Are your top performers pushing back when it comes to participating in the on-going sales training that your company requires everyone to complete? How are you handling this push-back? If you’re like most of the retail managers I hear from every week, this is a real struggle. A struggle that usually results in just letting that all-star salesperson do their own thing and forego the training everyone else is doing.
How bad is this for team morale? How much respect do you think you’ve lost with that prima donna seller (who knows you need her on the team…how else would you make target every month!)? Can you imagine how much more that top performer could sell if she did get more training under her belt? This is bad news no matter what way you look at it. It’s time to use your power of persuasion to get your top performers on board! But how?
Get them on your side and make them a champion! One of the best ways of handling the elite sellers on your team is to recognize their skills and reward them. Give them some authority by asking them to help run the sales training program with the rest of the team. Make them the champion of the training program; the assistant coach. Lean on these top performers to help mentor more junior salespeople and shoulder the coaching load. Teach them how to conduct individual 5 minute coaching sessions each week with the team and watch them blossom into great sales leaders!
The trick to all of this? You can’t coach a sales training program unless you know the program! These top performers who once thought they were too good for training will inevitably have to go through the training in order to help you oversee it. Voila! Problem solved! Everyone does the training and you develop a new sales coach…or, potentially a new assistant manager in the process!
