Your Sales Operation Plan is Only As Good As Your Training Program
A sales operations plan is a strategy for allocating resources, sales tools, and employees of your business to achieve sales goals with a clear and measurable ROI. Does your business have a sales operations plan in place?
If so, has leadership explained the importance of the plan to employees throughout the organization? It takes time and energy to communicate the strategy of a new sales initiative and engage employees. But it is critical to your success.
Engaging Your Employees Begins with Your Sales Leaders
If frontline managers or supervisors have not been presented with strategic training, they may not fully grasp the purpose of the new sales tools or plan. With this lack of knowledge, it is easy for these leaders to put a negative spin on a new initiative and stop the implementation before it has even begun.
Because of this, it is critical that the frontline managers or supervisors have adequate training at the beginning, before the plan is implemented. The training will help them fully understand the new tools and how they will affect the company’s overall sales operation plan.
Once the leaders have a complete understanding of the new sales tools and the impact they will have on the overall strategy of the business, they should move on to train other employees.
Why Engaged Employees are Critical to Operational Success
Many businesses invest huge sums of money and resources into sales plans and tools that are meant to deliver results, and forget about the importance of investing in training employees. Just like the sales leaders, employees not only need to know how to use a new tool, they also need to understand how the tool will impact their day-to-day work world.
For people to get behind a new idea or sales tool, they may need to hear the story in several different ways so they can understand the strategy and get behind the vision. Fully articulating what your business wants to accomplish makes it easier to execute your strategy.
When designing a program to train and engage your employees on a new sales operations plans consider the following:
- The sales operations plan is not just a function of the sales team. Leaders need to paint a clear picture throughout the organization so all employees understand the impact of the sales plan on both their own success and the company’s.
- People with the appropriate training and skill set need to be prepared to execute the plan and add to measurable ROI.
- Engaged employees will deliver measurable results when they believe in their organization, the leadership, and therefore the strategic sales plan.
Have you implemented your sales operations plan and failed to see results? Has the plan been communicated effectively throughout your organization? At 19 Oaks, we specialize in developing, implementing, and educating on all aspects of sales operations plans. Contact us today.