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If there’s one thing I hear from every business owner, manager or executive, it’s that good people are hard to find; especially good salespeople.

In this highly competitive economy the demand for top salespeople is high, while the supply is low, which leaves us with only two options:

Steal them from someone else, or develop the living heck out of what you have.

Let’s examine both roads and figure out which is the best one to take.

Stealing good salespeople from someone else is certainly the fastest and easiest way to do it, but far too often not always the best way. Sure, if you steal someone from your competition you could be killing two birds with one stone: weakening the competition while strengthening yourself. But there are drawbacks and pitfalls:

• Stealing salespeople from another company is costly. Good salespeople aren’t going to leave a company where they’re producing (and treated like a star), unless the package they’re being offered is huge. This could knock your compensation structure out of whack and, more importantly, tick off your current top producers, who, I’ll bet, are not making nearly the same amount.
• Every company has their own unique culture and way of doing things. Someone coming in from the outside whose career and habits were developed in a totally different culture and work environment might have a tough time duplicating their past success. Old habits are hard to break, and the last thing you want to hear is someone telling you, “That’s not the way we did it in my old place.”

As you can tell I’m a big believer in developing the heck out of what you have. But that means being willing to do what’s hard and not just what’s expedient. It means a commitment to ongoing training, education and development. And I don’t mean just putting the new salespeople through sales training while everyone else only gets a couple of workshops at the annual sales conference.

Are your salespeople being encouraged to constantly strive to be better at who they are and what they do on a regular basis?

Are your sales managers coming up with their own education and development plans for improving each and every one of the salespeople who report to them?

Are you taking advantage of today’s technology and its ability to bring training and education to your people on not only a regular basis, but in a timely manner.

Internet based training can constantly bring the most up to date information to your people when they not only need it, but can immediately implement it.

For example, we have many clients who are taking advantage of our ability to develop and deliver customized private podcasts to their salespeople, so they can listen any time and any place, allowing them to use the information as they need it and best of all: spend more time in the field.

Over the space of 6 years (1996 – 2001) the New York Yankees appeared in 5 World Series, winning four of them. While everyone accuses the Yankees of outspending the competition and buying their championships, closer examination shows us that the key players on those championship teams were either homegrown and developed from within, or brought in as youngsters from other teams and trained in the “Yankee way:” Andy Pettite; Bernie Williams; Jorge Posada; Alfonso Soriano; Paul O’Neill, Tino Martinez, Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, two players who are still leading the team today.

Create your company’s “Way of doing things,” and develop your own winning team.