, they’re going to be on the telephone or hanging out with their buddies and becoming a distraction instead of an asset.

Keep them engaged and make sure they understand in advance the role they are expected to play during and after the training event. Your post-training follow-up activities will have no impact if your sales managers are not ready, willing and able to encourage, inspect and coach to the new skills and new goals.

Remember, our simulation-based learning approach serves two purposes. First, it helps sales representatives get smarter by igniting or reactivating learning needed to execute new, important behaviors. Second, it trains sales managers to coach these new behaviors and provides real-life opportunities to sharpen their coaching skills.

 

 

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].