By Bob Cooper of Elite

1. Make sure that your advisors have the natural talent. No matter how experienced they may be, if they don’t have the natural talent to sell, then no matter how many courses you send them to, they will always struggle with sales.

2. Have a clear understanding of where your advisors need help the most. For example, some advisors can perform very well with first-time callers, but they struggle when presenting sales, with sales objections, or with dealing with difficult customers. Before you send your advisors to any sales training, you should do a needs analysis and make sure that the course can help you in the specific areas of improvement that you are looking for.

3. Have clear expectations of the course. Any sales course that is less than three hours will be a shot in the arm at best. An advisor may be able to pick up a few ideas, but that is all that you should expect. Courses that range in length from one to three days can certainly have an impact, but without follow-up, your advisors will more than likely fall back into their old patterns of behavior within 30 – 90 days. If you are looking for long term, permanent results, you’ll need to find courses that provide on-going training and support.

4. If you don’t provide your advisors with the right tools and support, regardless of how good the sales training may be, you are setting yourself up for failure. When it comes to tools, you should provide your advisors with digital audio recorders that you and your advisors can use to listen to their sales presentations. The recorders we recommend at Elite are the Sony digital recorders. You will also need to discuss your expectations with your advisors before sending them to sales courses, and then debrief them once they return to find out what they learned, how they will apply what they have learned, and what you should expect to see as results.

5. Choose the right company. Choosing the right sales trainer is one of the most important decisions you will make in business. As I am sure you will agree, your reputation, and the success of your business, relies on the experience your customers have with your advisors. You need to make sure they learn from trainers who are not only well-skilled, but have the ethics, and a commitment to never putting money ahead of people. You need to speak with their references, reach out to your industry associates, and do your research to ensure that you have a complete understanding of the trainer’s background. Otherwise, you are doing far more than just choosing the wrong sales trainer. You’re actually doing a disservice to your advisors, and even more importantly, a disservice to your customers.

I am honored to say that I have presented more service advisor sales courses than anyone else in our industry. I am not telling you this to impress you, but rather to impress upon you that we here at Elite know what it takes to help service advisors go right to the top, so you can rest assured that these 5 tips will lead you in the right direction

For more information on Elite’s sales training, take a look at the Elite Masters Service Advisor Training Program.