Following a busy day Thursday, the second full day at the HDA Truck Pride Meeting Friday was featured an extended trade show period and a four training courses in a rotational setting.
The training sessions addressed Sales Training Tips for Growth; Tools for Growth, Using Telematics for Growth and Product Category Expansion for Growth. The first three courses were available to all attendees; the latter was geared specifically for members.
The sales training course proved to be the busiest of the quartet. During the brief rotating presentation, HDA Truck Pride members Paul Boggeman of Plaza Fleet Parts and Adam Clark of Midwest Wheel advised their colleagues on the success they are having using the new HDA Truck Pride-provided Rapid Learning online training system.
Boggeman says he was drawn to the tool because it has training modules built to address real-world scenarios he experiences in the field, such as customer pushback against pricing or new product lines. Boggeman says Plaza Fleet’s small outside sales staff doesn’t have many group training opportunities, so Rapid Learning has been a nice fit because it allows the company’s salespeople to be trained and coached independently.
Clark says he likes the tool because of its performance tracking and data availability. When Midwest Wheel signed up to use Rapid Learning, Clark says he contacted the training company and had them perform an assessment of Midwest Wheel’s sales team to best determine the areas of their business where training modules would be most helpful. Since then, Clark says Midwest Wheel has rolled the training courses out to each branch, and monitors the participation rates and performance scores for each facility and salesperson to make sure the courses are providing the training the company wanted for its team.
Clark and Boggeman’s comments were followed by a crash course in sales management and leadership coaching by Mike Cueto of Heavy Duty Training and Consulting. A longtime industry veteran, Cueto has started his new business to provide sales training and consulting guidance for aftermarket operations.
During his brief presentation Friday, Cueto noted to attendees that good sales leadership requires the understanding that leadership and management are actually two different things. He says management is dealing with processes and tasks. It’s developing territories and compensation plans, managing prices, implementing CRM tools and training resources like the Rapid Learning system.
