Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

You can’t expect people to change their behavior in a hundred different ways - ways that most sales training companies, seminars, personality assessments, workshops etc. suggest. You have to narrow it down to the most critical things to learn. In addition, those “things” have to be skills. They can’t be motivational nostrums or personality traits. Believe me, you don’t have the time—and nobody has the ability—to reconfigure personalities. Skills, however, are learnable, teachable and measurable.

If we can’t change salespeople in a hundred different ways, what are the critical skills to teach and how many are there?

1990年,我们开始我们的任务找到的技能s that make the most difference in improving sales performance. In 1995, we developed the instruments that measure skill acquisition and skill application. By comparing skill improvement and sales-performance improvement attributable to specific skills, we were able to identify the most impactful skills. Five stood head and shoulders above the rest. We now call them the Five Critical Selling Skills:

1.Managing the Buyer/Seller Relationship:When sellers understand the series and sequence of minor decisions that buyers go through when making a major decision, and they skillfully match their sales process with the buyer’s decision-making process, success rates improve dramatically.

2.Sales Call Planning:What is your Commitment Objective for this sales call? Failure to have a Commitment Objective is the most frequent mistake made by salespeople. What is your questioning plan for the call? What’s your Company Story? Poor planning skills often result from the lack of a clearly defined sales process to follow.

3.Questioning Skills:The impact of poor questioning skills is horrendous. Eighty-six percent of salespeople ask the wrong types of questions. Even more fail to prepare a solid game plan for questioning. The Question is the number one tool in every salesperson’s kit. Unfortunately, it’s either used improperly or it’s rusty.

4.Presentation Skills:Most salespeople think that they are fantastic presenters. They can spew large quantities of data about their products. The problem is, customers don’t want that. They want you to zero in on specific solutions based on their unique needs for your product or service.

5.Gaining Commitment:大多数销售人员都认为,这是他们的技能most need to improve. If a salesperson is not good at gaining commitment, why is he or she on anyone’s payroll? Yet research shows that 62 percent of salespeople don’t ask for commitment on sales calls. Regardless of whether salespeople are acting in a Hunter or Farmer role, these are the skills upon which sales training must focus on if it is to have a significant impact. When these specific skills are learned and applied, more performance improvement occurs than with any other intervention.

Transferring the Skills:

ES Research, figure that roughly 85% of sales training companies fail to produce meaningful performance gains. The reason most sales training fails is because the skills covered in class or online don’t transfer into the field. What is taught doesn’t get used. Why would any company want to waste training dollars and everyone’s time on training that doesn’t have a proper method for transfer? If this were a simple problem to solve, the failure rate wouldn’t be so high. In a nutshell, here is what we know for sure:

1. Transfer requires multiple tools, and they need to work together in a system. Each tool needs to have an appropriate level of measurement and management accountability attached to it. (If you want to see such a system, look me up on my profile.)

2. A big part of the problem is tied to what I discussed earlier: a.) Poorly documented sales processes are hard to reinforce and transfer. You can’t reinforce what you can’t see; b.) You need to focus on the right skills, those that have the greatest impact on performance. When salespeople see tangible improvement, they are eager to apply what they’ve learned.

3. The process of transfer is usually seen as something that you do after a training workshop (reinforcement). Wrong, wrong, wrong. The process of transfer begins before the workshop and permeates the entire learning process.

4. Motivation is a huge factor in the transfer process. Students have to want to practice the skills they are learning and to use them on the job. They need to be completely sold on the training. This sale is no different from any other sale. It has to be seen by the customer (in this case, the salesperson) as a solution to agreed-upon needs. The benefits of using and mastering the skills have to be perceived as far greater than the investment required. If salespeople don’t see this, transfer won’t happen.

if you want more info, just look me up on my profile.

I hope this has helped.

It depends on what you are selling. I live in the world of knowledge-based distribution. People selling technical products on an ongoing basis. There is no one time call, instead it is an ongoing relationship.

I believe sales skills are something that have to be developed, coached and mentored over a long period of time. The problem is very few sales managers take the time to think through a comprehensive program. I know this sounds self serving but I developed a program called the sales leadership subscription. It is an ongoing month by month plan which puts between 15-30 minutes of sales process training into the hands of the sales manager.

The sales manager then must reinforce the process and coach the salesteam on using them properly (I help with that too).

If a program is not available to you, the second most powerful tool is " role playing". Trust me when you mention role playing, salespeople will twist, turn and complain. But - in my 30 years of selling - it is the single most overlooked tool.

Mentoring surpasses all other methods. But choosing the wrong mentor (it's not about seniority) can be a disaster.

Michael

Dear faisal.ayoubii,

Ever made a cake?

Eggs, butter, milk, flour, dried fruit, sugar, and whatever else needs to go into the mixing bowl are all—as ingredients—great things to have.

一个d mixing the stuff, that's important too. And then there's the cake tin to pour the mix into (don't forget to grease it and line it!), and the pre-heated oven to bake it all in.

Then, 45 minutes or so later:

Cake! T'dah!

Only once it's come out of the oven does cake turn into golden brown yummyness! My granny used to say that if the cake was golden brown, it was done, but that if it was black and scorched,
it was buggered.

I think the same is true in sales training and marketing messages.
Here's why:

When it comes to sales training (or marketing messages), those group excercises, class room sessions, and room presentations are all great—to a point. They're the ingredients for your cake. And the mixing bowl and the oven.

But unless there's one key ingredient OUTSIDE the bowl—and an ingredient that's well-beaten into the mix, nothing rises in the oven. You can call that key ingredient whatever you want: mindset.

Focus.

Attitude.

Whatever.

But it all boils down to the same thing. In the same way that the cake ingredients have got to be mixed together, the people being trained have got to want to be trained.

Which means your mixing bowl, your ingredients, and your oven are all useless if you don't have the right baker.

The right baker is the KEY ingredient.

Without this person's love, attention to detail, and experience, the things that go into the cake tin can go in in all kinds of ways, but there's got to be some measure, there's got to be a watchful eye kept. All of which needs a baker, a pastry chef, someone who knows what the heck they're doing and who can DIRECT and INFLUENCE the end result to the betterment of the audience.

All of the nonsense that's talked about "leveraging core competencies:, it's just a fancy way of saying "how are we going to get people to do the things we want them to do with the skills they've got?"

For this, you need a great teacher. A grade "A" mentor. Someone to inspire, excite, educate, and inform your team. Whoever this person is, they've got to CAPTIVATE your sales team's attention, and they've got to HYPNOTIZE them with the DESIRE to become the leanest, most effective selling machines your company has ever produced.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Most sales training programs are based on learning short-term sales skills. But the best salespeople have long-term outlooks and sales strategies that focus on improving sales behaviors to achieve peak selling effectiveness. Without changing the behaviors, salespeople are likely to continue to struggle with the latest "tool/trick".