Sales Training ROI: Are you an Attendee or a Participant?

Posted in Sales Training by Dan Wood on the August 17th, 2010

We have all sat through our share of boring training courses, designed around disseminating vast amounts of information to as many people as possible, and in as little time as possible, without any thought of incorporating the attendees’ past experiences, or providing individualized attention to attendees who need more support, or who crave more of a challenge.

This won’t work in the sales training setting. There are a great many inspirational speakers who can deliver a rousing talk to a large audience, but is this training? Are you actually developing skills in this setting? In order to learn and really get something out of a sales training course, you need to be engaged: you need to be a participant, not an attendee.

A good sales trainer should offer a course that can motivate, engage, and involve the participants. Instead of being lectured to, they should participate actively in their own learning. The trainer should work with the participants to help them understand that sales training is a skills development course that can not only help them in their day-to-day tasks, but help them down a path of life-long improvement with practical sales skills that they can use every day.

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Retention or Acquisition, Revisited

Posted in Sales by Keith Thompson on the December 5th, 2005

I received a comment to a previous post that got me thinking. It seems that there needs to be parallel efforts in maintaining both Acquisition and Retention, with equal focus, and not one at the expense of the other. In my post I said I thought that Acquisition was the mandate of Sales Force Automation (SFA), whereas Retention was in the realm of CRM. I did that, because I am fixated with trying to disentangle these two terms.

If we drive down to the departmental level, it seems that Marketing and Sales should drive Acquisition, and after sales service should drive Retention. In my book I discuss the “long winded title of Acquisition and Retention loop” (page 27) – long winded, because I could not find any other description that was suitable.

So after I write this, I realize that I was wrong—sales is not the only group responsible for acquisition, marketing is in there too.

Definitely everything falls under the umbrella of CRM, but that term has become so all encompassing that it is tough to look below and see what it all means.

Perhaps, if companies are focusing too much on Retention at the expense of Acquisition, or vice versa, one department may be more powerful than the other, in other words they don’t have a unified CRM program that’s working well. If they did the normal departmental interplay would help them achieve the right balance.

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Retention or Acquisition? Both!

Posted in Sales by Keith Thompson on the November 15th, 2005

I subscibe to the “inside 1to1” newsletter from the the Peppers and Rogers Group. As everyone knows, Peppers and Rogers were the early proponents of the CRM philosophy, and have published some very successful books on this topic. An article in this morning’s edition was titled Customer Acquisition Makes a Comeback. The opening sentence is “After a solid 18 months of obsession with customer retention, the customer strategy pendulum may be swinging toward customer acquisition.”

Retention of the customer means the process of developing a loyal customer base, and making sure that they stay happy and provide more business. Acquisition means that the enterprise puts its efforts into finding new customers.

I was surprised that big business has actually been homing in on one of these strategies at the expense of the other. I thought that you had to do both. Fortunately as I read on, one of the analysts comments supported my feelings—“you need a balanced attack of both existing customer development and involvement in your brand coupled with smart strategies to acquire new customers.”

It struck me that for most businesses, Retention is more about CRM, and Acquisition about SFA. The marketing and sales departments will be involved in both initiatives – but the goals are distinctly different.

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