New salespeople face a variety of obstacles including unfamiliar ideas and phrases that make them feel uneasy about their everyday routines. When it comes to selling, handling, and promoting the organization's merchandise, it is often important for companies to retain a team with exceptional expertise (Lounsbury et al., 2014). The purpose of this paper is to address various methods of retraining sales workers, as well as various training systems that can be used.
The company will retrain new salespeople in a variety of ways. One of these methods is to train sales staff by E-Learning. In case the sales team doesn't understand the products front to back, they will always fall short when it comes to closing a sale. E-Learning will enable the sales personnel to brush up on their product knowledge through the use of online modules, as well as videos (Johnston & Marshall, 2016). This helps in boosting their confidence when selling, mainly when they are new in the field. For example, the organization can identify the gaps in product knowledge across members of the new sales team, and later implement an E-Learning program to empower the team.
Additionally, the organization can use field training to sharpen the skills of the new sales personnel. Talent development mainly happens in the field where the mentor provides immediate and detailed feedback concerning any issue raised by the trainees during the training (Lounsbury et al., 2014). Under this method, the supervisor can emphasize listening to, as well as understanding the needs of the clients. The organizations can use different games like merchandise scavenger hunts which educate the sales team concerning new store layouts and how to deal with clients.
There are different ways of redesigning recruitment efforts to account for additional training. One of the ways is ensuring that the recruitment process is short, but always consistent with the requirements. According to different research works, recruitment for sales persons can sometimes be too much of a good thing, with supervisors and managers being anxious to have a highly competent sales force (Moncrief, Marshall, & Rudd, 2015). However, the truth remains that the recruitment procedures need to be designed in a way that there is room for additional training.
Various techniques can be used to measure the success of the retraining process, as well as the recruitment designs. The first one is focusing on the degree of positive reaction towards the training as displayed by the participants. This can be done through the use of online questionnaires or exit slips reviewing the sessions after finishing the training (Moncrief, Marshall, & Rudd, 2015). The second way of measuring success is looking at the extent to which the sales personnel under training uses the acquired skills, knowledge, confidence, attitude, and commitment when engaging is sales and marketing (Johnston & Marshall, 2016). This method measures the amount of information retained from training and retraining through the use of pre-and post-tests. When the training is successful, the personnel will display different attributes including the following:
Skills: "I can do it."
Commitment: "I'm planning to do it on the job."
Knowledge: "I know it."
Attitude: "I'm certain that this job is worthwhile."
Confidence: "I'm sure I can make it on the job."
In conclusion it is evident from the above discussion that there are different ways of retraining sales personnel including using E-Learning services and field training. It is also apparent that recruitment efforts can be designed in a way that they accommodate more training if need be.
References
Johnston, M.W., & Marshall, G.W. (2016). Sales force management: Leadership, innovation, technology. New York, NY: Routledge.
Lounsbury, J.W., Foster, N.A., Levy, J.J., & Gibson, L.W. (2014). Key personality traits of sales managers. Work, 48(2), 239-253.
Moncrief, W.C., Marshall, G.W., & Rudd, J.M. (2015). Social media and related technology: Drivers of change in managing the contemporary sales force. Business Horizons, 58(1), 45-55.
