Creating an Effective Salesforce: Selecting and Training Salespeople for Optimal Performance

Salespeople play a critical role in the growth of an organization by contributing positively to brand reputation, enhancing customer relationships and retention. Businesses recording good performances have a well-built loyalty and trust between the customer and its operations (Soltani & Navimipour, 2016). An effective salesforce is created through training. Similarly, it can be argued that an effective salesforce is created through selection. Salesforce training is the primary strategy used to create a good sales team over selection.

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Efficient salespersons exhibit some habits that are reinforced through training. For instance, a good sales team is that which is committed to business operations. Salespeople need to be trained on how to devote themselves to the profession. For a sales team to embrace the work they perform, they ought to be trained on how they can get committed to their organizations. Besides, salespeople should have true relationship building capabilities (Itani et al., 2019). For the sales team to exhibit top performance, the sales personnel can be trained in building good relationships with the networks in the business. An effective salesforce also depends on the abilities of the personnel to listen to their customers. Skills such as active listening and good communication are acquired through training. The acquired skills can make a salesforce go the extra mile other than echoing what the customer says.

Sales are dependent on various dispositions in the professional domain, including the ability to be attentive, be responsible to the customer, and solve problems while building trust and good customer relationships. Being such a professional depends on individual training. It is through training that a salesforce can develop the desirable skills and characteristics for an effective team. For instance, a well-trained salesforce would tend to measure the results better than a naturally selected sales team. The lack of training would make a salesforce criticize or praise the achieved results. Besides, training teaches the salesforce how to make sales whereas the lack of training lets salespersons consider what to sell over the process involved. Professional sales activities are attributed to training regardless of the experience.

An effective salesforce is also made by individuals with naturally gifted innate talents. The selection process ensures that the top salespersons have sociable actions, are action-oriented, and can integrate well with other people. Some people are born with the introvert personality whereas some with the extrovert personalities. Depending on their forms of engagement in the organization or business, each may exhibit different ways through which good customer relations can be made. For instance, extroverts tend to be naturally charismatic and could get an audience to listen to them effectively compared to the introverts (Pauser et al., 2018). Similarly, introverts have a selection of individuals with which they can communicate and could prefer person-to-person strategies of marketing. Even so, their contributions to the salesforce are variant with the situation they engage with.

An effective salesforce is created through training over selection. Training involves reinforcing various professional skills such as communication and problem-solving, which are critical in the sales process. While charisma could be a natural gift that is effective for sales activities, the individuals without a training lack professional qualities but only exhibit experience, which is not enough for the sales process. Since customer relationships and retention as well as brand reputation depend on the skills and abilities of the salesforce, it is important to recognize that the key to developing an effective sales force is training.

References

Itani, O. S., Goad, E. A., & Jaramillo, F. (2019). Building customer relationships while achieving sales performance results: Is listening to the Holy Grail of sales? Journal of Business Research, 102, 120-130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.04.048

Pauser, S., Wagner, U., & Ebster, C. (2018). An investigation of salespeople's nonverbal behaviors and their effect on the charismatic appearance and favorable consumer responses. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 38(3), 344-369. https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2018.1480383

Soltani, Z., & Navimipour, N. J. (2016). Customer relationship management mechanisms: A systematic review of the state of the art literature and recommendations for future research. Computers in Human Behavior, 61, 667-688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.03.008