Last week, we announced Tyson Group inclusion and recognition in Selling Power’s list of Top 20 Sales Training Companies of 2018. As I mentioned in my post last week, such a monumental achievement is never the actions of a single person, but the work of the team, striving to achieve a major, common goal.
The press release noted that Selling Power looked at several areas for judging this year’s candidates. The areas they reviewed were:
Depth and breadth of training offered
Innovative offerings
Contributions to the sales training market
Strength of client satisfaction
The members of Tyson Group have a broad range of experience in all 4 of these areas during their time in the training industry. Each member of our team brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the company. It’s one of the reasons that that Tyson Group is able to bring a cumulative breadth of knowledge and experience to the table. We've built our processes on years of working with sales and sales management teams and knowing the elements to achieving real, behavioral change.
Common Challenge With Training Today
One of the challenges we faced in the past occurred after the training event. The sales participants would come away feeling good about the whole event. But eventually, the manuals would be placed on a shelf to collect dust. And the sales reps would go back to doing what they found comfortable. Sales training was, and is in many cases, an event where the sales rep picks up a few ideas, gets some time away from the field, and they feel better about themselves. But with no real way to enforce the change, they soon revert back to what they were previously doing.
Changing the Way People Consume Training
In the majority of sales training today, sales reps of all levels are herded into a room and the sales trainer bestows upon them the sales trainer’s wisdom.With Tyson Group, we want the training process to be specific to the individual salesperson. And if we know the strengths, weaknesses, skills, and capabilities of the individual, we can specifically target areas for improvement to achieve a desired outcome.So, one of the modifications we implemented in the training process is to first, take an assessment of where the sales reps are in their professional development.
To that end, the assessments align with the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of each position and tell us which skills are a struggle for the participant and the team. The participants then receive coaching on their specific results. We use the overall results to tailor the training to the team's needs and focus in on the areas that need the most development. After the assessment, we assemble the training program. We tailor this program specifically to achieve the desired outcomes based on the skills of the team as a whole. In addition, coaching is applied to individual members to strengthen their weaknesses and hit their individual targets. But it doesn’t stop there. We also work with the sales management team to build their leadership and management skills. Now the loop is self-sustaining with the managers continuing to coach their team to attain the targets and to hold the team accountable for the desired outcomes.
The Results from this Change in Training Strategy
This is a brief overview of what we do. But the results speak for themselves. In a quote from our Houston Case Study, Jason McGuinness, the VP of Premium Sales, stated:“Tyson Group training is not robotic; It’s not out of the book. The biggest thing I got from it was how to differentiate ourselves from all the other sales calls that these C-level and VP-level executives receive.”
These are the kinds of results our clients are seeing. These are the kinds of results we are committed to achieving for our clients.