Sales Training - What it Takes to Make a Sales Team
By Matt Berkley
Back in 1973, Sam Black didn’t have the luxury of formal sales training. Desperate for money to buy back possessions snatched from her apartment in a burglary, Black was thrown into her first sales job at a call center in New York pitching everything from TV Guide renewals to American Express Collectors Items. “I had to get everything back before my folks came in,” she laughs. “Back then, people who were 22 didn’t move back home.”
“The amount of training I had was minimal,” Black recalls. “I learned sales by osmosis. The four night classes that I attended weren’t really focused on sales or handling rejections. It was mostly based on a script.”
If you think that she would cite the experience as productive, perhaps even character building, you’d be wrong. For Black, there’s no plan worse than plunging into the deep end without a lesson. As the president/owner of Sam Black Consulting, Black offers advanced training courses to sales professionals around the globe. In today’s sales world, she says, “You have to give everybody a solid foundation of the core skills, which include voice, listening, needs-based selling, features and benefits, closing, offering the product, handling objections and re-closing.”
“A good sales staff is trained to specific ‘needs’ of the company,” says Tom Reilly, sales professional and owner of Tom Reilly Training. “Before you invest any money in training, you need to do a needs analysis,” he says. This analysis will tell you employee competency/skill levels and what needs to be developed. The needs should reflect the company’s objective, which along with the marketing, should be supported by the sales training. “For example,” Reilly explains. “If your company’s objective is to grow rapidly over the next few years and expand into different areas, then that will drive your training needs because you will be going out to cold call and bring in new business.”
Richard Hoerz, president of the Rubicon Institute, a locally based sales coaching firm, says that most business owners often back peddle by confusing sales training with product knowledge training. Not that product familiarity is unimportant, Hoerz says, but sales training should take a higher priority. This is often skewed by constant pressure from the marketing departments and business owners that emphasize product knowledge over selling skills. “A good salesperson can sell anything with a little bit of product knowledge,” Hoerz points out. “Learning selling skills is the hard part. I can teach product knowledge to anybody, but I can’t teach sales skills to everyone.”
According to Ken Stark, president/owner of Stark and Associates, Inc, product training is essential, but only to a certain degree. “Product knowledge has to complement how to sell something. If not, then salespeople who aren’t really comfortable selling go out and read product knowledge off and they think that’s selling.”
Regardless of what a business owner might think, hiring an outside sales coach is a good idea. “People need training; preferably from a coach,” Hoerz stresses. “If you expect a salesperson to be professional, they should have a coach and a trainer like any other professional would.” Owners looking to get the most out of any individual on their staff need to invest in long-term reinforcement programs, Hoerz believes. “Sales training is a lot like getting a master’s degree. If you don’t take the time to get the basics and then reinforce them, everything is going to get lost. People will fall back to their old habits in a couple of months.”
What’s the best way to spot a top-notch trainer? Check out their track record, for starters. “A question you should ask that tends to scare a lot of people in my business is, ‘Do you guarantee your work?’” says Reilly. “Another question might be ‘Is this person well schooled in instructional design?’” You’ll be much better off, Reilly points out, finding someone who is more than an individual with an opinion. They need to have some meat in their programs based on solid instructional design experience and applied knowledge, he says. Because of this, Reilly adds, business owners should avoid relying too much on the ramblings of strictly academic sales instructors. “You want someone who has a blend of the theoretical and the practical. You don’t want too much of one without some of the other.”
4 Steps To Proper Sales Training
David Hotle, teacher, trainer, business coach, and CEO of the Rubicon Institute, offers these four keys for building a successful sales force:
1. Commitment. “Before you begin to train salespeople, they need to be committed to your business. Completely. Particularly in a small business, salespeople should be committed to the extent that they see themselves an integral cog that makes a business go or not go. They need to be willing to invest extra time and effort to get themselves up to speed in training and knowledge of product and sales system. They have to be committed to learning about selling and committed to themselves to develop and grow.”
2. Have A System In Place. Business owners need a selling system the same as they would have a production system. You have to have an acquisition process—beyond simple marketing—that the salespeople will use in order to put money in the bank.
3. Continued Training. Sales training is an ongoing, never-ending, developmental process. That doesn’t mean you have a sales meeting every week. It means that there’s always coaching, mentoring, training, and supervision all working together.”
4. Owner Should Focus On Process. “Results will come if you focus on process. Trust the results.”
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