We are back with the final installment of the Building a Championship Sales Team blog series that focuses on developing sales talent for ongoing success. We have established how strategic talent development can enable sales leaders to build a championship sales team and provided the first three keys to successful strategic talent development.

Unfortunately, when a lot of organizations begin a talent development initiative, they end up focusing on a single training event to improve the perceived deficiencies in knowledge and skill. Although a training event is a component of talent development, a single training event alone is not enough to ensure the kind of development necessary to achieve next level business results. The reason this is true is because a training event alone will not guarantee the knowledge/skills are being applied in the field or that they are being applied correctly to succeed.

When executing a talent development initiative, we recommend focusing on four vital areas of talent development to enable ongoing success:

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Welcome back to the Building a Championship Sales Team blog series. In this post, we share why establishing the development plan is key #3 to building a championship sales team. We have been discussing the keys to strategic talent development and how it can enable sales leaders to build a championship sales team. A sales team that meets its number every quarter despite higher and higher quotas.

Many sales organizations have development plans for their sales teams, but that doesn’t mean they have the right plan for their business or that they will be able to execute their development plan. In order to develop your organization’s talent and build a championship sales team, we suggest the following 5 best practices for successful adoption and execution of the talent development plan:

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This week in Building a Championship Sales Team, we get to be a scout. In baseball, it is the scout’s job to assess the talent and determine the players’ strengths and weaknesses. For a baseball team to be successful and win championships, it needs to understand the current makeup of its talent so it can develop players accordingly. This philosophy is the basis of our second key to Building a Championship Sales Team: Determining the Current Talent Makeup of Your Team.

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Building a championship sales team is an ambition shared by most (if not all) sales leaders. If you follow professional baseball, then you know that there are two ways to build a championship team. One way is to be like the New York Yankees. The Yankees strategy is to set a very high payroll by offering the best players in the league the highest salaries. However, this strategy does not always work because having high paid players does not guarantee the players are the right fit for the team. Check out this example Major League Baseball (MLB) team success measured against payroll:

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