The work performance of sales personnel mainly comes from two aspects: namely work ability and work willingness, which in layman's terms are the technical issue of whether one can do the job and the attitude issue of whether one wants to do it. Of course, no one is born with work ability; it must be acquired through learning and practice. If employees lack work ability, there must be a problem in learning, which can be divided into two situations:

  1. The boss does not arrange learning opportunities The company never arranges such training or learning opportunities. The boss thinks it is the employees' own responsibility to figure things out, so employees have to grope their way through work, or new employees are paired with old employees, trying to cultivate new employees through this mentoring method. Of course, the result of old employees mentoring new ones is often that each generation is worse than the last.
  2. Employees themselves are unwilling to learn It is said that as sales personnel, one should continuously improve one's business skills through learning and practice. Besides, this is learning for oneself. However, some salespeople do not think so. They feel their business ability is already strong, they know everything they need to know, have experienced everything, understand everything, and can do everything, so why learn more? As for problems in work, such as difficulty in developing new outlets, poor performance, difficulty in selling high-end products, untimely collection of accounts receivable, poor display, ineffective promotional activities, etc., these are all caused by objective factors, such as the company's unwillingness to invest, the boss's decision-making problems, too strong competitors, difficult customers, and other objective reasons. Objectively speaking, the work ability of the vast majority of sales personnel is still relatively limited. Some do not even meet the basic standards (interpersonal communication, customer visit actions, industry knowledge, product knowledge, and other basic vocational skills). The various market problems that arise are often, at the root, caused by the low work ability of sales personnel. Of course, when sales personnel have poor work ability, it is ultimately the boss who suffers the big loss. Raising a bunch of fools, they are not very capable in doing business. When encountering market problems, they either complain or wait for the boss to spend money to solve the problems. Why don't they learn? There are three factors:
  3. There is no clear yardstick. Boss, on what basis do you say my work ability is poor? Is there a specific quantitative yardstick?
  4. Everyone has inertia, that is, laziness. Learning also consumes brainpower and energy. Instead of doing that, it is better to play games!
  5. Not admitting mistakes, so they are unwilling to face their own problems, and unwilling to admit mistakes. The problems are all on others; anyway, I am fine. How to break this? Simply put, introduce a preliminary internal training mechanism, that is, regularly hold training classes within the company, requiring all sales personnel to give lectures on stage. The relevant practices are as follows:

  1. Once a week;

  2. All sales personnel must be present; logistics personnel should participate as much as possible; more people create a better atmosphere;

  3. Each session lasts 1-3 hours, with each person speaking for 15 minutes to half an hour;

  4. Everyone goes on stage;

  5. Report the course name in advance;

  6. Set the teaching duration according to the time of joining the company. In principle, the longer the tenure, the longer the teaching time;

  7. Those with experience talk about experience; those without experience talk about lessons learned, how they suffered losses;

  8. Newly hired salespeople can talk about the business operation models, methods, and characteristics of their previous companies;

  9. Topics that have been covered by others earlier cannot be repeated by later speakers;

  10. All participants score the courses, follow up on the scores, and determine the lecture fee; employees should not speak for nothing;

  11. The relevant course content should be fully recorded, and some valuable content should be extracted and added to execution standards such as job descriptions and operation procedures;

  12. Focus on internal employees, but if factory business managers visit, or other distributor peers visit, try to arrange for them to give a talk as well. The several purposes or values of arranging this simple internal training are:

  1. Cultivate a learning atmosphere;
  2. The boss actively guides employees to start learning work; do not expect employees to have the self-awareness to learn on their own;
  3. Exercise employees' language expression ability, exercise their presence, especially their psychological endurance when facing many people;
  4. Through lectures by experts or factory business personnel, compare their own thinking limitations and business abilities, see how far they are from the experts, and gradually break the overestimation of their own business abilities;
  5. Let every salesperson go on stage to share their technical experience, even if it is lessons learned, and it is not allowed to repeat, and it must be done weekly. This forces sales personnel to empty their technical accumulation, forces everyone to learn new things, forces everyone to innovate and be one step ahead, rather than holding back;
  6. Language is highly summarizing. Experience that took three to five years to figure out can be said in a few sentences. Employees will soon find that although they thought they had a lot in their stomachs, when poured out, it is just so-so;
  7. Through synchronous recording and consolidation and related filling (job descriptions, work execution instructions), continuously improve the company's current operation system construction. The author comes from a private business owner background, has operated a family distributor company for many years, and during that time served concurrently as a business manager and trainer in several production enterprises. The research direction is internal management of small and medium-sized private enterprises, with main topics including personnel management, cost control, management backend construction, and demobilized military personnel entering private enterprises. The author has continuously broken down more than 400 topics related to internal management of private enterprises and keeps updating material collection and solutions. -END-