Easier continuing professional development

25th June 2019 |   Journal Of Sales Transformation

CPD is vital in today’s sales world, and the “Journal” is aiming to help.

Continuing professional development is widely recognised as fundamental to the improvement of standards and skills for individuals, their industries and professions. Yet, until recently, CPD has not been top of the agenda in sales.

Why? Let’s face it, sales may be the world’s oldest profession, but it has not grown up until now. In the past, too many people were left to sink or swim when they embarked on their career, and too many organisations failed to invest in developing their people.

Today, neglecting CPD is not an option if organisations want to win in a very competitive global marketplace.

Automation

Moreover, automation is just around the corner and that spells change. To remain relevant, salespeople will need to continuously hone their core communication and sales skills and add new ones around their industry, their understanding of finance and strategy, and their ability to be agile and entrepreneurial.

All of which means that occasional training courses will not provide a solution – we all know the stat that almost 90% of information learned on a sales training course is lost after just 30 days. So, if US companies spend around $20bn a year on sales training (according to the American Society of Training and Development) potentially almost $18bn is being wasted each year.

So what to do? SAP has been at the forefront of developing new ways of equipping its formidable sales organisation with the up-to-date skills and knowledge that they need to compete in a digital world.

Here at the Journal we also have a solution. Our new website is a fully searchable resource packed with informative sales and sales leadership content organised by topic – available at the touch of a button, whenever you want it, and at a tiny fraction of the cost of even the shortest training course. What’s more, all of our content is founded on research, so you can be sure it is objective, authoritative and fit for purpose.

There is no secret sauce in sales, despite what we might like to think. However, an extensive knowledge base like the Journal holds the collective knowledge of the whole profession. It’s up to individuals what to do with that knowledge.