---
title: "How Sales Supervisors Can 'Raise Tigers'"
description: "A strong sales team is essential for achieving excellent sales performance. As a sales supervisor, you can't wait for a formidable team to appear; you must build it yourself. This article offers practical training methods for developing a capable sales force."
author: "毛小民"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2014-11-01"
language: "en"
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# How Sales Supervisors Can 'Raise Tigers'

> A strong sales team is essential for achieving excellent sales performance. As a sales supervisor, you can't wait for a formidable team to appear; you must build it yourself. This article offers practical training methods for developing a capable sales force.

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To win battles, you need a strong army; to achieve excellent sales performance, you also need a brave and skilled marketing team. As a sales supervisor, you naturally want a formidable team of tigers and wolves, but such a team won't come to you on its own—you have to build it with your own mind and hands. Do you have any clever strategies? The author's approach in this article may inspire you.

Sending an untrained sales team to the market is like sending an untrained army to the battlefield; they are likely to become cannon fodder rather than accomplish any significant task. However, companies cannot keep sales representatives in the headquarters for training all the time, so a large part of the training responsibility falls on the sales supervisors or sales managers who lead troops on the front lines. So, how should sales supervisors or sales managers train their subordinate sales representatives to turn their teams into a brave and skilled force? Having worked as a regional manager, provincial manager, and marketing director at a company, I have summarized the following training methods for sales representatives based on years of practical experience:

**1. Lead by example and train during work.**
Sales supervisors and sales managers usually start from the grassroots, possessing rich practical experience and theoretical knowledge. When on business trips to the markets under the sales representatives' charge, they can conduct one-on-one communication and training, analyzing and answering questions and confusions raised by the sales representatives. They can also visit markets and call on distributors together with the sales representatives, correcting any inappropriate words or actions in real time and personally demonstrating how to communicate effectively with distributors.

**2. Use mid-month and month-end sales meetings for training.**
To facilitate work and summaries, companies generally arrange mid-month and month-end sales meetings. For sales personnel who are often on business trips, such centralized meeting opportunities are rare. Sales supervisors or managers can take advantage of these occasions to conduct specialized training for sales representatives. Training can be conducted in the following ways:

(1) Supervisors and managers personally conduct the training.
(2) Let sales representatives take turns as instructors to train other sales representatives (a training coordinator can be designated within the team to organize the training). The benefits of this approach include: satisfying the sales representatives' sense of achievement; subtly imposing pressure and motivation on them, because to train others, they must first have something to teach, which encourages them to develop good learning habits; cultivating their presentation skills and ability to think on their feet; and since the content is mostly from their own experiences, it is more persuasive and easier for others to accept. When I was a sales supervisor and manager, I often used this method and achieved excellent results.
(3) Case-based training. Managers or supervisors can collect cases (both positive and negative) in daily work and have sales representatives study and discuss them during training. These cases can be from the managers' or supervisors' own experiences or from other sales representatives. The biggest advantage of case-based training is its strong persuasiveness, making it easy for sales representatives to accept.

When I was the marketing director at a company, we launched a new product. Since it was a mid-to-high-end product, promotion was relatively difficult, but the market had good prospects. I tried many methods to promote the product, but except for a few markets, most showed no improvement. In response, during a sales meeting, I had the successful salespeople share their success stories as case studies for training and rewarded them on the spot. At the same time, I had the underperforming salespeople present as negative examples why they failed and punished them on the spot. Then, I promoted the successful experiences and made them mandatory, while using the failures as cautionary tales. After several such training sessions, everyone worked together, and the product's sales quickly took the lead in the company.
(4) Problem-based training. At each meeting, sales representatives raise various questions. Managers or supervisors can organize group discussions on these issues, which often pool wisdom. Those with the problems can find good solutions, and others will know how to handle similar issues in the future.
(5) Game-based training. If only classroom-style training is used, it often leads to fatigue and distraction, reducing the training effect. To address this, when I was a sales supervisor and manager, I often used game-based training methods. As needed, some sales representatives would play roles such as distributors, distributors' partners, distributors' employees, secondary wholesalers, and retailers, while others would "interact" with them. In these games, sales representatives incorporated their usual situations into their roles, performing vividly, and everyone learned many sales skills amidst laughter.

For example, everyone knows the importance of distribution, but many sales representatives often miss the point in actual work. Once, during a sales meeting, I had everyone set up different scenarios for possible situations during distribution, with sales representatives playing various roles, and experienced salespeople handling the situations "on the spot." Although some performances made everyone laugh, I soon noticed that many sales representatives became proficient in various distribution techniques in their subsequent work.

**3. Use online training.**
Although training during meetings can be effective, sales personnel spend most of their time on business trips and rarely gather together. Is there a way for sales supervisors to train sales representatives scattered across different locations? Yes, with the help of the internet. Advanced networks make training possible across geographical boundaries and are cost-effective. Although not every sales representative has a computer, internet cafes can be found even in county towns and townships, providing good conditions for cross-regional training.

When I was a sales supervisor and manager, I required all sales representatives to learn how to use the internet, have their own QQ numbers, and share them with the team. I also established a public email account accessible to all team members. This way, I and other team members could upload good training and learning materials to the public email for everyone to study, exchange, and reference. If we needed longer communication, we would schedule a time to enter QQ "group chat" together.

**4. Organize on-site training.**
In actual training work, sales supervisors or managers can organize sales representatives to visit well-performing markets or markets with representative problems for effective training on market issues, often achieving twice the results with half the effort.

**5. The "One Book" plan.**
Some sales representatives enjoy learning from books, while others do not. How can we make them all learn from books and share what one learns with the rest? When I was a sales manager, I initiated the "One Book" plan, requiring each sales representative to read a book or magazine every month. At the month-end sales meeting, they would present the main content and useful parts for marketing personnel to the other sales representatives, exchanging and learning from each other, progressing and growing together.

Originally published in *Sales & Marketing*


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