Take all the employer training you can and supplement it with training you do on your own. It can be internet based learning, books, cds, formal classes, etc. My belief is that you need to be educated in order to sell. The key is if you want to advance and you want the higher salary you need the education and training behind you. Armed with the education and training your numbers will go up and so will your paycheck.

I would love to see a study that shows the correlation between training and performance. I don’t know of any such studies, but I do, like most in the training business, have a considerable amount of antidotal evidence to suggest there is a strong correlation between the two.

It isn’t absolute, of course. I think we all know salespeople who have been through mountains of training but whose performance hasn’t improved–these tend to be salespeople who either simply don’t apply what they’ve learned or who are forever searching for the magic instant fix for their sales problems.

I wonder if there are any stats showing a correlation – for sales training specifically – between the amount of training and the earnings of the sales professional. I fear that many salespeople (and their managers) readily understand the importance of training for the other professions – but would not be certain the same applied for sales. Perhaps an indictment of both their perception of what it take to succeed in sales – and also on the quality of training they had received in the past and it’s success.

Ian

This is a brilliant post. Why? It takes you far beyond the old-style motivational kick-in-the-pants. You present a credible business case.