The economy has many companies scrambling to reduce unnecessary costs while projecting consistent revenue growth and solid sales goals. Oftentimes, businesses that focus on quick-fix and non-strategic cost reductions create a roadmap for collapse. In the most challenging of economic times, manufacturers should concentrate efforts on communication and training to ensure adequate preparation for a changing market.

In order to realize an economic quick fix, many companies view research, product development, marketing and sales training programs as "added" business expenses that are expendable and easily started and stopped. This is shortsighted for many reasons, but the most critical is that a company, especially a manufacturer, should focus its efforts during challenging conditions on accomplishing its primary business objective and strengthening itself for the future. Comprehensive preparation, including education of a sales force and distribution network to better position and sell the company and its products, are not luxuries, but priorities for survival.

Practical training programs are extremely varied, numerous and can be one of a company's most valuable employee communication tools. Training has multiple benefits for an organization, as it equips representatives with effective information, helps to maintain higher levels of employee morale, and has been proven to increase worker retention.

Successful training does not begin and end with the manufacturer's sales force, nor should it. A beneficial training program can create tangible, bottom-line results and improvements in customer relationships, particularly when it extends beyond the company's sales force to distributors. Furnishing both the sales force and key distributors with selling skills and product knowledge takes a company to a deeper level of customer commitment and profitability.

For many trainees, about 10 percent of what they learn in a traditional lecture-type training session is actually retained. But the results change dramatically if trainers add the learning methods of "showing" and "experiencing" to lecture-type training. This experiential training is one of the more successful methods of sales training programs because it allows participants to experience the sell. Experiential training enables participants to learn through a combination of hearing, seeing and doing, sharpening what they've learned through practice.

Experiential familiarity is at the heart of Georgia-Pacific's new training series developed for distributors. In 2002, the company conducted an experiential training program for sales representatives that included more than 220 participants and resulted in a 5 percent increase in commercial dispenser placements in just four months. Management saw firsthand that the training helped representatives become a more valuable resource to customers and were subsequently viewed as industry experts and solution solvers.

Experiential training benefits the sales force because it allows them to focus on uncovering customer needs before the sell ever comes into play. They are then better equipped to sell solutions because their training required input and active participation and invited them to think strategically.

An organization that can provide experiential training to its distributors, as well as its sales force, is better prepared to face and conquer the challenges of a struggling economy. Remember, instituting a quick fix for the sake of shedding a few dollars may cost the company the ability to compete, and cause it to lose focus on its ultimate goal.