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Understanding the Sales Force
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If you invest in sales training, especially now, you also need it to work now, not in 12 months. Why does it take so long for most sales training to make a difference and why does most sales training fail to make the difference you expect? There are a lot of possible reasons and I'll attempt to explain them here.
- Sales trainers want to sell sales training so they skip or gloss over the more important issues like
- a sales force evaluation to determine the real issues and answer questions about possibilities;
- helping you create the appropriate sales infrastructure including a customized sales process; a visual, criteria-based, staged pipeline; and proper metrics to drive revenue;
- development of a proper sales culture;
- development of the sales management team so that they become masters at coaching, accountability, motivation and development;
- alignment;
- compensation;
- documentation;
- recruiting and selection process and tools.
This is why it's so important to work with a sales development expert - someone who takes an integrated, thoughtful approach to the sales force.
- Sales training is too difficult to understand and apply and trainers make it even more difficult with their complicated processes, non-intuitive tactics and tricks. Instead, they should make it as simple as possible by making it memorable, intuitive, and easy to apply.
- They tend to demonstrate their strategies and tactics through role play, which is fine, but their role plays demonstrate more tactics than what they have already taught. They should never include more in the role play than their audience has learned from them. Here is an example. You take a seven year old to the movies. If it's an age appropriate movie, rated G or PG, all of the previews are age appropriate and the seven year-old gets it - all of it. However, if you take the seven year-old to a PG-13 movie, then the previews are a bit overwhelming. The seven year-old can tell you whether it seems exciting, funny or scary, but the seven year-old doesn't understand the theme, content or mature dialog. They haven't been exposed to that stuff yet. Same thing with your salespeople. If the trainer has already exposed them to the basics, and includes only the basics in role play, the salespeople get it. It's age appropriate. But if the trainer includes material that the salespeople haven't been exposed to, they can only tell you whether they like it or it seems scary. The role play is a bit overwhelming because they haven't been exposed to that stuff yet.
- Some of the sales trainers just aren't that good. They fail to relate, engage, understand, entertain and change the salespeople they are training.
- Much of the content isn't that good. Some of it is just plain outdated while much of the other content around isn't complete, only focusing on certain parts of the sales cycle.
- Some of them only know strategies and tactics but they don't understand the laws of cause and effect. They can't get to the real reasons why salespeople fail to execute the strategies and tactics.
There are at least as many more reasons but this article is already longer than it should be. We'll just call it part 1 and I'll circle back with part 2 at a later date.
(c) Copyright 2009 Dave Kurlan
COMMENTS
100% bang on target, as usual and yet the number of people who still persist with ill conceived, ill planned, ill thought through sale training is a serious worry, made worse by people who think that a 2 day sales training programme and only 2 days is the answer. In a series of videos that will be on my website in three weeks one opens with the statement "Sales Traning does not work". Well done Dave, another home run
I agree with both of you! That's the reason I stopped beying sales trainer and started my sales consultant career almost two years ago. I saw I'm not helping my clients with 2 days sales training. Unfortunatelly, most of my prospects still ask for it!
At an appointment yesterday I was told they'd had many proposals in the past which, whilst providing an impetus at the time of delivery, failed to sustain an improvement. So its not just about delivering now, but also in 12 months and 2 years. Without an end to end program, including recruitment, induction, sales process, sales training and sales managment training you end with a sales team going in all directions. Much of this is as a result of sales being viewed as a transient role rather than the profession that it has become. Thanks for the blog. Paul
It's 'Training' Ray, ....... No cost on this one!
This is great information. Appreciate your perspective on sales. For additional info on free sales training resources, you might want to visit: www.freesalestraining.com Maybe even suggest a link back to your blog.
I have to say that you have very good points about the sales trainers skip and gloss. They are so true. Especially the first bullet, they don't always answer all the questions.
Great post! Across our clients, we hear that nearly universally, traditional training investments fail to meet expectations. The evolution we are seeing is that firms plan to continue to conduct traditional in-person training, but are starting to have more realistic expectations. In turn, they are augmenting traditional training with more "tribal" knowledge sharing, such as fostering peer-to-peer sharing of best practices, just-in-time Q&A with experts and other sellers, and providing a mix of formal (e.g. marketing-approved) versus informal (sales win reports) documents such as case studies. A quote from a customer, a VP of Sales Training and Enablement from a large US technology company, summarizes the trend we are seeing: “Sales training definitely has a role, but in terms of ramping up a new rep or introducing a new product, or even rolling out an enhanced methodology, formal training addresses only part of the needs, in some cases, we suspect the main benefit is the hallway conversations that take place between reps during breaks in the program. It is when the sellers are back in their offices or in the field that they need just-in-time access to the material they did not retain which is a substantial percentage—or was not covered in the training. For us, this means access to experts and peers on how to handle very specific selling situations. Institutionalizing that type of content is just as important a component of an overall training process as the class.” Great discussion, hope to hear more on this important topic! John Held SAVO Group
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