Blog

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Training From Within: Using Win / Loss to Learn from Your Best Performers

Sales training is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry. Between blogs, books, videos, seminars, and individual coaching, there are countless avenues for organizations and individuals to pursue additional training to help them develop sales skills to become more effective at their jobs.

Often times, however, the best examples of how to most effectively sell your product or service comes from within. The star producers on your team have methodologies and tricks that are proven to work. There is no better use case than seeing the solution you are trying to sell yourself be marketed clearly and persuasively.

But there are several reasons why most companies rely on outside consultants or trainers who aren’t responsible for selling themselves to do the coaching. Most notably, the top salespeople in companies need to be out doing what they do best: selling.

It is a resource constraint to try and ask the top producers to also impart their wisdom and tricks of the trade throughout the organization. It is especially difficult to ask those experts to repeatedly carve out time for training others.

Win / loss has many benefits, but among them is the ability to proliferate best practices to all members of a team.

Win / loss isn’t just about personal learning and growth, it is also about helping others learn.

The completed transcript that is written after a post-sale debrief interview contains invaluable context about the deal, strategies used by the sales team, how those tactics were received by the prospect, and any competitive comparisons to rival salespeople. The completed transcript allows the person reading the debrief to learn how and why the rainmaker in your organization was able to reframe the prospect’s business problem in a way that helped them see the value of your solution or articulate the differentiate against other vendors in a tightly contested RFP.

And that completed transcript allows anyone to become a student of the sales team, most notably other salespeople who are looking up to your top performers for tips on how to raise their game.

Think of the power of not only distributing relevant descriptions of your top sales peoples’ performance, in the voice of the customer, to everyone on your team to learn from. Some of Anova’s clients take it a step further, and carve out time on a monthly call or other team meeting, for the actual individual who was praised by the prospect to explain in more detail why they approached a situation the way they did and what tactics they used that were received so well by the customer. In those cases, the ability to combine both voices, the buyer and the seller, to demonstrate best practices is some of the best coaching available.