Is your sales training a "body without a soul"?

The Roman philosopher Cicero believed that “a room without books is like a body without a soul”, and I believe the same can be said of any sales training programme that is not supported and reinforced by a suite of easy-to-use, easy-to-adopt sales tools that reinforce the principles that have been taught on a day-to-day basis.

The evidence is clear - a wide range of studies has shown that without reinforcement, the positive messages that were taught in training will have been forgotten or abandoned after just a few short weeks. The investment in training will have been utterly wasted.

It’s an all too common story. It’s why, when I was running sales organisations, I used to insist on ensuring that there was appropriate reinforcement. All too often, we had to create it ourselves.

That’s why, when I started delivering sales training to my own clients I made it a point of principle that every key concept was supported by an appropriate sales tool, and why I ensured that each tool could be easily customised to the client’s environment.

In fact, it’s only by having this ability to customise as and where necessary that we can be sure that the tool is going to be adopted.

I’ve sought to embody this learning in the latest release of the Outcome-Centric Selling® Academy - which is available as on on-line, on-demand programme, as an on-line, instructor-delivered programme, or as an onsite programme.

Whichever option you choose (and they can, of course, be combined), you’ll find that the concepts being taught are supported by perhaps the widest and richest range of simple sales tools available with any other apparently similar programme.

And, of course, the content itself stands out by being focused on understanding, influencing, and facilitating each customer’s buying decision journey, and not on implementing an internally focused “sales process”.

If you’d like to learn more, you can:

• Download the guide to the Outcome-Centric Selling® Toolbox here
• Visit the on-demand version of the Outcome-Centric Selling® Academy here

So - is your current approach to sales training, and the outcomes it generates, like a body without a soul? Or is it widely, enthusiastically and effectively adopted by your entire sales organisation - because they can see how it makes them more effective, every selling day?

This article was initially published on LinkedIn.