It's easy for companies to play it safe, offering opportunities to their employees to take the same training programs and routine skill checks on a regular basis. These assets can help form a uniform team of average, acceptable staff members offset by a few over-achievers and the occasional slacker. Such teams are what many organizations expect, but there's no need to take these talent skews as the norm. It's essential that companies come up with innovative challenges to spark sales coaching and talent management initiatives.

As Business 2 Community stated, there are plenty of professionals who wait for their clients to tell them what they want and then have to scramble to react to these demands. Proactive customer service is the backbone of the best organizations, with employees who know their shoppers and are able to tell when they will need assistance, and with what. The right big data analytics can even turn team members into go-getters, providing consumers with product information and pertinent advertisements for items that they may find useful but hadn't thought to purchase or upgrade yet.

Learning and listening
All of these positive outcomes rely on better sales coaching and talent management, however. The source stated that it's important that firms offer superior training opportunities, but these offers alone aren't enough to get everyone working at the next level of expertise. Employees need to be challenged, put outside of their comfort zones and made to think about new ideas and customer incentives in ways that they hadn't previously.

Putting too much data into a staff member's head is also a dangerous scenario, the source warned. Instead of teaching people to memorize everything about a customer or inspect each market to minutia, it's best to think creatively about the big picture and take each meeting as it comes. A solid knowledge base will help associates navigate these transactions successfully but without falling back on wrote insights or generic input. Speaking to every customer as an individual and driving toward their specific goals are all attitudes and challenges that employees should meet.

Another article from Business 2 Community stressed that such proactive endeavors are best enforced by making higher standards the norm. If companies are okay with setting their sales goals at average rates and minimal revenue generating levels, few employees will strive to exceed these figures. Businesses have to make excellence the standard in order to achieve this outcome.