And if sales are down, how quickly could you get to the route of the problem?

What makes a great sales person? Hunger, personality, empathy, product knowledge? The success of your business may well rely on your sales people that are out there on the front line, talking to your customers– advising them on your products and making recommendations.

How do you know that your sales people are competent, skilled and knowledgeable? Blind trust in this particular situation seems ludicrous when you lay it all out. In fact, often the first sign we have that a sales person is falling short in any area of competency is missed targets. And then you need to investigate which area of competency is causing the problem. In the cut throat world of sales, often we don’t even make it to this point. Target missed? Sales person is out the door.

But what if you could pin point the problem, resolve it and move forwards. What if you could take a good sales person and make them great. What if you could take a great sales person – identify their make-up and replicate it? The key to all of this is to mine information about employee knowledge and behaviour, and put that information to work.

To tie product knowledge directly to sales successes – you need to keep your eye on a variety of metrics:

  • A baseline knowledge level for every employee and every department
  • Improvement rates for specific topics or products
  • Knowledge about which employees actively participate in learning (and who doesn’t!)

If you start by mapping these baselines, there a whole world of intelligence you can obtain that will help you build a workforce of super heroes.

  • Understand whether your employees are hitting their target levels of product knowledge
  • Which employees need more training and in which areas?
  • Who is actively participating in training, who isn’t?
  • Are these participation levels linked to performance?

You can then start to correlate knowledge levels to job performance over specific periods of time. Equally, you can monitor where the gaps in knowledge are, and if these correlate to low performers in your workforce.

Alternatively, if you’re ready to get started setting up a process like this, get in touch with one of our Solutions Advisors to learn more about our training reinforcement tool , Axonify.