Training That Wasn’t, from NCM Institute.
Have you ever really trained your people? I don’t mean some of this stuff out on the market that is purported to be training; I mean really training.
Every third call to my office is a dealer calling and telling me “we’ve tried training our salespeople, but it didn’t stick”. Or, reporting that it is impossible to train salespeople. If you don’t think salespeople can be trained, you may as well extend that to all humans. When I ask these same dealers what they’ve done, many times they’ve simply sent some of their people to a seminar or workshop or something along those lines. Seminars and workshops definitely have a place and that place is normally education or creating momentum for a training initiative. For training to be effective, three elements need to be present; education, simulation and accountability. If you don’t have a strategy for accomplishing all three of those things, you don’t have training.
Let me give you some sports analogies that make this easier to understand. I can watch golf all day long on TV. I can understand what it looks like when somebody plays well. I understand golf; hence I’m educated in golf. That doesn’t make me a good golfer. If I want to become a good golfer, I have to hit bucket after bucket after bucket of balls for the rest of my life to get good and stay good. That’s simulation. Then I’m held accountable on a scorecard.
