For a new person, or for that matter, any salesperson, continual grounding in pure sales training is a necessity and most probably won't come from the salesperson's company.
I do sales training for a number of companies--from small mom and pops with 5 or so salespeople, to some of the largest in the world. Of course, my training is done on a contract basis, not as part of their training department. It might be evident why a company with 5 or 20 or 50 or so salespeople would contract me--they don't have a training department. But why would Fortune 50 companies spend money contracting me and many, many other sales trainers? Because they don't do a very good job (if any) of training their people to sell. Their concentration is on their product/service training and the details of how to "sell" those products or services, that is, overcoming specific objections or dealing with specific questions about the product or service.
There is a real difference between true sales training and product/service training. There is some overlap, of course, but not enough for product/service training to be effictive as sales training.
Consequently, the only real sales training most salespeople get is from their manager--and the subject of sales is far too broad and far too complex for one person to know and be good at each of the parts. Even sales training companies have to specialize--or have huge staffs to cover the ground professionally (most companies are like mine--specialize in particular segments, mine being lead generation and personal marketing, or, if they are a larger company, they still specialize in some particular selling theory, such as SPIN or whaterver; very few try to do it all). A manager, or even a few managers simply cannot do an adequate job. Unfortunately, most companies expect--rely--on the manager doing it all and then they wonder why their sales force isn't particulary well trained.
The fact is unless your company hires trainers like myself on a contract basis or are consistently sending you to seminars and feeding you CD's, etc., you'll have to find and pay for the training on your own.
On the other hand, no one should be able to do a better job of product and service training than the company you work for since the products and services are theirs--and no one should know the products or services better than they themselves. But even there, some companies--usually smaller, but not always--have to contract with outside trainers to come in and train their sales force on the company's products and services simply because the company doesn't have adequate training skills.
