Sales and Service Staff Training Challenges
14 October 2005 | Strategy | No Comments
I recently published an article on the competence site regarding the success factors companies will have to take into consideration when they have to train their distributed sales and service staff. As the article is in German language, I will outline the success factors here in English:
1) You should have a dedicated training department that is ideally directly reporting to the business department, not to Human Resources.
2) All training sessions should be contextual and directly product-related.
3) If you are using e-learning modules: make them “easy to digest” - the duration to complete one separated module should not exceed 20 minutes.
4) Wherever possible: try to encourage and support informal exchange between the “lonely cowboys” out there in the field. You can also support this using technical means like weblogs and wikis.
5) The instrument for measuring training success (which means to measure how the knowledge is applied in practical settings) is a sophisticated 360-degree-feedback-approach, implying tests, course feedback, customer feedback, management feedback, and colleague feedback.
Taking these success factors into consideration, the organisation of the training for distributed sales and service staff can definitely be improved.
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