Training: Staff training is key to beating the recession

Training can help you succeed in a hard market
In an environment where trading is tough, credit crunch and
recession are the words on everyone’s lips, deals are much harder and are taking longer to close, the flow of customer traffic has all but halved.

This together with increasing costs result in profit margins being significantly reduced, or we end up simply buying the business.

We all find ourselves asking the same questions:

Where can we cut our costs?
What is it that we can do to help improve our profitability?

Training is probably one of the first luxuries to be axed in this sort of environment.

It’s not a necessity, it’s not going to keep the wolves from the doors, and how can you justify making investments in training your staff when your priorities should be elsewhere?

Quite often, it’s a very high financial commitment, one that is not deemed indispensable.

So why is it important to keep that focus on training and
developing your staff in an unpredictable economy?

Selling in a recession is harder.
The pressure to ‘just sell something’ is intense.
It’s a different experience to selling in a booming market.
Sales skills need to be sharpened.
Strict sales processes must be followed.
Every opportunity to make a profit should be maximised.
Concentrating on up-selling wherever possible in order to boost profits.

Of course, training doesn’t just help to improve the profit margins, although one could argue that’s the most important aspect. Think about all the other benefits:

How much more successful is your sales team going to be?
How much more motivated are they going to feel?
Motivated staff want to sell more.
How will that impact their conversion rates and your ever
precious CSI?
They will be more productive and more profitable.
Staff retention will improve, which can be a bit of an issue in our industry.

Training is one of the key factors in helping your sales people to achieve all of this, and it doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive, certainly not with our help.

With an array of bespoke training material tailored towards unique sales processes, MAPFRE ABRAXAS, together with a field team of experienced and dedicated training personnel can provide the back-up and support required to maximise your potential profit earnings from our insurance products.