By: Barrett Riddleberger

For greater ROI from sales training, take fresh look at how selling is learned.

Shared: From your friends TechAutoCareers.com® the online resource for the Automotive Sales Consultant

There’s no greater return on investment (ROI) than new revenue, and in most organizations, increased selling is the fastest way to achieve this. Trainers have an opportunity to play one of the most important roles in making sales organizations more successful.

Too often this is a missed opportunity. Some organizations take the approach that sales professionals are born, not made. It’s assumed that building a sales team is a matter of finding “proven” salespeople, usually thought of as extroverts who need a lot of autonomy and good commissions. This is true to a certain extent, but if that’s how sales is perceived and how sales professionals are developed in your organization, a lot of potential is being lost.

There are three key issues that diminish the effectiveness of sales training curricula:

• No clearly defined sales process­—This is not initially the problem of the Training department, but it can make training irrelevant.

• Too much lecturing—Mastering a sales process is not easily taught. You learn it by doing.

• The curriculum is too broad—Go deep, not wide with sales training by keeping the focus on specific skills and then spending a lot of time practicing.

What’s the Sales Process?

If sales training is not delivering ROI, the Training department needs to sit down with the sales leaders and understand the sales process. Training can’t design the process, but it needs to understand it.

A great sales process is standardized, systematic, easy to learn and to apply. It’s a quantifiable set of activities that creates conditions for the exchange of goods and/or services that gives maximum benefit to two or more parties. Your procedure for booking sales should be customized to your business. It has to be up-to-date and it has to fit your product.

Elements of such a process include the functional structure of the Sales department—e.g., outside sales, inside sales, administration, leadership, and “who does what?” Do front-line sales reps cold call and set their own appointments? Or do they call on warm leads generated by telemarketers? Do sales reps process and fulfill orders or is this handed off to administrative personnel? What you train is contingent on these questions.

Then there are strategic considerations for the process that should align with the company goals and culture. What is a qualified prospect? How are leads developed? Where should salespeople NOT spend their time in order to be most productive?

In order to train salespeople so they will succeed, this process needs to be the basis. If it’s missing, you have different kind of teachable moment that may require a higher-level conversation with management about the need to define the sales process. Boundaries are important to maintain, but as a trainer, you can confidently say that outcomes will be better if all the members of the sales team can quickly and easily articulate its process.

Don’t Teach. Train.

Think of selling as “soft skills with an edge.”

In most enterprises, sales is a consultative, value-added process. Selling should make the prospect feel listened to and understood. So reps need to be astute in hearing what the prospect is asking for and be keen observers of behavior. They need empathy and self-awareness, while encyclopedic product knowledge goes without saying. The “edge” comes in actions such as closing; saying, “No”; responding to resistance; and the willingness to walk away when necessary.

This is not something that can be taught from a lectern. It has to be practiced. So an effective sales training looks more like a drama class than a math lecture. Cold calls, follow-up calls, initial meetings, asking questions, closing, and handling resistance all can be role-played. Selling is akin to theater in that the fundamentals are repetitive behaviors that need to be “called up” as real-life selling situations unfold.

It’s also a little bit like athletic training, in that you can’t drill too much. Trainees should leave the training session able to repeat a sales call like a perfectly executed basketball play: passing, dribbling, and taking a shot at just the right times.

It may bode well to structure your training curriculum to include experienced sales managers for parts of such role-plays, because as effective as your training may be, salespeople need continual coaching. By involving managers you can plant the seeds for sales leaders to reinforce the concepts weekly to ensure the training sticks.

Go Deep, Not Wide

Most traditional sales training tries to deliver too much information. When you try to cover as much ground as possible over several days, sales reps feel overwhelmed and leave the session ill-prepared for Monday morning. This kind of short-term knowledge transfer won’t build retention or affect the behavioral change described above.

Results improve when, instead of covering all elements of the sales process, you focus only on the essentials of what is going to be needed when the sales reps get back to work. Spend less time delivering knowledge and more time practicing the new knowledge. You’ll get far faster ROI with this kind of drill-down.

Break your training into smaller chunks, such as prospecting, qualifying, or presenting. Then go much deeper into each skill, with plenty of time for supervised practice. This way, reps will leave with the confidence to be productive and rehearsed.

Coaching Is a Great Follow-Up

Sales skills are shown to improve through on-the-job feedback in coaching sessions. For your firm’s sales curriculum, you may want to emphasize one-on-one coaching from sales leaders rather than advanced classroom sessions. Many firms can benefit from training sales managers to effectively coach their direct reports.

Conclusions

Sales training is best treated as an intensive and active rehearsal of the organization’s well-defined sales process. Selling skills are best learned through doing. Training should be treated as an opportunity to prepare sales reps through repetitive practice that makes the steps of the sales process easy to perform while still being attuned to the needs, wants, and resistance of prospects.

The curriculum for any sales training should be narrow in scope to allow more time for active role-play, observation, feedback, and mastery of essential skills. Follow-up coaching done in the field, during sales meetings or in the office can be more effective than additional classroom sessions.

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