Taking Responsibility for Your Own Training

Having trained sales professionals for 15 years I've seen every scenario when it comes to taking responsibility for training.

Who schedules it and who pays for it can vary from company to company and industry to industry. Some companies are built on training and others don't have the belief, the budget or both. Some companies don't want to train their salespeople only to have them leave at some future date - so they settle for untrained salespeople who stay forever and produce mediocre results. Not good.

If you're a sales manager - train your people and inspect what you expect them to do. They'll stay longer and produce... more often than they will leave with your precious training secrets. Seriously.

Now to all of you sales people here comes the point of this post - take responsibility for your own training! Your sales manager can't possibly know everything it takes to motivate you and make you successful. Even if they did, what if they didn't provide it?

Ken Blanchard put it this way "Ultimately, it's in your own best interest to accept responsibility for getting what you need to succeed in the workplace." If you take that approach to your training (which is a component of your overall success strategy), then you'll always have what you need to be at the top of your field. If not - it's your fault.

I love that. Put the ball in my hands - if I score then I had a hand in it. If I don't then I had a hand in it.

Blanchard wrote a book entitled "Self Leadership and The One Minute Manager" and I pulled the quote from that book. The subtitle is more compelling than the title and is something we should all hope to find in our sales and business careers... here it is:

Discover the Magic of No Excuses...

TK