When Sales Training Isn’t Working

Nothing is more frustrating than investing the time to identify the need, design, develop, and deliver great sales training and then discover that sellers aren’t implementing what they learned when they get back to the field.

Whether you’re delivering product or soft skills training, participant time away from the job is expensive and your organization has a right to expect to see a sizeable return on their investment.

Executives and sales managers often lament that while they can quickly tell us how much they’ve spent on training their sellers in a given quarter or year, pointing to actual behavior changes and sales increases is not always as easy. Increase the value of your training by changing the way you think and plan for sustainable implementation.

Design and Develop:  Confirm with your stakeholder, the business value and observable behaviors the organization is expecting at the end of the training, then 3 and 6 months later. Are they looking for an increase in new client opportunities in the pipeline, reduced sales cycles, or more up-selling?

As training is designed and developed, use learning objectives and module goals as beacons to create the training content. Conceptualize and then validate exactly what it is you and the stakeholder expect from participants at defined milestones. Use those measurable behaviors as a yardstick. Hold the developing content and activities up against it to ensure their value.

Deliver: Tell sellers early exactly what’s expected of them by the end of the training. Show them the WIIFM, what’s in it for them, and how the improvement in their skills will directly impact their sales results, goal attainment, and pocket-book. Finally, tell them how their skills will be observed and measured by their manager.

Today’s adult learners are sophisticated, constantly seeking short cuts to get results quicker. We’ve found that compulsory learning paths don’t always work, especially with sellers. Learners will implement only those skills and tools that make them more productive, faster. We’re amazed at the success achieved when we involve learners as much as possible in the interpretation and application of the content. They feel a sense of ownership and want to try new techniques. Be flexible in your delivery even if it means diverging from the path you’ve defined. Let them share their own experiences and hardships and apply them to the techniques you’re training.

Use the measurable sales behaviors as the goal you’re all striving for. For example, if you’re focused on moving a solution sales force to a consultative approach, measure behaviors like executive meetings and quarterly business reviews.

Evaluation: Involve the managers and team leads who’ll be supporting and helping implement the desired sales behavior changes throughout the design, development and delivery process. They’re busy people who’re often challenged when told it ‘s their responsibility to “coach” their teams. Managers that we repeatedly work with expect us to interview them early in the training process to clearly understand their team’s current – and desired behaviors. With a clear picture of how the sales training is designed to help reach the measurable business goals, they buy-in early and support participation from pre-class prep work, through delivery, and into implementation. 

A component of our classes that managers now look for and appreciate is a checklist of content covered paired with expected, observable sales behavior, and desired business results. As managers discover what behaviors to look for and have available resources from the class content and activities, they’re ready to “coach” at every possible opportunity from listening in on a sales call to participating in an on-site demonstration or assisting in negotiating the final contracts.

Waiting until after sales training has been delivered to consider how it will be implemented and who’ll be responsible for supporting it doesn’t work. Insert the implementation conversation earlier in the instruction design process and watch how quickly sales behaviors change.

The Hidden Path to Sales Success

In my twenty plus years of educating sales people, I have encountered tens of thousands of sales people, and worked with literally hundreds of sales organizations. The vast majority of them want to do better.  They want the benefits of greater success:  Increased income, greater respect from their peers and managers, and increased self-confidence.

Yet, the vast majority of them remain at a level best described as “ordinary.”  They never make the transition to being a true master of their craft. In spite of their desire to excel, few do. 

The reason, for the overwhelming majority of sales people, is that they take the wrong path to sales success.  Only a few discover the hidden path to sales success.

Let me illustrate. I have had these kinds of conversations in almost every training session that I have done:  A sales person is concerned about an issue in one of his accounts.  It could be that he can’t unseat the competition, or that he’s at risk of losing the business, or that he can’t gain an audience with the right people, or that he’s constantly asked to reduce his price, etc.  The list is without limit.  There are as many variations on the theme as there are sales people.

But, while the specifics vary, they almost always revolve around the same themes.  There is a problem in an account.  Someone won’t do what the sales person wants them to do.  The question, in one form or another, is always, “How do I get them to do what I want them to do?”  The focus is always on the account, the other people, the things outside of the sales person that he/she wants to influence. 

I don’t think I have ever had a sales person ask me in these encounters, “How can I change myself in such a way as to impact this situation? ” And therein lies the problem.

As sales people, we almost exclusively focus on those things that exist outside of ourselves – the prospects, the customers, the politics, the products, the price, etc.  We focus on the externals.  And as long as we do that, we will be forever stymied in our desire to become exceptional performers. 

We will never reach our potential until we begin to focus inside – on changing and improving ourselves.  The hidden path to sales success is the “path less traveled,” the path that traverses the bumpy geography of self-growth and self-improvement – the inward path.

When we focus on self-growth and self-improvement, those changes that we make in ourselves naturally ooze out of us and impact the people and the world around us.  If we want to improve our results, we need to improve ourselves.

Here’s an example.  A sales person recently shared this scenario.  He has been trying to penetrate an account in which he had some business, but was a minor player.  One or two other competitors dominated the account.  He had difficulty even getting an opportunity to present his solutions.  He saw his problem as external – the politics, processes and personalities in this account.

I talked with him about his ability to nurture professional business relationships, to uncover hidden concerns and obstacles via effective questioning, to empathize with the key decision makers.  In other words, my conversation was about his competencies (internal) instead of the account’s specifics (externals).  If he could improve himself to the point where he was more competent at these sales fundamentals, he would be more effective in that account, and the problems he expressed would gradually decrease.

He saw the problem as existing outside of himself (external).  I saw the solution coming as a result of improving himself (internal).

As I reflect on the thousands of these kinds of conversations that I have had with sales people and sales leaders, I have concluded that the conversations almost always follow that pattern.  They present an external problem, and I reply with an internal solution.

The obvious question pops to the surface.  Kahle, is it you?  Am I so far outside of the mainstream of reality that I am misleading the people I’m supposed to be helping?

Honestly, I don’t think so.  The concept of reaching your fullest potential, of making your greatest mark on this world, by focusing internally instead of externally is a position that all of the world’s greatest thinkers, from King Solomon  thousands of years ago, to Mahatma Gandhi in more modern times, have espoused.  That concept lies at the heart of the world’s greatest religions, a key part of the world view of Jesus Christ and Buddha, for example. I’ll often share this quote from James Allen in my seminars:

“Men are often interested in improving their circumstance, but are unwilling to improve themselves, they therefore remain bound.”

Clearly, unequivocally, the path to achievement and fulfillment is an internal, not an external one.  What is true for our lives is true for our professions, and is true for our jobs as sales people.

Yet so few sales people understand that.  I’ve often shared this observation:  In any randomly selected group of twenty sales people, only one has spent $25 of his own money on his own improvement in the last 12 months.  Not coincidently, the same ratio is used to define the superstars of the profession.  Five percent (one of twenty) of the sales force produce approximately 50% of the sales. 

In a world of externally-focused colleagues and competitors, it is the one in twenty sales person who chooses the hidden path to excellence.  These are the people who understand this principal, and who consistently and willfully act on it.  They are the ones who buy the books, go to the seminars, listen to the audios, and watch the videos – all in a relentless quest to improve themselves, understanding that the only lasting path to excellence is the hidden path of internally focused self improvement.  And these are the people who inevitably rise to the top of the profession.

The same can be said of organizations.  Very few sales organizations understand that.  They expect their sales people to learn on the job, and look at investing in their development and improvement as a discretionary cost, rather than a fundamental strategic initiative.

Alas, that’s the world inhabited by the mass of sales organizations. They find a grab bag of reasons to not invest in their people:

•    they are too busy
•    they don’t want to spend the money
•    they know it all already
•    they would rather do it themselves
•    the time just isn’t right
•    if they improve their sales people, they will just go to the competition.
•    their people are too set in their ways to learn.

Pick the reason du jeur and come back next year to discover that another year has gone by without any significant investment in the skills and competencies of their people.  They select another reason from the list and use it to let another year go by.  And so it goes.  One year slips by, morphs into another, expands into decades and eventually deadens careers.  Focusing on the externals, they never come to grips with the real secret to sale success.

Study the leading companies in any industry and you’ll find that those who lead the industry are always those who most consistently invest in developing the skills and competencies of their people.