How much more effective would you be if your life were better organized?

I mean in every sense. Suppose that every time you were looking for a document or a screwdriver or a kitchen utensil, you could put your hand right on it because you always knew exactly where things were?

Organization is helpful when you are learning sales skills, too. If your company is going to invest in sales training programs and sales coaching initiatives, look for programs that are grounded within a complete, coherent, organized sales system. Here’s why:

Someone once said that “a bad education sticks to you.” If you don’t absorb knowledge about the world in a systematic way, with earlier learning providing a framework and context for later learning, it is very difficult to catch up. You’re trying to build a house with no foundation.

The same principle applies when you set out to learn new sales skills via a sales training course or sales coaching efforts. Organization matters. The order in which you learn things matters. Above all, the framework upon which you hang each new piece of information matters. Sales skills aren’t applied in a vacuum; they are used within a certain context. And for sales skills to be truly useful, you must know where and when to apply them within that context.

Unless you can apply the right sales skill at the right time and in the right way, you aren’t actually skillful. To be effective, you need to understand the context and where you are within it.

If you don’t know when to perform the sales skill, you aren’t skillful.

This is why it matters—a lot—that the sales training program you use should be based on a sales system that describes the entire sales process in a clear, organized, step-by-step way. The Action Selling ® system, for example, can be summarized and graphically represented on a single card that you can carry with you. The card shows the 9 Acts of the system and illustrates how they relate to the 5 Critical Decisions that every buyer makes.

When sales training programs and follow-up sales coaching are based upon such a system, salespeople are not just taught some grab-bag of knowledge and skills that they are supposed to draw upon somehow, IF they can figure out where and when. Instead, since the sales skills they learn are grounded within a highly organized, step-by-step system, salespeople always know exactly where they are in relation to the customer and the customer’s decision-making process.

Here’s what that means in practice: A lot of sales training programs will tell you, for instance, to do things such as ask open-ended questions. But they don’t tell you where and when to ask which kinds of open-ended questions to uncover which kinds of needs as you pursue which kinds of commitments from the customer. The right sales training course, based on the right sales system, will tell them all of those things and more.

That makes all the difference. Just remember this: If you want dramatic improvements in sales performance, organization counts.

For information about how to improve sales skills and make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.