Training
There are a number of findings from the current research to support the notion that sales training may be different for a salesforce selling services as opposed to goods. While the usefulness of training content in the current research was generally the same for both sales forces, there was considerable difference in perception of company policies and time management between services and goods salespeople. Because services are not tangible and are created for each individual customer, it is difficult to guarantee product satisfaction. Greater knowledge of company policies may be more important for services salespeople in order to know exactly
The use of on-the-job training as a method of training also seems to better meet the needs of services salespeople. This may be driven by the heterogeneity inherent in the service product. Since each product is unique for the customer, the approach of learning while actually doing may help prepare the salesperson for more situations than a classroom setting would permit. This would fit within the conceptual framework of Weitz, Sujan, and Sujan ( 1986) who assert that by increasing the richness and interconnections of the salesperson's knowledge structure, more effective sales presentations can be developed.
An interesting contradiction in these findings is that even though services salespeople found on-the-job training to be the most useful of the training methods, the location of their training was more likely to occur at the company offices. Taken together with the previous finding, this implies that the centralized location for training may not be meeting the training needs and more training should be undertaken in decentralized locations. Also, the results suggest that sales managers should assume a more active role in the training process for services.