Importance of Sales Training for Success in Consultative Sales Process

Being a Sales or Marketing man is one thing and becoming a Sales Manager and managing a sales team is a totally different game. At one point or the other in your career, you will move up the hierarchy and become a sales manager. As a Sales and Marketing manager you will make direct sales calls as well as manage your sales team and work with them to achieve the sales targets. Managing a sales team can be quite a challenge. Sales training and re-training is the only way that you can equip your sales team to become smart and successful.

Consultative selling process calls for the salesmen to be good at many fronts. They have got to be equipped with the required technical and product knowledge. More importantly they have got to be emotionally intelligent to be able to build a relationship with the customer and understand the customer’s business from his own perspective.

Managing the customer and handling the sales process involves managing customer’s emotions too. All interactions amongst humans are always colored with emotions. Therefore managing the customers, understanding their feelings, their fears, anxiety as well as their environment is critical to the sales process.

As the sales manager you will need to keep identifying the short falls of each and every salesman in your team and ensuring that you equip the team with the right training to overcome their shortfalls as well as sharpen their skills.

One of the key aspects of the consultative process is the final phase of getting the customer to sign on the dotted line and making the commitment to buy from you. Most of the young and inexperienced salesmen fail at this stage and many times loose the customer to competition. The reasons for not being able to close the deal can be due to the customer’s inability to commit due to internal reasons or at times, due to the inability of the sales person to push for closing the deal.

At the end of the sales call after reaching consensus with the customer on your solution proposal and negotiating the price, you come to the last phase of the sales process. This is the time when the salesman is expected to take charge and ask the customer to buy.

Quite often salesmen assume that the customer will take the interactions forward and wait rather than ask the customer to buy. The inability of the salesman to ask the customer for a commitment can arise out of several reasons. The sales person might not be aware of how to close a sales call or when to close the deal. In some cases the salesperson might not be ready to push and pressurize the customer to make a commitment.

In-experienced and young salesmen sometimes suffer from insecurity, fear of losing or rejection, lack of confidence and many personal issues that hold him back from going out to seal the deal.

The sales manager has got be able to anticipate or identify such roadblocks and step in to take charge of the situation and push for the logical conclusion as well as train and educate the sales team and help them overcome such issues. Practice and experience in selling is what makes one a successful consultative salesman and sales manager.