If You Need To Reduce Profits… Do Some sales Training!

Do you need to find a way to legitimately and quickly depress excellent profit results, to stave off the pressure of accommodating higher budgets in the next fiscal period? If so I have an idea that will not only diminish revenues immediately, it will ensure that you are not embarrassed by exceptional results for some considerable time to come.

Simply organise some 'sales training' of the most available and favoured variety, the kind that damages sales people in the way that a diet of junk food can impair the health of our children, and your income will dramatically drop in these ways:

• Sales results will begin to suffer the moment the team hears that more of the usual sales training is planned; • Income will be lost when the sales team move off the road and attend the course; • The direct and indirect training costs will be an enormous drain on funds; • The irrelevant nature of the training will subtract from the sales team's value, causing further deterioration in service and sales levels after the course; Now, you must be sure to select 'the most common' kind of sales training, otherwise you could end up with the very uncommon variety that will actually cause service and sales improvements to take place. Here is how to recognise the most damaging type of sales training programme:

• The actual trainers will have had limited experience or success in selling and management (in other words they will serve as ‘mouth-pieces’)

• The training emphasis will be on memorising puerile 'sales techniques' (for instance the sales force will have to remember 'how to handle objections' ... rather than learn 'how to learn and defend beliefs', plus learning ‘features and benefits’, etc.)

• The sales team will not be consulted about their training needs, and not one customer will participate in the course or in the preparation period (thus ensuring the programme's irrelevance and defectiveness)

• No professional, strategic consulting and self-management tools will be provided (creating an ‘everyman for himself’ scenario)

Quite seriously, I know of two major banking organisations that have invested heavily in the same sales training programme from overseas, and I also know that their employees are more than embarrassed to be associated with the programme. The content of the 'programme' offers the same hackneyed 'sales techniques' we first saw 30 years ago, simply presented with new packaging. As a banking customer, you will perhaps know how well the sales training has worked!

The question is why do managers inflict poor quality training on their sales staff, remembering that no one aims to do the wrong thing in this critical area. The answer is that managers fail to ‘work backwards’ from the needs of the market for excellent service, choosing instead to ‘move forwards’ from company needs to lift sales. The news is that ‘selling’ at its very best is the highest form of service that a company can offer to its customers. Selling is supposed to represent contribution of results and not just distribution of products; it is supposed to cover ‘order-taking’ to a small extent but it must also address ‘sales-making’ to a large extent. Additionally, selling involves ‘the move from being market-driven to market-driver’.

So, when sales people are made to endure an occasional and ruinous training pig-out, as opposed to a valuable diet of professional motivation, real business education, exposure to customers and strategic selling tools, they become 'Scud Missiles' in the market - missing key targets and acquiring the image of product-pushing predators.

Here are the most serious training needs of sales people…who must perform mostly as ‘sales-makers’:

• They need to be informed and motivated about what constitutes high-level behaviour in leading sales people…across many industries • They need to be sold on what they sell, learning first to understand the distinction and value of their offerings, so as to develop conviction and [contagious] enthusiasm • They need to be rehearsed on high-level sales conduct and presentation, not to the point where ‘they get it right’, but to the point where ‘they cannot get it wrong’

• They need to be trained and equipped to become 'self-managers' who can see immediate sales potential • They need to be provided with the apparatus to create simple, dynamic customer and territory development plans • They need to understand their customers' businesses and their business needs and problems, and to understand how their value propositions fit with those needs and problems • They need to be held responsible and accountable for high-level conduct and for achieving excellent and profitable sales • They need a first class service from management - which includes productive meetings, regular training, lots of exposure to customers (away from transaction mode), an equitable and exciting incentive programme and a system of reporting that reflects service and sales performance.

When management gradually attends to these needs, the expense of serious sales training becomes a wise investment and not an extravagant, wasteful and counterproductive cost.

Last but not least this point needs to be made. If sales people who play social golf or tennis at the weekends were offered one hour with a ‘pro’, they would jump at the chance…and the first question they would ask of the pro is ‘what am I doing wrong?’ This is not a sign of weakness; people inherently know that they cannot move ahead until they know what is holding them back. The point is that when it comes to ‘sales training’ sales people must be provided with someone who is recognised as being a consummate ‘professional’…someone who will shake them up and create high-level motivation as the platform for offering strategy of the highest quality. As they say ‘When the student is ready the teacher is never far away’…and so the real training challenge is to invite sales people to become serious ‘students of selling’.



If You Need To Reduce Profits… Do Some sales Training! - To learn more about this author, visit John Lees's Website.

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