Continuously developing sales competencies

13th December 2017 |   Bob Apollo

I’m not sure that what you might describe as the “traditional” approach to sales skills development – sending salespeople on an occasional formal sales training course based on one of the many standard methodologies – ever delivered consistent results in terms of driving sustained performance improvement.

And that was in yesterday’s relatively static marketplaces! In today’s fast-changing business environment, sales competencies require continuous honing and development. Simply repeating what worked a few short years (or even months) ago no longer guarantees future success. This has a number of significant implications.

Agility

First, skills development programmes themselves have had to become more agile – evolving to more of an on-demand, self-paced, customised-to-the-individual approach. There’s still an important role for collective training, but bringing salespeople together in a room once a year (or less) isn’t going to satisfy these new needs.

Bob Appollo

Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners | + posts

Bob Apollo is the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B sales effectiveness experts. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now spends his time as a coach and advisor to growth-phase technology-based businesses, equipping them to adopt the principles of Outcome-Centric Selling.