As the job of selling becomes ever more complex, companies are struggling to assure their salespeople keep pace with the changing landscape. Traditional sales training simply isn't meeting the need, but companies may find the right peak performance recipe by looking to other disciplines. From music to sports to mathematics and chess, the common denominator is deliberate practice: it's not that practice makes perfect, but that perfect practice makes perfect.
New developments in performance science and technology will drive accelerated sales performance in the future:
- Studies in neuroscience and behavioral design point to the impact of deliberate practice in fostering effective learning
- New technologies create easy ways for people to practice and learn with mobile apps, interactive features, gamification, etc. The massive activity in educational technology -- $1.3B in venture capital investment in 2013 alone -- is readily transferrable to the business sector.
Sales management has a tremendous opportunity to up their sales performance with a programmatic effort employing creative processes and innovative technologies grounded in the latest performance science.eeds and desires of each segment. A startlingly simple concept, segmentation, which is nearly ubiquitous in companies' client facing distribution strategies, applies just as readily to sales force management.
