Sales courses are often regarded by staff as being an opportunity to shirk off. Bill Gates is one CEO, who has realized that taking a person out of their work environment and providing them with a series of courses in another environment does not have a high guarantee of success.
Many courses are built around a technique or tactic that has proven successful for one individual and are not customized to suit the person or company being trained. Gates has developed a system of online sales courses that are very effective as they allow an employee to learn at their own speed and take as much time as they want when they can fit it into a work schedule, to internalize new ideas and strategies.
Although online sales courses cut down on travel expenses, booking conference venues, and providing meals and hotel rooms for participants there is also no interface with the usual clients or business and so no opportunity to test out what is being learnt in real time. Valuable selling time is lost to the business while the course participants are out to lunch in more ways than one.
Employees frequently resent being taken out of their day-to-day environment for training as it impacts negatively on their family and private lives. Employees already give a third or more of their time to earning a living and a weekend or week-long training courses is seen as simply more time lost from the things people really want to be doing.
Where normal sales courses require a certain number of participants to make them efficient financially for a business, online sales training can cater for one new employee, an entire sales force or just one person who is struggling with certain concepts or practices. Online courses can be customized to be specific to your business and your selling environment without wasting time on additional information that will never be used.
Bill Gates’s method makes sales training pain-free and has clearly been highly effective for Microsoft as it is the world leader in the computing sector. The emphasis is on individual choices not forced participation.
Knowledge sharing has to occur for a company to be successful and training is one of the simplest ways to achieve this. Employees do want to improve their knowledge of their company and products but resent sales courses that do not fit in with their work needs and private lives.
