Customers, salespeople best guides on training

In the old days if you wanted some sales training you simply rang up the Dale Carnegie rep, ordered a case of Norman Vincent Peale books, bought a Tom Hopkins 8-track or waited for Zig Ziglar to hit town.

It’s not so easy anymore.

How does one pick the right sales training course? The first step is to get a clear picture of who’s really running your asylum. If you’re the boss, you’ll hate to hear this: It ain’t you. According to your customers, your salespeople run the company, and they either do it well or they do it poorly. They attract business to your company or they run it off.

In fact, your customers likely know more of the truth about your company than you do because your salespeople tell them, directly or indirectly. If you want to know what’s really going on, good and bad, ask your customers. Ergo, if you want to know what kind of sales training your salespeople need, get your customers to tell you.

While you’re at it, talk to some of your noncustomers. They know for sure what’s wrong. They might not know the names of sales training programs, but they can point you in the direction the training should take.

So can your own salespeople. Ask them to help find the right training program. Here’s what happens when you include them:

• They’ll learn more from the training when they’re included in the search process. Never forget, if you pick the sales training course, your salespeople won’t like it. Oh, a few will suck up and say they do, but they’ll be lying. Salespeople don’t learn much when sales training is foisted upon them. They spend most of the time mentally sabotaging the new material, or fantasizing about Jessica Simpson.

• Your salespeople know more about their own weaknesses than you’ll ever know, so, as they look at the available courses, they tend to pick materials that answer their needs.

A word of caution: Don’t count on your sales manager to pick out good sales training material. Deep down, every sales manager worth his or her salt looks at sales training as competition. Odds are, the act of acquiring sales training probably means your sales manager isn’t getting the job done anyway. So, if you think that sales managers want sales training that works, think again.

I’ll likely be assassinated for saying this, but in the real world, sales managers cannot stomach seeing sales improve as a result of outside sales training. Before you spend thousands of dollars for a sales training course picked by your sales manager, get yourself a new car or take an expensive vacation. In the end, you’ll get more out of it.

However, if after reading this far you still want a sales training program, look for the following:

• A system. There are bunches of proven sales training courses taught by professional trainers who come in from the outside. The best of the lot will teach your salespeople a system that, if followed, will work well and increase your sales. The system, whatever it is, works best when sales efforts are measured by activity, not dollars sold.

Any good system will provide a simple checks-and-balances process that will let you evaluate the results whenever you wish.

• Skills. Good sales training should elevate the skills of your sellers. If your salespeople are trained well on what to say, your sales will grow. Buy training that focuses on skill development.

Note: Be wary of motivation or time-management training. Motivation is a concept primarily touted by people who command outrageous fees to tell us it’s important. Let me manage the activities of under-motivated sellers with high skills, and I’ll beat the highly motivated sellers with low skills every time. The key is staying on top of activity.

When word gets out that you’re shopping for sales training, your mailbox will mysteriously brim with training brochures and your phone will commence ringing like the phone bank at the Ozarks Public Television teleauction. It’ll be calls from people trying to sell you sales training.

It just takes a single drop of blood to drive circling sharks into frenzy.

Hint: When you talk with these people, don’t buy from anyone who uses any of the following words: quintessence, archetype or exemplar. If you hear “paradigm,” hang up and immediately de-list your phone number. These people will only dumbfound your sellers, who are already confused enough.

And finally, buy your sales manager a management course. But, let him or her pick it out.

Bob May is former managing partner of five local radio properties and is now engaged in the publishing of large-print phone directories in about 50 small towns in southwest Missouri.