First, if you’re a small business owner or leader taking time to read this post, thank you and congratulations. I know how slammed you are, and how chaotic your days can be. If you’re reading this, then you’re taking the first step in scaling your business – taking time to strategically learn and develop your business. Most small business owners are always in reactionary mode - especially leaders of system integration companies due to the service nature of the business. Again, congratulations.
Sales training is one of those activities that Stephen Covey referred to as “Important but not Urgent”. He went on to define that great leaders spend most of their time on these types of activities, while most leaders spend their time on activity that is “Important and Urgent”. This is a big deal – don’t just read through this. The number one factor that I see separating leaders of businesses that scale and those that rise and fall with the tide is this concept. The ones that scale are led by leaders that do the “Important but not Urgent” things.
Sales training is one of those things, and today I’m going to start a three part series that is meant to provide three ideas to help leaders of small businesses incorporate training.
Idea #1: Block off sales training as non-negotiable time on the calendar.
Much like the concept of paying yourself first when saving for retirement, you need to pay yourself first with sales training. If you wait until you have an hour each week, you’ll never do it. Below are four best practices to successfully blocking off sales training on your calendar.
- Limit sales training time to one hour per week maximum. If you can only do a half an hour, that’s ok – just make sure you do it once a week. Not every other week or once a month – it must fit into your weekly routine and become habit.
- Plan sales training to be done first thing in the morning before the chaos hits. Ideally, schedule it before your weekly sales meeting. For example, do training from 7:30 – 8:30, and then have your weekly sales meeting 8:30 – 9:30. A bonus to this idea is that your meetings will be livelier.
- Always hold sales training at the scheduled time. If you can’t make a session, then have someone else lead that day. Define a list of acceptable reasons to miss sales training. Document this list of reasons in bullet points and make them absolutes.
- If some people are traveling or working remotely, have them join virtually. Of course, that’s not ideal, but you’ll figure out ways to deliver virtual training that is productive.
Looking forward to sharing the “what to do” in tomorrow’s post. By the way, if you’re interested in a virtual sales training program for sales people in the security industry, check out www.vectorfirmacademy.com.
