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IS SALES TRAINING PASSING ITS SELL-BY DATE?

Written by: Nikki Owen

Article Overview: As a company who specialises in sales training and development, I've found myself growing increasingly more sceptical towards the real impact of traditional sales training methods. According to Professor George Miller, Harvard University, our conscious minds can only process around 7 chunks of information at any given moment. If this is then related to applying new techniques learned during a training course, then how can salespeople feasibly put into practice loads of new techniques instantly?

IS SALES TRAINING PASSING ITS SELL-BY DATE?

From my own experiences with prospects, customers and clients, there are simply so many things to think about during a sales call that I've sometimes found myself going into overwhelm and decided to slip straight back into the old ways of doing things. As a female who is supposed to be good at multi-tasking, I think selling can be likened to juggling, when it's a challenge to keep all your balls in the air!

That's why I'm a passionate convert to taking a step-by-step approach to development of any kind, where new skills are embedded as an unconscious competence so they are performed automatically. Someone who in my opinion is a total guru at teaching and installing skills unconsciously, is my NLP Master Trainer, David Shepherd from Performance Partnership. Even now, I chuckle to myself when I notice that I'm doing something that I didn't know I knew!

There are some amazing courses out there, yet how many new skills can be taught in one day? In my view you can only teach 2 new skills in one day if you are allowing for many opportunities to practice so that delegates cannot, not do them. Yet, there are still thousands of traditional sales trainers and sales training companies that opt for the U-shaped training room, complete with powerpoint and high levels of content that is almost completely forgotten within 3 months. As for the Happy Sheets, you know the feedback sheets that are often used at the end of a course - well I've never read a bad one yet! I think these are more about the egos of the trainer, rather than providing meaningful feedback.

Yet, some organisations still crave the supposedly 'tried and tested' traditional approach (you know, the ones that believe you'll never get fired for choosing IBM computers). In fact, as an individual who has always prided herself on innovative, weird and whacky delivery methods I was once asked to run a 2 day training on NLP for Consultants at PWC. It was catagorically the worst course I had ever facilitated and I still cringe whenever I think of it. Instead of stretching my delegates just outside of their Comfort Zone, I managed to freak them all out, perfectly! I was described as the trainer from hell and the feedback was entirely 'less than positive'! Horrible though it was, I learned more from this disaster than from the thousands of other courses I delivered brilliantly. I learned that there has to be 'substance' behind the 'sizzle' and some people just aren't ready for radical new teaching methods.

Deep down, I believe that the more responsibility a Sales Manager accepts for the ongoing learning and development of his/her team, the better. If they can teach their people one new skill at every sales meeting, the salesforce have the opportunity to focus on one new thing at a time. Then, they are 50 times more likely to improve.

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Article Tags: balls, david shepherd, delegates, delivery methods, egos, experiences, feedback sheets, guru, many things, meaningful feedback, multi tasking, nlp master trainer, organisations, performance partnership, prospects, pwc, sales training companies, step approach, traditional approach, unconscious competence



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