Companies that are the most successful at engaging their employees, outperform their competitors by 147%. These companies understand the role their employees play that contributes to their business's overall health, wellness, and growth, from product quality to customer service and everything in between. One of the most critical elements of employee engagement is the availability of internal growth opportunities. It isn't surprising that 87% of millennial workers consider growth and development essential for job satisfaction.
It isn't feasible to put every employee on the same track for advancement. Differing skill, experience, and aptitude levels will have some ready for a promotion long before others. However, to keep your BevAlc sales team engaged, productive, and excited about their future in the company, you need a way to assess their readiness for the next role fairly, consistently, and objectively. That means having a comprehensive skills assessment in place.
Often, we get the question about how BevAlc sales managers can tell if they've chosen the right training program. While there are several ways to accomplish this, the best way to evaluate ROI of a sales training program is how your team grows in their job skills and ability to close sales. So how can you measure their progress? The Fox Selling System Sales Assessment gives you the tools you need to compare incremental progress against their initial baseline and the goals to achieve for advancement.
Why is this so critical? Insufficient skills assessment leads to inadequate coaching. In other words, if you don't know what needs work, how can you effectively guide your sales rep to higher levels of aptitude and success? Up to 60% of salespeople have a higher propensity to leave their job if their manager is a poor coach.
The Sales Assessment employs a 360-degree perspective from both managers and self-assessments. Not only does this allow the employee to express their desire for growth in areas where they feel less confident, but it also gives the manager the ability to highlight where improvement is needed. The skill assessment shows where the sales rep shows strength and where they haven't achieved proficiency, illuminating the critical path for continued learning. When employees feel supported with coaching, training, and a clear path to advancement, they are more likely to stay with their company.
Do you know how good your team is at selling? How do you determine that? Are you a reactive sales manager, assuming your salespeople are doing well as long as they hit their goals and have received no complaints from customers? Or do you take the initiative to proactively identify potential pitfalls from lack of training or experience in different situations?
The Sales Assessment can help you identify sellers that are ready to be promoted. The assessment is a collaborative effort that provides an objective, measurable path for improvement and progress toward a goal. When the sales rep completes their self-assessment and the manager performs their employee assessment, they can identify gaps. Once you identify those, you can focus the training and coaching on improving those skills.
The Sales Assessment provides a way to benchmark by job function. It also provides a baseline to work toward for future development. Customizing your sales reps' learning and development is made much more effective with a tool that allows a repeatable, standardized method for identifying skill proficiencies and deficiencies. It helps identify talent and readiness for those seeking promotion.
If you are among the sales managers who only evaluate your team on their sales numbers, consider the current real estate market. In almost every area of the country, demand for homes is high. There is fierce competition for houses to buy and lease. It has resulted in bidding wars and the willingness of buyers and renters to pay inflated prices just to secure a place to live.
It would take a pretty inadequate realtor not to reach record sales numbers in this market. But does that mean that they are a top-performing salesperson overall? What happens when demand falls back to more normal levels, and it reverts to a buyers' market where they can afford to be more selective and haggle over prices? What skills do these sales reps need to survive and thrive in a more challenging environment?
That is the power of skills assessments. BevAlc sales has its own cycles and times of challenge. Staying ahead of the curve and developing your sales team means your company has the tools, techniques, and talent to shift and adapt to dynamic environments. The best way to evaluate ROI of a sales training program is when your team can succeed in even lean times.