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Sales Training Doesn't Work

Written by: Mark Tewart

Article Overview: Sales training doesn’t work because it focuses on the wrong things in the wrong way. If you were to research books and training materials on sales for the last one hundred years you would find a vast amount of material on sales techniques, word tracks, objection handling, closing techniques and sales systems. All of those things are good for your sales knowledge and education but they account for only about ten percent of sales success.

Sales Training Doesn't Work

Sales Training Doesn’t Work
By Mark Tewart


“If you have a daughter attending school, would you rather her have sex training or sex education?” You may be thinking neither one, but if you had to choose, I’m sure you are going with education. I think that question points out the difference between training and education. Sales training gets a bad name because sales training doesn’t work.

Sales training doesn’t work because it focuses on the wrong things in the wrong way. If you were to research books and training materials on sales for the last one hundred years you would find a vast amount of material on sales techniques, word tracks, objection handling, closing techniques and sales systems. All of those things are good for your sales knowledge and education but they account for only about ten percent of sales success.

What should a salesperson know? - Sales skills, people skills, life skills and marketing skills. Let’s examine sales skills. Most sales skills training information that is in existence is based upon reactive, controlling and manipulative type selling. Society and the business world have changed. Customers smell a salesperson a mile away. No longer will people tolerate sales people using worn out, one hundred year old techniques such as tie-downs and inverted tie-downs. Eager salespeople are being duped by egotistical sales trainers teaching “magic pill” closing techniques.

Do you need to understand word tracks, sales techniques closing techniques? Yes. Is it the key to riches? No. First of all, most sales training focuses on the “what to do” approach. True education deals with what to do, how to do it and most importantly, why to do it. “When the why gets strong the how gets easy.” Sales trainers teaching sales techniques to salespeople in the “what to do method” without communicating a deep understanding why they are to do it, are playing Russian roulette with the salespersons career. Often too much is taken for granted about salespeople understanding what occurs and why in a sales process. Did you really understand why you were being asked to do what you were being told when you first started selling?

When you educate salespeople on selling techniques, try to create understanding about the power of proactive vs. reactive approaches. Instead of spending so much time on objection and problem handling, try to instill what makes these things occur. Delve into the psychological and emotional process a customer goes through and not only how these stumbling blocks occur but how you can proactively eliminate or massage these before they ever come up.

Imagine one of those long winding slides at a pool. You slide a long way down and directly and easily into the pool. A sales process should be the same. Look at any obstacles that potentially and often keep customers from flowing freely down the slide of the sales process and into the pool of buying. Identify, examine and eliminate proactively.

Now let’s look at the people skills aspect of selling. If you become great at this part, you may never need sales techniques again. People buy form people. People buy from people they feel comfortable with and that they like, trust and feel a connection with. Old school sales techniques can actually hinder the relationship with the customer because they cause distrust. People skills are often described as the “soft skills” of selling. In reality, people skills are like a velvet hammer. Examples of people skills are: listening, language, body language and understanding emotional and psychological triggers.

Listening is without a doubt the number one relationship and sales skill. Recently, I spent time with a twenty five year veteran of the automobile business who now consults with dealerships about their sales. After one hour with this person, it was easy to see they tried very hard to talk and impress, but did almost zero listening. Can you imagine being trained to sell by a person who can’t listen? Unfortunately, this is common in training and in sales. Not listening is and probably always will be the number one complaint of customers.

Not only do you have to listen to customers but you have to listen without a predisposed brain. You must TLC - Think Like a Customer. When a salesperson is wrapped up in their own agenda they can’t help the customer with the customer’s agenda.

When you are listening to a customer, try using active listening methods that show that you are listening and trying to understand with empathy. Repeat and respond to what they say and ask. Clarify everything. Stress the importance of helping them get what they want.

Reading and utilizing body language skills will exponentially increase your effectiveness as a communicator. If you want to observe masters of the art of communication and body language, just study Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Putting any politics or feelings about either man aside, just watch how they communicated with people and you find how they could immediately break down barriers with people and create warm feelings. I have often heard the staunchest critics of Bill Clinton that said they loathed the man; explain how he instantly melted them when they were around him. Those people skills used by those two men are learned skills that can be used in a powerful and non-manipulative approach.

All businesses are built upon two businesses: the people business and the marketing business. If you have great sales skills and great life skills but you don’t have customers to use these skills with it won’t matter. Therefore education on marketing becomes an integral part of sales training and sales success. All good salespeople have a “CEO mentality” that they are creating a business within a business. They understand their long term success is built upon becoming non-dependent on the businesses advertising or marketing sources. Individual sales people can often become better grass roots marketers than the business they work for.

There are five ways to increase your bottom line – Increase sales, Increase gross profits, Increase repeat customers, Increase the buying cycle of repeat customers, Create continuity programs that keep customers coming back to buy and service in between the major purchase. A salesperson can create low to no cost marketing programs to do all of these and insure long term and massive success.

Proper sales education must contain specific information on emotional based direct response marketing methods. Lead generation = Dollar Creation. Salespeople must be taught how to create leads from affiliations and database mining.

Demonstrate to your salespeople how to put a fence around their herd of customers through email, email newsletters, postcards, letters, phone calls etc. Too often, salespeople think that it’s the dealerships sole responsibility and the dealership thinks the salesperson is not capable of doing these things and won’t do them if they are taught. The reality is very few business owners and managers know how to do these things so they can’t share with the salespeople and don’t seek educators to teach them because they are not willing to create the expectations to do the things they would be taught. “Speed of the boss, speed of the crew. As the leaders think and act the salespeople shall too.”

The last item of essential education is life skills. More people fail or under-perform their potential because of a lack of essential life skills execution than from any other area of education. Life skills include areas such as, goal setting, attitude and thought mastery, action management, understanding persistence etc.

Salespeople with great sales skills and weak life skills will be short term shooting stars at best. Continual company and individual development is essential to long term growth. I am amazed at how many businesses have an army of people hanging out on the corner in the front of the building “smoking and joking.” Have these salespeople not been educated on life skills or are they simply being “tolerated.” Weak expectations lead to weak results.

Have your salespeople received proper attitude education? Having a good attitude is not just a trite saying. It’s a successful way of life that can be learned. There are tremendous resources of books, CD’s, DVD’s and seminars on nothing but gaining and maintaining an attitude of success. There are specific learned skills for success.

Sales training is like a sun burn – It wears off and then it hurts, leaving you worse off. Education is spaced daily repetition. Education is never-ending and life changing. Sales training does not work, education does. For more information on how to create successful education, email info@tewart.com with the word education in the subject line.

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