DISCOVERING THE TRAINING NEEDS OF FIELD SALES PERSONNEL TO BE IMPLEMENTED IN E-LEARNING ON GLOBAL SCALE

Global companies have recognized the importance of sales training. Training their sales forces can have numerous benefits for sales force, the customers and managers. The skills needed in sales person profession can vary greatly among industries. Due to this reason it is necessary to carry out need assessment to discover what skills are needed in sales person’s profession in case company market area. Case company ABB operates on highly technical field where selling requires specific skills in order to perform well. The purpose of the study is analyze and define the criterions (skills) of which the case company can then use in following study for decision-making in finding the most suitable supplier to develop sales skills through e-learning. The primary data was collected by in-depth interviews with three different sales professionals from different positions. All of the interviews have had several years (5+) of experience from different sales positions and had different perspectives to sales situations. Prevailing interview was done with one sales manager to deepen the author’s knowledge regarding issues around personal selling and test if secondary data was in order for searching primary data. After discovering necessary skills from interviews data was formed into order of importance by using Analytical hierarchy process model (AHP). The AHP questionnaire was sent to 15 sales managers over 10 countries. 11 answers were received. Empirical findings do support the theory and skills are relatively the same order as in theory. There are some differences mainly resulting from nonexistent research that would have same market context in it. Hence, the case company operates in high technology market where soft skills are not necessary so valued as product knowledge and engineering skills. It was interesting to discover that even so listening, negotiation and closing skills were seen the most important to train for new field personnel rather than ability to conduct research on industry competitor. Active listening skills are one of the most desirable training topics among large companies and seen to have direct impact on sales performance. Interaction skills are well recognized in literature and seen as important factor to sales success. It can be concluded that large companies do use their resources to target more “soft” skills regardless of the industry after creating solid groundwork for basic knowledge.