Most leaders are stressed when their staff doesn’t understand how to do their job properly.
Here are five training areas most business people need to focus on to ensure their team is confident and capable:
Customer service
We take it for granted when we hire people to take care of our customers that they understand what customer service really means.
Often the people we hire are looking for a job to pay the bills, and customer-service jobs are frequently entry-level jobs that enable them to make ends meet and put food in the fridge. Unfortunately, many of these people have never been trained in what it means to look after customers.
If you want your customers to be happy and continue to experience the level of service you delivered when you first started taking care of them, you should either spend time training your staff or engage someone to do it for you.
Time management
We assume wrongly that our staff know how to manage their time. However, if you consider how much time is wasted because staff aren’t blocking time or using techniques to limit interruptions and get work done in a timely manner, you might decide you want to teach them how to manage their time efficiently.
Simple time management training during a lunch-and-learn session can take your team to another level, helping you get more projects done on time and within budget.
Your systems
As leaders, we’re so busy that we forget when we hire new staff that they need to be onboarded properly to ensure they know our systems. Failure to do this results in frustrated staff who move on to other jobs because they feel that they aren’t capable.
Unfortunately, it’s not that the people are incapable; it’s that we haven’t trained them in our systems.
It might be simple things that are involved in doing their job on a daily basis. It could be the software you use to run your projects or your point of sale. It might be something as simple as scheduling or finding products.
When we fail to train and onboard properly, we set ourselves and our new hires up for failure.
And if we introduce new systems into our organization, we need ongoing training on those systems to ensure everyone is up to speed.
Sales techniques
So many companies hire sales staff and expect them to be professional without adequately investing in them.
A few years ago, we had a company hire us to reduce the turnover in their sales department. We helped them develop some processes for hiring and training their staff that enabled them to have less turnover and more success.
Sales training is more than just telling your staff what your products do. Good sales training engages these professionals and helps them understand what it takes daily to ensure their long-term success.
Sales training should be seen as an investment that will give long-lasting financial returns. If it doesn’t, there’s something wrong with the training.
Accounts receivable collections
Recently we had a client who came to us concerned that they had $1 million in accounts receivable. It’s OK to do business and grow your sales, but unless you’re collecting payments, you’re going to have a problem.
We helped this company develop a process to enable them to cut the number of outstanding accounts in half in three months. By training their staff to follow a process every month, the company reduced its risk and put more money in the bank. And their customers appreciated knowing where they stood.
Dave Fuller, MBA, is an award-winning business coach and a partner with Pivotleader Inc. For interview requests, click here.
The opinions expressed by our columnists and contributors are theirs alone and do not inherently or expressly reflect the views of our publication.
© Troy Media
Troy Media is an editorial content provider to media outlets and its own hosted community news outlets across Canada.
