Power point presentation on Selling skills development

Hello, I am from Surat working with one of the textile firms. We have our sales staff deputed at various Saree shops (counters) in different cities of India. We need to develop sales skills among them, and for that, we want to prepare a PowerPoint presentation. The following points are what we are trying to incorporate into the presentation:

1. Effective Communication
2. Product Knowledge / Expertise
3. Customer Service
4. Problem Solving
5. Business Acumen
6. Sales Demoing
7. Negotiating
8. Prospecting
9. Integrity
10. Grooming
11. Appearance
12. Body Language

Additionally, we would like to cover the following:

The six cylinders of Professional Selling:

1. Business Knowledge
2. Industry Knowledge
3. Company Knowledge
4. Product Knowledge
5. Selling Knowledge
6. Attitude

Please suggest anything else that needs to be focused on.

Dear Mahhernosh Ichhaporia,

You have provided a comprehensive list of topics on which you would like to train your retail salespersons. However, to fully understand these topics, retail executives must possess a certain level of IQ. The success of your training program hinges on the IQ levels of your staff. Therefore, it is essential to consider whether an IQ test was administered during the recruitment process.

In response to your query, I would like to highlight two important topics that are not included in your current list: cross-selling and add-on selling.

A few additional topics relevant to both retail stores and managerial levels are:

a) Various ratios related to inventory
b) Product aging analysis at the retail store and base store, if applicable
c) Demand forecasting techniques such as the least square method, linear regression, and multiple regression.

At a very high level, subjects like:

d) Application of linear programming
e) Understanding the theory of waiting lines (queuing theory)

While training for retail executives is crucial, significant cost savings can be achieved through the implementation of topics from (a) to (e). By incorporating these methods, you may find that the training for retail executives becomes more effective.

I specialize in providing training and consultancy services in Operations Management and Supply Chain Management, including Retail Supply Chain consulting. Please feel free to reach out to me at +919900155394. Thank you.

Best regards,

Dinesh Divekar

I am sure that any person sitting through a boring PowerPoint presentation covering so many topics would be brain dead by the end of the session and remember nothing.

If you are going to train people in so many topics, it needs to be gradual and far more creative than someone standing in front of them just reading the words on a PowerPoint slide that was designed by someone else, most likely for a different industry.

You need to outsource at least some of this training to experts who can enthuse and develop your staff to give them the knowledge, the tools, and the skills to do their job effectively and efficiently. A PowerPoint won't do that.

Dear John,

Most of the topics mentioned in the list do not require any training. If written material is provided, then the staff is expected to learn on their own. But then this is what the question is IQ is. For a chap with low grasping power, certainly, training or education is required. However, for an average+ IQ person, a few instructions or an SOP manual is sufficient.

In the list, one of the topics is "integrity". Can anyone teach integrity? Is it a subject to be taught? But then for a few over-enthusiastic HR professionals, basic terms of HR Management can become topics of the training. Matching their misplaced enthusiasm, training professionals also provide training on such topics. Of course, neither HR professionals nor training professionals take accountability for the measurement of ROI on training. If only ROI starts getting measured, all the unwanted training programs will get reduced automatically.

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar

Hi Dinesh,

I agree with you on the points in your post. I am always at a loss to understand why so many people think training is just standing up in front of the trainees and reading the words off a PowerPoint with no context and no additional information. I suspect this is part of the reason we have so many members here with little or no real-world knowledge of HR in the industry they are working in. I know that sounds harsh, but I've been reading posts here on CiteHR for 16 years now, and some of the stuff I read here just astounds me.

"Integrity" is an interesting issue. Yes, you cannot teach integrity; you either have it or you don't, and hopefully you will have weeded out those who don't via the interview process. But, as we all know, people are clever at hiding stuff, and the interview process is far from perfect, especially in the hands of those not trained in how to do it properly.

However, integrity and ethics are often much the same thing, and I have had ethics training in several jobs I had in my working life. Again, this is not a general catch-all topic; ethics training, while having some commonality across all spheres of life, still has to be tailored to the industry sector. In my case, I spent a lot of time working in Government, and ethical behavior there is a minefield. Government and corruption go together like curry and rice :-)

The OP refers to sales staff, and there again it can be a minefield. There is scope for a lot of unethical behavior by sales staff, e.g., doing underhand deals with shops, taking bribes, kickbacks, bogus invoices, etc.

As for ROI, I think very few people have any concept of that, which is why so much training is pointless. It is only being done because people suddenly think, "Oh, we need to train the staff because that's what HR does." Wrong. It is one of the reasons I continually post about doing a Training Needs Analysis FIRST and finding out if it is really necessary, and what the benefits will be. And I wonder if the OP has done that. I suspect not.