Sales Laundry

Posts Tagged ‘Sales Training’

Companies looking to hire key sales personnel in this recession should be excited about being able to pick up exceptional sales talent that would otherwise be unavailable in a better market.  However, what I am hearing from my friends and contacts is just the opposite.  They are telling me great sales professionals are just as difficult to find if not more difficult to find than ever.

Is your company facing a similar hiring dilemma?  Is your growth being hindered by your ability to find great sales people?

Then I will tell you the same little secret I told them.

Strategically I have always enjoyed selling into down markets as long as I was confident my number of sales professionals or department headcount would at least hold steady through the difficult times.

In down economic times I set a policy of continuous forward progress in the face of competitors buckling, retreating, cutting their sales force or taking other defensive steps.  Ideally when my competitors are pulling back I like to raise my sales headcount, increase our visibility and target key clients in a bid to gain marketshare from otherwise formidable competitors that have been temporarily knocked off their game.

If I am not in a position to bump my sales head count moving into a difficult economic period then I work through/replace my habitually poor performing sales team members (if I have any) with sales superstars that have found themselves unemployed for one reason or another and netting a stronger sales team as a result.  The key is knowing where to find them, and that, thankfully, takes me back to the point of this article.

The secret is that I do not place too much emphasis on requiring deep industry knowledge.  I find the exceptional senior sales guys in the market that already have the sales skills I am looking for, sans the bad habits, and teach them what they need to know to function.

From my experience it is much easier to convey product and industry knowledge to a smart, skilled salesperson than it is to convey the subtleties of sales to a “newbee sales toad” as one of my engineers used to refer to them.

There is no reason to shy away from older/experienced or out of industry sales reps.  As long as they still have that hunger to sell and have not been ruined by too many years of poor sales management, these guys are gold mines.

Ease your “must have” requirements for new candidates.  Requiring new candidates come to you with an established contact list, precise industry experience, a specific number of years of experience and exceptional selling skills is a tall order under any market condition and severly limits the candidate pool to the point of being too restrictive to allow you the flexibility to build your headcount and mentor them to take advantage of favorable market conditions when they present themselves.

Hire for the right character, sales training and ability to listen/learn and ignore the grey hair and non-industry experience.  I think you will find, like I have, that your industry/business is not that hard to learn and that a good hungry sales professional that can find the right contacts and get in the door can sell just about anything.

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Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of.  If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  Does sales training really work?  Why don’t more companies engage in training programs?

 A:  Does sales training work? Yes.

 In fact there is not a more cost effective way to convey massive amounts of information to a sales team over a short period of time.

 So, why all of the problems getting companies to sign up?

 Sales training works, but…

 If the person trained does not use the knowledge, the knowledge will simply leak out of their head.

 Which requires Sales Managers be trained and to reinforce the new behaviors with field sales coaching.

 Sales Managers do not typically do field coaching because it is almost never something they are held accountable for, so sales coaching gets bumped to next week  as call reports, expense reports, forecasts, etc. that they are held accountable for each week, get done.

 Changing the Sales Manager role requires Executive management to make reinforcing their sales training a priority and making sure Sales Managers have the time they need to work one on one out in the field, even if that means cutting some reporting requirements.   

 Frankly, most companies do not realize the extent of the changes that need to be made to their organizations to properly support their sales training efforts.  Many are not willing to put forth the effort in the long term to make lasting changes in their sales organizations and sometimes the required changes in their sales/management infrastructure are more painful than just absorbing the cost of the training and writing it off as a failed experiment and promising never to make the “mistake” of signing up for training again.

The companies that do build sales training into their culture do find measurable long term improvements in their sales organizations.

Why is product knowledge training painful on so many levels?

 Customers don’t want it unless it is in context to their situation.  Sales professionals don’t want to spend their time learning volumes of information they are never going to use.  Vendor representatives and Sales Managers don’t want to build the training materials or dedicate time to conducting the training, and no one wants to pay for it, citing cost or the money wasted when a trained sales professional leaves the company.

 So how could we make the transfer of product knowledge better for everyone involved?

What if we changed the way we train new sales professionals?  Teaching them about the industries and customers our products serve.  Teaching them the most common issues our products and services fix and teaching them the specific questions to ask to uncover prospect problems and questions to ask that point to a feature or competitive advantage for our product.

 We could teach some product basics, but no hard core product knowledge.

 What if we built product knowledge into an application accessibly via laptop, the web, or mobile phone that had all the data aligned by questions we train on and sorted/searchable by keyword, question, problem, solution, specific question, industry or application?

Pay once for building the application and maybe for loading updates, instead of paying to load every new sales professional and subsequently reload every sales persons head with knowledge with every model transition and new product rollout.

 The sales professional still learns the product information but learns it dynamically, as he is asked for it.  Learning this way also lets him/her associate the question, the context and the answer together in a meaningful way that completes the leap from raw product to actionable customer benefiting knowledge aiding in sales efforts.

 This would certainly put an end to the problem of having a sales professional full of product information with either no training or ability to ask good questions and make the product knowledge useful. 

 This could shorten the onboarding/ramp up time for a new sales professional.

Would it work?

 The smoke test would be if the sale tool was able to find, gather and serve up information quickly enough, and in a meaningful way while the sales professional sat across from the prospect.

 Give me your thoughts?  Does this exist somewhere? How does your company load product information into your head?  Is it effective? 

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Who is managing your sales force, your Sales Manager or your compensation plan?

If you said your compensation plan, the good news is you are in the majority. The bad news is your sales could likely improve 15-20% with a solid Sales Manager steering the ship.  Neil Rackham , in his book Rethinking the Sales Force: Redefining Selling to Create and Capture Customer Value, would say 17%.

When I find a Sales Manager that is giving honest effort but is not effective, it is usually because of one of these reasons.

1. The Sales Manager was your best sales professional and is still your best sales professional. Management? What management?
2. Most companies have a training program in place for new sales professionals and executive management, but few utilize any formal training for their Sales Managers. As a result, Sales Managers have no tools to help them manage the revenue production arm of the company, and run solely on gut instinct.
3. Sales Managers have a responsibility to complete a myriad of reports every week, with consequences for not getting them done. There is usually no compelling reason to make time for training or coaching exercises, and as such they don’t get done.
4. The Right Now. Sales performance is often measured on 30 day – 90 day increments on products and services with sales cycles that are much longer. No one dares to take their eye off the sales ball long enough to build in team development time.
5. The Sales Manager compensation model is out of line with company and/or the sales teams defined objectives.

Here are the first five tools I drop in my tool box when I am headed out to fix Sales Management related problems.

1. Put a “sales Manager” instead of a “Sales manager” in charge of your sales organization. Having the wrong person or personality type in the Sales Manager role is more often than not a significant part of the problem.
2. Train your Sales Manager. If you don’t have the budget, think of what an additional 15%+ in sales could do for your business.
3. Build training metrics into your Sales Manager performance measurements and make sure his/her workload will allow time to get the job done.
4. Build a model of continuous improvement into your sales process, making sure you do not shortchange your sales team’s growth and long term revenue potential for short term sales targets.
5. Align the Sales Manager job and compensation model with company goals to make sure a Sales Manager is watching and responding to the objectives and issues that are important to the company. Tie your Sales Managers compensation to the sales team and/or the sales professionals he is responsible for.

I want my Sales Manager to take care of his customers (the sales professionals he is responsible for) and keep the road clear of obstacles that might prevent them from doing their job.

I want my Sales Manager to be my eyes on the front line, making sure we are allocating our sales resources in the most efficient way possible to engage prospects and that he has and will use his authority to make necessary changes on the fly.

I want my Sales Manager continually engaged in enhancing or reinforcing the skill set of the sales team and identifying new ideas and best practices discovered by one sales professional and incorporating them into the entire sales team.

Put your Sales Manager to work growing your business instead of growing the stack of paper in your in-box. There is typically not another person in your organization that can have as much immediate impact for the dollar on your front line sales team as a well trained Sales Manager.

Have any Sales Management best practices or unique signs of spotting trouble?  I would love to hear them.

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For your 3 minutes today I will show you one consistent way to come across a little smarter to your prospect in a meeting and how to put them a little more at ease.  Planning is part of the conversation, so with that I am kicking us off with one of my favorite quotes on the subject of planning.   

 “You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan–even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan.”

-          The Joker (Heath Ledger) “The Dark Knight” 2008

Everyone, prospects included, likes to know there is a plan.  Everyone is happier, still, when they know what the plan is.  It must be hard wired in our DNA somewhere.

 Plans are everywhere.  Go to church?  They give you a church bulletin that lists everything that is going to happen, and we feel better knowing.

 Getting the car repaired?  As soon as we give them the keys we want a plan.  We want to know what they are going to do to it and when it will be ready.

 Going in for Surgery?  It is not quite as frightening when the doctor tells us his plan.  The same is true for every aspect of life, right down to our economy.  When everything falls to pieces and chaos ensues we move to the brink of panic until there is a plan to rally around, no matter how miserable the plan is.

 Want to seem a little bit smarter on your next account call?  Pre-plan the sales call.

Want to look like an expert and put your prospect a little more at ease?  Pre-plan your sales call and explain the details of the plan to your prospect up front and get natural human nature working in your favor.

Example: 

“Hello, Mr. Jones.  It is great getting a chance to meet with you today.  I have done some research, but if you don’t mind, I would like to ask you a few questions to get a better understanding.  Is that alright?”

 “Sure.”

 “Great.  I’ve got five or six basic questions that will fill in some gaps for me and give me a better understanding of your company.  That should take us about 15 minutes, depending upon your answers.  After that we should spend about 20 minutes drilling down into some specifics and identify a few areas where we might be able to help one another, leaving the balance of our time to wrap up any loose ends.  Do you have any questions before we get started?”

 When I was taught this it was called the Predict and Prove Method or the Sandwich Technique.  The objective is to predict the basics of what will occur in the meeting, prove your prediction by executing the meeting properly, and then following up at the end to confirm the fulfilled prediction with your prospect.  End result?  You look smarter and your client is not wondering where or when your sales odyssey will end.

 Got it?

 Good.  See you Monday.

 “I love it when a plan comes together!”

– Col. John “Hannibal” Smith (George Peppard) “The A-Team” 1983

How many hours each year do we keep new sales representatives cooped up in a room somewhere loading their minds with product information?

 Probably too many.

 The better question is how much time is spent teaching new sales representatives how to use that product knowledge?

 Would you like to field “smarter” sales representatives and help the middle 60% of your sales force close more opportunities?

 Then we need to look at how we build actionable product knowledge into our sales representatives in our efforts to get them ready for the field.

 Having sales minds loaded with product knowledge, in and of itself benefits no one, not even the “loaded” sales representatives.  It is in fact, a cost.  It is in the application of product knowledge to customer problems that value is realized for the owner, sales manager, sales representative and customer alike.

 In practical application, we have to load sales minds with product information, but we should spend at least an equal amount of time, if not twice that, training them how to wield the new weapon they have been given.

Moving From Product Knowledge to Actionable Product Knowledge

 Put your new sales representatives and the “middle 60%” of your existing sales representatives in role playing situations that force them to ask questions, a lot of questions, to uncover what issues a client might be facing.  Help them shape their questions and truly understand both the answers and the ramifications of those answers they get back.  Teach them questions that have answers tied to your products features.  Educate them with questions that will uncover problems the majority of your prospects have in common.  Teach them the questions that will help them locate problems your product solves that your competitor’s cannot.  Teach them the questions to ask when you are at a competitive disadvantage.

 Begin by teaching them a product feature, then teach the problems solved by that feature, and finally teach them the questions to ask to uncover those problems, if they exist, in your prospect’s business.

 Once the questions have been asked an equally important step is what to do with the valuable answers provided.  Show the sales representatives how to turn those answers and the problems those answers uncovered, into creative solutions built with your products and services with role play.  In the advanced form of this training, add time, budget, and political constraints they have to work around.

 Write case studies on your past performance, good and bad if you can stomach it, to help your sales representatives see real problems your company has identified and real solutions you have developed in the past.

 To keep your training relevant, have your new sales people travel with your Top 20% on new sales calls with the express objective of writing down questions they hear and the answers provided.  Review the trainee’s notes with the sales veteran’s perspective to make sure the new sales rep understood the conversation and was able to accurately translate what he heard.  Incorporate anything new and fresh into the ongoing training program.

 There is no value in being a talking brochure.  That ship has sailed.  No one cares what your product can do; they only care what your product can do for them.  Talking about features and benefits with a prospect just comes across as noise if the features/benefits are not relevant to his situation.  Smart questions bring clarity.  Clarity allows for accurate custom tailored solutions designed to solve specific client problems and answer the biggest unspoken question your buyer has, “What’s in it for me?”

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Remember when you only had to find and fill a Need to get a sale?

 Remember the good ol’ days when the sun was shining and everyone including our clients were augmenting their budgets with bags full of cash that randomly fell out of the backs of garbage trucks, freely spending bucket loads of money on big, medium and small needs alike? 

Me either, but don’t tell the new guys.

Today, clients aren’t spending their money so freely and sales are down, but the good news is we are saving a lot of money on printer ink because these forecasts are just so much shorter.  Apparently the majority of our clients do not have any needs that need filling right now, so what is an enterprising Sales Representative to do?

 Stop looking for needs.  Start looking for agony with flaming critical, heart ripping consequences.

 Corporations are the legal equivalent of people, so if it helps, look at them that way to get a better understanding of how to approach them.  Think “injury” here.  

You can live without a Band-Aid, it may not be as neat and tidy, but you can live.  Think bigger.  Start looking for companies in Intensive Care Units, needing your product in order to survive.  Those needs will get addressed, because if they don’t fix them, they die or face catastrophic game changing consequences.

 “But Val, I sell fly swatters, if they don’t buy my product the worst thing that happens is there are a few more flies buzzing around, how does that help me?”

 Maybe you change your message from “Get rid of an annoying pest” to “Avoid diseases that flies transfer from dung heaps and decaying matter to your food that can lead to kidney failure in young children, seizures in toddlers, or in some cases, death*.”

 If your customer’s are not buying, it is because the need your product is filling is not a real or percieved priority right now.  Change the priority, change their perception, find a client with a bigger need you can fill, or find something else to sell.    

Want another example?  Look at what Kellogg is doing to reposition Mini-Wheats.

If you are stuck and can’t think of any deeper problems, add a comment and I will give you my best ideas, otherwise watch for a post in the near future that will detail a step by step process to help you find those deeper problems.   

*I am not making this stuff up.  Read Diseases from House Flies.