A few months ago I came in contact with a sales person, lets call him Steve, who wanted to get sales training for the other members of his team. He was part of a small business organization that had a 5 person sales team. He was the original salesperson hired and the company was in growth mode so they brought on 4 more people. The CEO who this person reported to did not have much formal sales experience so he relied on Steve to “train” the new sales team. Steve thought this would be a great opportunity to move up the sales ladder so he spent extra time working with the rest of the team to get them on board.

He called in frustration because this extra effort was costing him valuable sales time and not really bringing the rest of the group up to speed. We talked about the value of having a formal sales process and methodology and a way of delivering this training to his small group through a contemporary sales 2.0 platform. Since he was not the decision maker, we agreed he would get his boss on a webinar to go over the proposal.   A week went by and after contacting Steve, he said his boss was interested but was too busy traveling and would have to do this later–Steve should continue bringing the team along.  This went on for several weeks.  One day, Steve called and said he just couldn’t get the CEO’s attention and that he was leaving for another job.  It was taking away from what he loved to do–sell and was not providing an avenue for advancement as he had hoped.

This notion of on the job training by a co-worker is an all to common practice and has not become more effective with the passage of time — especially in the sales arena.  More often it institutionalizes poor practices for the sake of getting a warm body on the street.  The outcomes are a medicore sales team with high turnover and equally poor revenue performance.