OL sales training

After suffering through the good, the bad and the ugly in sales training as well as delivering sales coaching, I now believe that there is something missing in the majority of sales training programs I have experienced or reviewed. From your experiences, what is the one topic, learning objective, skill set, call it what you will that if included would deliver a positive return on investment. This question presumes alignment with the organization's goals, buy in from management and a culture to ensure ongoing reinforcement.

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I'm sure there are lots of good answers to your question. Having wasted a lot of money on sales training before we decided to take it into our own hands, there two things I think are consistently missing for most sales training.

When our senior team reviewed our collective experience with sales training two things became evident. Too much of it centered on motivation/entertainment - short term good - long term waste of money. The other was a focus on sales process. Since the 1960's - yes some of us are that old - the process was that someone would write a book, gen up a sales training program to sell the book and then trademark their "unique selling process" as a means of capitalizing on the effort. Many of these 60's and 70's programs are being sold today.

The result was an industry of cooks. "My sales recipe is better than their sales recipe," kind of thing took off. "My sales process is more efficient," "My sales process is faster......." etc. That was followed in the 80's and 90's by a generation dedicated to the idea that the only effective sales training is the one I personally custom design for your company. That industry took off mostly as counter weight to the recipe folks. A lot of the stuff invented way back then is still being re-packaged and sold today.

The problem is that B2B and B2C customers have moved light years beyond the targets these programs shoot for. Today, sales training must address the needs of the 21st century customer.

So with 150 years of collective sales, sales management and business ownership on the team, we came to the conclusion that at least two things were missing in our sales training options and needed to be addressed.

Perhaps the most important missing element is time. We all agreed that way too many sales training programs are just events. They come and go and are soon forgotten. Today our shortest sales training program is 8 weeks long, others are 16 weeks long and we want our salespeople to stay training active for a year. The reason we focused on extending the training time was that we believe the second missing element was the salesperson themselves. None of the short term sales training programs could address what we feel is the most important issue, sales behavior. Most sales training is an intellectual exercise in learning something new but it seldom changed behavior - over the long term.

When we sat down and reviewed the sales careers of over 300 salespeople our team knew personally, we realized that what limited their sales performance was not what they knew but what they did. What limited them were fears, comfort zones, blind spots, personal organization and difficulty communicating and bonding with customers. We noted periodic breakthroughs and performance spikes, but until the salesperson can master themselves they didn't achieve long term sales success. Because it takes a minimum of 30 days to break a habit or to acquire a new one, we knew that we had to train over an extended time frame to give them time to transform their behavior.

To me, getting a return on your sales training investment means that you have to start with investing in the salesperson as a whole. If you measure your return in the form of getting the sales behaviors you need and want, then we believe it is not only a good investment by one central to the survival of every company.

IMHO, if your sales training investment is focused on sales education you're always going to have a "Know-Do" gap that will limit sales performance.

online sales training