How Will You Weather The Perfect Storm of B2B Sales Training?

By Mark Roberts

I enjoy training and coaching salespeople, it’s a passion mine. I led sales training for a global manufacturer, helped develop online training and workshops. Working for manufacturers I have often helped train distribution sales teams and coach sales managers. There is a perfect storm brewing that will capsize most manufacture and whole distributor B2B sales training programs ROI if teams do not make some strategic course corrections now and batten down the hatches. This post will share the top four forces quickly converging on how we train and onboard B2B manufacture and wholesale distributor salespeople.

There was a great movie based on a true story titled: The Perfect Storm. This movie shares the story of courageous men and women who risk their lives on rescue vessels and fishing boats. On Halloween night 1991 a fishing boat faced three raging weather fronts that unexpectantly collide to create the fiercest storm in modern history. If you have not seen the move here is a movie trailer. The experienced crew has weathered storms at sea before but never three storms converging all at once making the Perfect Storm.

Having trained manufacturer and whole sales distributor sales and sales managers for over 25 years now and  I see a perfect storm brewing on the horizon for B2B sales training and in this post I will share the four converging forces that will capsize the ROI of sales training if you do not transform your sales training programs now.

The bigger impact of this perfect storm will be felt by manufactures and distributors alike in the next five to seven years and will be experienced as:

·       Sales growth quotas not achieved

·       Lost sales you should have won

·       Decline in customer experience

·       Decline in customer satisfaction

·       Reduced profit margins

·       High sales unplanned turnover

·       Large account defections to new competitors

·       Poor Training ROI 

·       Manufactures not happy with their distributors

·       Distributors not happy with manufactures

What are these four converging forces about to rain down on how we train our salespeople and disrupt the ROI of Sales Training like never before?

1.     New Generation of workers: Millennials and Gen Z

2.     Buyers changing how they buy and what they need to buy

3.     The “Amazon Effect”shaping buyer service and customer experience expectations

4.     Top sales talent leaving the workforce (retiring)

I think you will agree any one of these would have an impact on your B2B salespeople and how we need to train them differently. However, all these four forces are converging over the next few years to make a B2B sales training perfect storm.

How do we strategically navigate through this storm and produce top sales performers?

What are common characteristics of top performers today?

The business owners play book shares how to identify top performers and future leaders:

·       Quality – if you are going to do something do it right

·       Skills Development– continuous learning

·       Fearless decision making – they leverage data and make decisions

·       Desire input from others

·       Self-Directed – they have a plan and work the plan

·       Emotionally intelligent-cool under pressure

·       Strong people skills– interpersonal communication and listening skills

Boomers who often lead sales departments and or are top performers with your largest accounts will be leaving over the next five to seven years. One distributor shared with me they estimate over 50% of their workforce will be retiring over the next eight years.

Your sales training and onboarding must change to support the audience you are now training, the new training paradigm if you will.

You must immediately start capturing all the tribal knowledge of your best and brightest workers about to retire.

Many sales training programs will need to be transformed into Modern Sales Training Programs.

Some key considerations of modern sales training for B2B?

Asynchronous 

Fast paced

Just enough

Relevant to the sales role, customers and products

Just in time with workflow

Mobile friendly

Peer to peer learning critical component

Interactive

Gamification will appeal to the new generations

Virtual Reality and augmented reality will become the norm

On the job tools, learning aids, application exercises will be critical

Sales managers will help coach and play a role in skills development

If you would like to learn more about modern sales training programs I wrote a whitepaper titled: 17 training innovations for the future and you can download a copy here.

Other consideration before we close?

Death by PowerPoint instructor led training alone does not work with new generation of workers. (easy for you, not so great for trainees and skills development) New Generation needs to be involved with interaction in the training.

Instructor led one and done training without reinforcement or application exercises does not stick.

You don’t have 6 months to train salespeople or $50,000+ training cost per new salesperson for new associates who plan leave in 24 months.

On the job training is great if managers are equipped with the right tools and coaching guides.

The new generations want coaches not managers. They want and need feedback more frequently than ever before.

With every new challenge, urgent market problem, an innovator will deliver new solutions to meet the challenges.

What will sales training look like in the next 5 years for manufacturers?

What will distributor onboarding and sales training look like?

How will these converging four forces impact your sales?

What will sales training need to look like if employees only stay 24 months? 

So, there you have it. All the above forces are quickly converging and will create a perfect storm for training manufacturer and wholesale distribution salespeople.

What do you think? 

Is my argument that sales training must change all wet? 

Is there something I forgot to consider? 

How does your team plan to weather this storm like we have never seen before?

This as an urgent and pervasive problem that is growing each month and must be solved.

If you have some ideas how to solve this perfect storm of a sales training, I would enjoy chatting.

This post originally appeared on my business development blog www.nosmokeandmirrors.com where I unpacked each of the four forces in greater detail. 

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