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COVERSTORY
What Gives?
Why so much of your training has produced so few results (and how to prevent it from happening next year)
One of the most common complaints that sales trainers get from both salespeople and their managers is that sales training in any form, whether via book, workshop, seminar or online course, has little or no impact for most of the men and women who complete the training. Unfortunately, their complaint is supported by a number of studies confirming that training does not change the behavior, attitudes or results of the vast majority of salespeople.
Where does the fault lie for this miserable return on investment? Should you blame the sales trainer? Is the content weak? Maybe the issue is with the teaching methods. Or just maybe, the real problem is with the salespeople themselves.
Blame can be affixed to all of the above. But there is a more basic issue that seems obvious but often is overlooked. Sales training is not simply an intellectual activity; by its very nature it demands behavior change. To be effective, sales training requires that negative or ineffective behaviors be replaced with positive or effective behaviors. Sales training has more in common with sports coaching than it does with academic teaching. It is action oriented. The lessons must be integrated into one’s behavior, not just filed away.
Changing behavior is different than absorbing information.
To be effective, sales training must be converted from information to behavior, and that can't be done in one hour or half a day or even a two- or three-day training session. It takes time. It takes repetition of action. It takes making and learning from mistakes. It requires the "student" be able to analyze performance, isolate mistakes and institute new behavior that corrects the mistake.
Most salespeople don't have the ability or the patience to implement the training, work through the issues, and hone the skills on their own. They need
help. They need an outside observer, a sounding board, an encourager, a disciplinarian. They need a coach.
Every athlete, from the youngest to the best player in the world, has a coach.
The coach performs a number of duties but the primary duty is to oversee behavior change. Teach information, yes. Discipline, yes. Encourage, yes. But all of those are supplements to the primary goal - behavior change.
Knowledge in sales is useless unless you use the knowledge, and that comes in the form of action, whether that action is instituting the referral generation process, dealing with those pesky objections, or closing the sale. Just as with an athlete, translating the information into action requires coaching.
If you want the sales training that your teams engage in to work -- that is, to instill positive behavior and eliminate negative behavior -- you must provide a coach. It may or may not be you.
More and more sales trainers include group or individual coaching in their corporate sales training proposals. Some trainers include "coaching the coach" segments wherein they train the management team how to be the team's coach.
If you're not going to back your training up with active coaching, you may as well save your money. Add coaching to your training mix, however, and
you'll see a significant change in your sales team's performance -- and in everyone's paycheck.
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Paul McCord is the founder of McCord Training (www.powerreferralselling.com) in
Midland, Texas.
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See also in "What's Next..."
Off-Sites Are Down, But Not Out
What Do Your Meetings Look Like?
See the Future By Helping to Set It
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