From the Sales and Sales Management Blog, comes a guest post by Jonathan Farrington discussing the consequences of reduced opportunities for sales training, and the importance of ongoing personal training:
During the seventies, eighties and nineties, it was common for large corporations such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Compaq etc to put their new sales recruits through a twelve to eighteen-month training program.
Today, salespeople consider themselves extremely fortunate if they receive an initial two weeks of induction training or product familiarisation workshops.
So what has changed? Have companies discovered that training is not necessary?
On the contrary, training appears to be even more important today than it was thirty years ago and it is becoming more critical all the time.
One of the instructors at Three Value Logic is a product of the IBM sales training program, from back in the days of IBM sales training programs. He’s expressed a very similar sentiment.
