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Do your new hires know what makes you tick? Do they know why you exist and what matters to your customers? The training I’m talking about is customer-driven training, not internally driven training. Most small businesses have some rudimentary form of initial training, but it is focused on how to work the cash register, how to input data into the computer, or how to file the paper work. Yes, those things are necessary to learn, but they come with time. Most of that kind of training has little to do with what really matters from a customer standpoint. The answers to the following questions are what effective employees really need to be trained about:

· Why do people buy from us?

· What do we do differently from everyone else?

· Why do people buy from us and not the other guys?

· When people buy from the other guys, why do they do it?

· What makes us unique?

· What do our customers care the most about?

· What are the primary tasks you need to know, and how do those tasks relate to the customers’ needs?

When you can answer these questions and train people on those topics, you will have a powerful training program. You assume that customer satisfaction is obvious, but it is not. (See the Oyster Bar Story.) Most new employees have no idea what satisfies a customer of your company. You need to teach them.

Dedicate some serious time to the training that really delivers. Each new employee should go through at least one day dedicated to an orientation to the company, its values, and its history. The best growing companies pull in the company founders, the top sales reps, or the president to explain the company’s core reason for being. They get new hires up to speed on how the company is different, what it does better, and why it is going to grow.