General sales training or industry sales training

Seth

This is a hypothetical - you just got out of college and want to start a career in selling cars, insurance, real estate or some other large industry. What kind of sales training would you recommend? Would it be industry specific or more general?

Is there a list of recommended sales training companies or trainers for different industries?

Derek

The company that you work for should have a training program. However, you need to do a little research to find out if it is any good. Talk to people that have been at the company for less than 3 years and are having financial success based on your definition. Ask a lot of questions about their training and how they got to where they are. If you really want to be in that particular industry/company and they don't seem to have a good program, look at outside training firms.

Sandler, SPIN, and High Probability Selling are the 3 talked about most on this site. I'm sure there are many more. I don't think that it needs to be industry specific, but I think that you want to make sure that they have experience training people successfully in your field. Call them up, read about them, etc. See which ones sound good. Then ask for references to people they have trained in your industry and call those people. Pick one, pay the tuition, learn, apply, succeed.

Good Luck!

Seth

I wonder how many companies really do provide sales training that gets results. I was told that the turnover rate is really high with new salespeople. Maybe if new salespeople had better training and were more successful the turnover rate would drop.

AZBroker

In our industry, real estate, many of the brokerages provide their own versions of sales training and many don't. Most of the real estate sales training that I've looked at was almost too specific. It was more like "do this" and "do that" versus actual sales training. I don't know how it is with other industries or companies but we train our agents in the basics of sales training so they know not only what to do but why.

Derek

I think that the "Why" is often overlooked, so it is great that you include it.

Gary Boye

Why has often been the missing ingredient.

I was a trainer with a large direct selling organization for a few years. The company, rightly or wrongly, required the representatives to use a prepared presentation. Considerable time was spent teaching that presentation. One thing that they did in outlining the script was to put it into two columns. On the left was "What you are saying". On the right was "Why you are saying it".

BossMan

I would suggest both. Start off with the basics and then learn how your industry/company operates within that framework. If I could only choose one I would take general sales training over industry specific sales training any day of the week.

Seth

Can I ask why?

BossMan

A sales education built on the fundamentals allows a salesperson the freedom to change industries without having to completely retool. General sales skills and abilities work equally as well in food sales as they do in car sales as they do in office equipment sales, etc.

Industries are in a constant state of flux but relatively speaking human behavior isn't.

Seth

I think those are really good and important points to think about when considering sales training. Gracias.