If recruiting is considered the lifeblood of an organization, then training must certainly be its pulse. Experienced salespeople are often reluctant to take time away from their busy schedule for training and as a result, over time, become less productive. It is only natural to expect commission-based salespeople to resist any activity that takes them away from their customers. Award winning sales managers place a high premium on training and purposefully design their training programs to be timely, relevant, realistic, and reoccurring.There is absolutely no substitute for a well-trained and highly motivated sales force! In his best selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey makes a strong case for the fundamental importance of training, or as he calls it, “sharpening the saw.” In addition to skill development, Dr. Covey points out that time allocated for training also provides an opportunity for much needed personal reflection and renewal. Progress and growth are virtually impossible in an environment void of assessment and training.

Timing is everything. It is important to operate from a written training program and schedule training well in advance. Due to the damaging ripple affect on appointment calendars, training must be scheduled at least 30-days in advance and short notice changes should be avoided. Planning ahead not only helps minimize scheduling conflicts, but it also provides opportunity for training preparation and promotion. Attendees are typically more receptive and inclined to participate when they have been given sufficient time to plan and prepare for the training.

For training to be perceived as relevant and beneficial by the sales force, they must be given the opportunity to contribute to topic selection. An excellent way to elicit input and establish training priorities is through the use of a self-administered, skills assessment survey. A well-designed survey will evaluate skill expertise over a wide array of categories such as administrative tasks, product knowledge, and sales proficiency. For example, it is quite common for a low producer to rate themselves high in product knowledge and low in sales related categories. The skills assessment survey not only provides a good benchmark of an organization’s current overall training level, but it also serves to identify potential peer trainers as well. With the appropriate person, peer training can be extremely effective and therefore should be encouraged.

As they say in the military, train like you plan to fight! Obviously, the more realistic and thought provoking the training, the greater its impact. Build value into your training sessions by finding ways to inject realism. For example, if you are role-playing phone scripts, it’s preferable to separate the participants and conduct the training over the phone vs. across the table. Due to the lack of visual cues, this approach closely mimics the real experience. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then videotaping a role-play session speaks volumes. Videotaped training sessions don’t lie and therefore, provide an excellent opportunity for self-critique. A videotape provides meticulous feedback on body language and sales techniques that otherwise may go unnoticed.

Designing a successful training program is limited only by your creativity. With a little effort and imagination, you can develop a world-class training program that will excite your sales team and keep them coming back for more!

Source: John Boe

Probably, there is no human being in the world who doesn’t have any hobby or interest of his/her own. Some one may love and have a large collection of books, music, and movies or may be sports fanatic or enjoy traveling. Some one may also love gardening or having pets. Doing things we love to do, reduces stress and helps us to temporarily forget our every day problems and troubles, in some cases it may inspire us to find a solution to a problem. But not everyone has a hobby that makes money for him/her except if you love your job.

Earning money with a hobby you love to do could earn you an extra income, with practice and experience it could allow you to quit your day job. That is why many of us today go online to start a business; their reasons are either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their offline income from their job. A great way to start making money online is through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is sharing revenue between an online merchant and one or more affiliates. The affiliate refers new customers to the online merchant and is paid a commission for either the new referral or sales generated. There are several advantages to affiliate marketing, mainly you don’t need to generate or stock an inventory of products, no need to create an online e-store, and you never have to worry about keeping a customer happy, the merchant takes care of it all.

Now, for sure you want to be an affiliate marketer with all the benefits an affiliate could get. But, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer? To properly begin in affiliate marketing, you have to decide what area or areas you’re interested in. What products do you know the most and which products you could do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty; perseverance, patience, and determination comes next. These qualities should be possessed in order to be a good affiliate marketer.

A lot of online affiliate marketers become impatient and fail. You have to know your strengths and weaknesses, what things are you good at and what are your abilities and capabilities related to your chosen niche. The most important thing is you have to have a strong desire and will to succeed in affiliate marketing.

To be an affiliate marketer is not an easy task. You have to learn the techniques of marketing your product or service. There are many marketers out there promoting their ways of marketing, one should be cautious in attempting to jump on each technique. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you should learn how to listen and to be taught because in life we need to learn skills to get by.

An affiliate marketer should know how to effectively market their product; an effective marketing technique will get thousands of visitors to view their product which equates to more sales. Creating and publishing your own website will create a bigger chance of making money online faster. Avoiding the same mistakes of other affiliates is advised; many are just in it for a quick buck and fail to build a long term business. It’s important to understand that you’re building a long term business. It is essential to focus on what will makes you several sales each day and not the few dollars you’ll make in one sale.

It is also better to have knowledge on how to upsell your visitors for expensive services. This will distinguish you as an expert to the field which will allow you to sell more products and make more money. There are some people thinks that just by having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. It is true that some affiliates do make good money this way, but many still believe that it is more effective to use a strong marketing campaign in order to be successful. Affiliate marketers who treat their online visitors or customers as friends are more successful than those who don’t. Establish a relationship with customers and especially with the visitors to your website. Building a good business relationship with customers will bring that customer back again and again.

You should also be creative. The real key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to develop a good content based website and weave your affiliate links into all your content. Providing your visitors with good, quality, and updated content will keep them coming back to your site. Affiliate marketing can be a long term profitable and successful business.

By Michael Conant