If you are considering investing in Sales Training in hopes of growing your Sales, please save your time and money.

Throughout my career as a salesperson, manager, corporate executive and entrepreneur, I have participated in dozens of well-known sales training programs.  I have run six businesses with great sales teams.  For the last 12 years, I have owned and directed a successful Sales Development company that has helped hundreds of excellent companies to build consistent, scalable, world-class sales teams.  I’ve created many training programs and have experienced sales training as a student, creator, teacher, and coach.  I have personally trained thousands of salespeople and sales managers.

I am writing to tell you that sales training programs rarely produce desired results. 

So whenever a business leader contacts me to ask if we can train their sales team, I ask them:

“What results are you expecting from training your salespeople and sales managers?”

Companies invest millions every year in sales training.  Some want to improve skills.  Some seek to educate.  Some feel an obligation to provide training.  Some leaders hope to improve morale.  Others just wish to feel good about making training available. 

Most provide sales training in hopes that it will improve top line results. 

These are all reasonable thoughts and objectives.  Unfortunately, training alone almost always inspires hope but typically produces very disappointing outcomes.   And with very good reason…

Most salespeople and managers, especially “experienced” ones, hate to leave their comfort zone. 

So the primary objective of training salespeople should be to change your salespeople.  This single issue will determine success or failure.  In order to produce real, quantifiable results, your salespeople must:

• Change their Beliefs & Attitudes
• Change their Strategies
• Change their Behaviors
• Change their Tactics

And unless they change, their beliefs, strategies, behaviors, tactics and results will not change.  Another waste of time and money…

Many large corporations believe they have internal resources such as trainers, sales managers, HR experts to provide training.  They may even remove their “best” salespeople from the field for this purpose.  They purchase train-the-trainer programs, have companies develop curriculums for them, and deploy their own personnel to attempt to train.  If they measure results by education, obligation, morale and feelings, these programs may achieve their goal.  However, if they expect to see results in the form of improvements in revenues, market share, new customers, or profit (all by-products of changing their salespeople’s behaviors and activities), they will fail.  These failures often come at enormous expense in time, money and lost opportunities.

To change a sales professional, a trainer must be able to do much more than recite a script, teach curriculums, demonstrate strategies & tactics and perform role plays.  Effective sales trainers must possess competencies far beyond selling skills and training.  There are common, recurrent, underlying reasons why salespeople behave as they do– why they only do what’s comfortable versus doing what their employer needs them to do.  In the absence of this understanding, all training will go for naught.  

These hidden insights can be uncovered quickly by using an effective sales force evaluation instrument.  But trainers must be able to go further than understanding the beliefs, self-talk and sales specific weaknesses that prevent salespeople from consistently doing what they should.  They must also be able to get salespeople to understand that their lack of success and inability to execute a plan and process has more to do with those hidden weaknesses than from not having the right strategy or tactic. 

An effective trainer must also understand how to help people systematically eradicate their weaknesses.  So a stand-alone training program, or even multiple programs offered over the course of a year, will almost always fail.  Salespeople must be changed via consistency in training and coaching, several times per month for at least six months.  Overcoming long-held weaknesses and head-trash requires as much attention as strategies and tactics.  Even then, if sales management has not been trained to provide effective coaching and hold salespeople accountable to these changes, it still won’t work!

So why does so much training not achieve the desired result? 

• The wrong people are delivering the training.
• The participant’s trainability, coachability and hidden weaknesses are not assessed in advance.
• There is not enough reinforcement.
• Salespeople sense a lack of true commitment or support on the part of management.  They sense that management will continue to tolerate their mediocrity. 
• The message hasn’t been delivered holistically, with enough frequency in the context of a congruent Sales and Sales Management development program.

  Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2010.   All Rights Reserved.

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Every week, I hear from business owners who are frustrated in the quality of the sales forecasts presented to them by their salespeople and sales managers.   In fact, the situation is getting worse and is exacerbated by the slowness of the economic recovery and the lackluster performance of mediocre salespeople.

I’m a big believer in the power of optimism and positive thinking, but there is absolutely no place for optimism when it comes to forecasting new sales.

If you are having difficulty believing in the quality (or quantity) of the sales projections you receive each month, it is likely that whoever is doing the forecasting is missing some very fundamental information.   Fortunately, there is a straightforward remedy to fixing this situation. 

For starters, a salesperson should never forecast a piece of business if he/she does not have a commitment to purchase from the Real Decision Maker (RDM) and crystal clear answers to the following questions (at a minimum):

• Does the RDM perceive a need?
• Is he/she willing to fix it?
• Do we really have a clear understanding of why the RDM must act now? (hint:  without urgency derived from personal pain, don’t hold your breath…)

• What is so great/special about us in the eyes of the RDM? (besides the fact that we think we’re the best)
• Does the RDM trust us more than our competition?
• Exactly how much money is available to spend and by when?

In addition, you will want to be sure that your salesperson has been identified to be the Most Valuable Player – a differentiated trusted advisor who truly rises above a field of smooth talkers and peddlers. 

Finally, never accept assumptions.  If any assumptions have been made, have your salesperson go back and verify them to be facts.   Checking assumptions is one of the most critical areas where real sales work resides.  If you have an existing salesperson that continues to accept stories for truths and refuses to verify that their assumptions are indeed facts, I would recommend that you find a replacement.

The steps above will go a long way to improving your forecasts.

To request a comprehensive checklist to eliminate all surprises from your sales projections, email GrowMySales@Zthree.com and write “Improve My Forecasts” in the Subject Line.

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2010.   All Rights Reserved.

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If your salespeople are like most, they love to do things that allow them to:

• live inside their comfort zone
• feel like experts
• have fun
• feel in control
• feel smart or important
• avoid rejection

In order to accomplish this, they choose to spend their time:

• talking about your company
• talking about themselves
• giving demos
• presenting
• burning up company resources
• dropping names
• creating and offering proposals (often multiple times to the same prospect!)
• offering references

Unfortunately, these behaviors will cost you big bucks, especially when deployed prematurely. 

Premature Satisfaction will never:

• serve to build trust
• accelerate sales cycles
• create positive differentiation
• uncover the compelling reasons that a decision maker would buy
• help one discover if or when they might do business with your company 

To worsen things, most salespeople just can’t wait to begin wasting time with Satisfaction as early as possible in the sales cycle in order to “feel the love”.  If you are still wondering if members of your sales team might be satisfying prematurely, evidence will reside in the reliability and believe-ability of your monthly sales forecasts. 

To improve your effectiveness and revenues, you need to ask your salespeople to immediately:

• take a step back to breath deep – haste makes waste
• commit to being trustworthy and sincerely interested
• focus upon understanding personal reasons for buying
• commit to becoming infinitely curious
• care
• ask more questions than everyone else
• ask more insightful questions than everyone else
• ask tougher questions than everyone else
• listen actively
• be authentic
• never make assumptions
• commit to continuous improvement in all of the above
• master the psychology of cooperation versus the manipulation of traditional selling

For further help or to request a simple UnCommon Sense Sales Upgrade checklist, click here.

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2010.   All Rights Reserved.

Bookmark the CEO Success Blog!

If your salespeople are like most, they love to do things that allow them to:

• live inside their comfort zone
• feel like experts
• have fun
• feel in control
• feel smart or important
• avoid rejection

In order to accomplish this, they choose to spend their time:

• talking about your company
• talking about themselves
• giving demos
• presenting
• burning up company resources
• dropping names
• creating and offering proposals (often multiple times to the same prospect!)
• offering references

Unfortunately, these behaviors will cost you big bucks, especially when deployed prematurely. 

Premature Satisfaction will never:

• serve to build trust
• accelerate sales cycles
• create positive differentiation
• uncover the compelling reasons that a decision maker would buy
• help one discover if or when they might do business with your company. 

To worsen things, most salespeople just can’t wait to begin wasting time with Satisfaction as early as possible in the sales cycle in order to “feel the love”.  If you are still wondering if members of your sales team might be satisfying prematurely, evidence will reside in the reliability and believe-ability of your monthly sales forecasts. 

To improve your effectiveness and revenues, you need to ask your salespeople to immediately:

• take a step back to breath deep – haste makes waste
• commit to being trustworthy and sincerely interested
• focus upon understanding personal reasons for buying
• commit to becoming infinitely curious
• care
• ask more questions than everyone else
• ask more insightful questions than everyone else
• ask tougher questions than everyone else
• listen actively
• be authentic
• never make assumptions
• commit to continuous improvement in all of the above
• master the psychology of cooperation versus the manipulation of traditional selling

For further help or to request a simple UnCommon Sense Sales Upgrade checklist, click here.

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2010.   All Rights Reserved.

Bookmark the CEO Success Blog!

All behavior is made up of the following three components: 

• What we do
• What we think
• What we feel

Did you ever notice that doing and thinking are always expressed as verbs, like “exercising” or “considering”, but that feelings are typically expressed as adjectives, like “frustrated’ or nouns, like “depression”.

Most of us believe that we choose our actions.  Some believe that we choose our thoughts.  Surprisingly few people believe that we choose our feelings.

A couple questions to consider:

1. Do feelings happen to us, or do we choose them?

2. Can using better words (in our self-talk) positively affect our behavior (and ultimately our level of success and happiness)?

A feeling is a response to a stimulus.  If we are responsible (response-able) human beings, one can argue that we should each be able to always choose our responses.  For most people, managing their feelings is tougher than it sounds.

In fact, choosing our feelings is tougher than choosing our actions, but we can control them if we know how.   How we act directly affects how we think, which directly affects how we feel.  So if we want feel better, start by acting in way that makes us feel better.     

Additionally, we can dramatically affect how we act, think and feel by using empowering conversation with ourselves.  We all talk to ourselves all day long (both consciously and sub-consciously).  So why not make our conversation a positive one?

If you are unusually busy, are you “overwhelmed” or “in-demand”?

The next time something or someone “makes you angry”, would your behavior improve if you told yourself you were “angering”?   

Would you act or feel differently if you were “frustrating” over a situation rather than being “frustrated” by a situation?

In each the examples above, the former conversation is that of a slave (someone who is response-unable).  The latter self-talk is one of someone in control of his/her thoughts and feelings.

The conversation that you have with yourself is the most important conversation that you will have today (and every other day).  Begin to pay attention to your self-talk.  Replace all the slave-talk with power-talk and pay attention to the effect this new conversation has on your behavior.

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2010.   All Rights Reserved.

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