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Just like most of you who are reading this post, I’ve received a gazillion hours of sales training and coaching. There have been times when I was ready to receive the input and other times when I was just too busy to give it much weight. I not only have received sales training and coaching, I have also been on the giving end too. From my experience I have learned that most sales professionals need to take a more active role in their training and coaching. Since you have to allocate the time anyway, why not take control of these experiences and use the time more effectively.

Sales managers and trainers are implored to limit the amount of information they give to salespeople in a training or coaching session. Let’s face it, there is a limit to how much information we can realistically absorb and implement. The reality is that most of the time sales managers will give you 14 areas to work on when they coach you and sales trainers will cover 38 topics in a training session. Your challenge, and this is where you take control, is to nod respectfully as your trainer or manager goes on and on, then select one or two things that you will actually work on. I’d rather you get something out of a little instead of nothing out of a lot.

The second thing you can do to take control of your sales training and coaching experiences is to use classroom training time more efficiently. What do I mean? Let’s face it; you aren’t paying attention every second during classroom training. Use this extra bandwidth to think about your customers and prospects. Which ones do you need to work on more aggressively and which ones do you need to stop wasting time on? Is there a product or service that you need to propose to a promising prospect? Which customers have you let drop between the cracks over the last few months? Work up your plan. What’s great about this mini-brainstorming-session is that frequently the instructor will say things that will give you ideas that you can use in your planning. When I used to attend sales training I would always come away with several pages full of customer and prospect action item notes. How many times do you actually take the time to just sit down for an extended period and think about your customers and prospects?

Sales people typically aren’t always thrilled about having to take mandatory sales training or getting coached by their sales manager. But you can select the information you want to process and use the time for your own benefit to make it much more productive.

Tags: training

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