Create a Comprehensive Sales Learning Ecosystem

What do sales personnel need to be successful in your organization? It’s not any one thing, but the big chunks can be grouped into three categories: peddling, product, and process. We’ll talk about the journey we took to get our system into place, describe the components that make up our system, and share how we’ve moved our sales leadership toward better learning practices.

Talk to different areas of a business, and they’ll have different ideas about what’s important for their salespeople to know. Ask the engineers, and they’re sure technical details about the product are most important. Talk to your back business office folks, and they’ll tell you how important it is for salespeople to follow the organizational processes correctly. Talk to your sales leaders, and they’ll talk about effective sales techniques. Who’s right? All of them, of course!

An effective sales organization understands how to sell (peddling), what they’re selling (product), and how to get all the post-sale pieces to work correctly (process). For each of these categories, we use an ecosystem of approaches that includes synchronous and asynchronous materials, online and offline learning. We have practices to engage managers and a series of partnerships within the business to help expand our ecosystem beyond L&D. A system like this is never done. No information in this day and age stays static for long, and sales product and process information changes frequently and significantly. Keeping the information current and relevant is as important as setting up the system correctly, and we’ll talk about the ways we approach this ongoing challenge.

In this session, you will learn:

• What sorts of materials are needed to help salespeople effectively perform in three categories: peddling, product, and process
• How to follow the journey from no sales training or sales process to a robust system recognized by sales and business leaders as a component of organizational success
• How to constantly weed and feed the ecosystem to keep it current, accurate, and relevant