What Untrained Employees or Under-trained Employees Can Cost You?
If a car runs out of oil, the engine fails. First, the pieces start to grind, and then the whole block seizes up, stalling the vehicle. At best, the engine will be seriously damaged; at worst, it will be ruined. Perhaps this is the truth that spawned the phrase “well-oiled machine.”
Your business also needs to function as the proverbial well-oiled machine. All team members must do their part to keep the whole process running smoothly. In order to understand the seriousness of this situation, one can understand what untrained employees can cost you. So what is the “oil” you provide for your sales team? What can you infuse into your business engine to ensure its parts run smoothly and keep your operation from stalling?
The answer is effective training. You may think training is expensive and wonder if it’s worth the investment. The answer to that question is twofold: 1) effective virtual training is far less pricey — it can save the company up to 40% in training expenses, and 2) Untrained Employees or under-trained employees can cost far more than effective training does. In other words, you can’t afford not to provide good training to your team, especially your sales team.
Proper, cost-effective employee training (i.e., virtual sales training) keeps your Untrained Employees from making high-priced mistakes. It also saves and makes you money by cultivating customer retention, which is far more cost-effective than acquiring new customers.
Reduce Untrained Employees Mistakes:
Properly trained employees make fewer mistakes and thereby save the organization the time and money it takes to correct those mistakes. When Untrained Employees have the tools to do their job right the first time, they avoid the following types of errors:
Misrepresenting Products/Solutions:
True story: a car salesman approached a man at the dealership. “These headlights are unbreakable,” he informed the potential customer. “Watch!” He punched the headlight with the side of his closed fist, shattering it into hundreds of pieces all over the showroom floor. Obviously, this Untrained Employees’ mistake cost his employer money on several different levels.
Over-Promising and Under-Delivering:
Another true story: A sales representative for a large landscaping company made a lucrative sale, in part by promising the clients a custom-made pergola and a face-to-face meeting with the landscape architect to personally select plants and trees. These services were outside the scope of what the company offered, and they couldn’t deliver. These clients did not return to the original landscaper for a bid on ‘phase 2’ of their project.
Both of these scenarios (and hundreds like them) resulted in costly issues such as refunds, legal fees, and lost customers. However, they could have been avoided if the salespeople in question had been properly trained.
Retain Customers:
Consider the following statistics:
- Acquiring a new customer costs up to five times more than retaining an existing customer.
- Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits anywhere from 25% to 95%.
- The success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60%-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5%-20%.
- Loyal customers are five times more likely to repurchase, four times more likely to refer, and seven times more likely to try a new product.
Jigsaw Interactive has everything your company needs to implement the effective sales training that will help you avoid costly Untrained Employees mistakes, retain existing customers, and grow your business.
About Jigsaw Interactive:
Delivered on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Jigsaw’s virtual learning and collaboration technology enables our customers to revolutionize how they train, educate, collaborate and work through a virtual environment – helping them embrace digital transformation and enhance their organizations’ success.
