subject: Traditional Sales Training Programs Do Not Work [print this page] Imagine you can outperform your competition by 100% each year. With the best sales training program you can increase revenues, increase your income and attain global domination. Just attend any one of the hundreds of sales training programs out there and you can become a superstar. The market is filled with successful sales training companies so logic dictates they must be helping salespeople like you.
Wake up, wipe the drool from your face, and say hi to reality. Realtys been sitting there all along and you never noticed it. In the real world, neither sales training programs, nor expensive sales trainers, nor any form of sales training that is farmed out to a so-called expert will make you great. If you want to become great you need to know how to train yourself. Yes. You train yourself.
This isnt just a matter of attending a seminar or listening to CDs in your car. Its a matter of applying what you learn every day. We are not saying you are not intelligent enough to come up with your own ideas, or that you may even have some good pointers regarding sales. However, its not a matter of sales tips its a matter of engagement and involvement. Sales training is your responsibility and you need to own it.
The cost of not developing your selling skills is staggering. Like any salesperson, you are regularly betting your livelihood on the ability to make sales: ahead of budget, ahead of schedule, on the heads of your competition. And yet most salespeople in most companies dont get any better. They dont really do what theyre supposed to do. They dont really sell what theyre supposed to sell. They only think they are getting better because they keep attending sales courses put on by someone else.
Thats because even the smartest salespeople subscribe to the most dangerous sales myth: sales training can be done by someone else. What are ya, nuts? Sales is your lifeblood. If you stop selling you will suffocate and die. If you can train yourself, youre well on the way to achieving real sales success. But youre building a base camp on Mt. Delusional to think that sales training is not your responsibility.
The company you work for isnt a products company. The company you work for isnt a technology company. The company you work for isnt a services company. The company you work for is a human company selling products, technology or services. If you cant sell you will simply fade into oblivion.
Who decides whether sales training will be successful? Start by crossing the sales trainer, the sales seminar or the sales book off the list. You have the only vote. If you want it to, it will. If you dont, it wont. You decide. You can only deride or accuse the trainer if you honestly, objectively, try the trainers material and you get nothing from it.
Sales training is about creating ongoing sales training programs that will increase your skill sets, increase your desire to sell, change your behaviors and in the end give you results. This means increased sales. It is not an event that can happen once and then discarded or forgotten. That is a seminar. If you fail to create a Commitment to Learning whereas you believe in continuous self-improvement, you will have created a process to keep selling the same way over and over again.
When they decide they want to get better at selling, most salespeople make the most common mistake: they sign up for and attend a seminar. Lets look at what happens at a sales seminar. You show up to the heavily promoted sales seminar. You sit through eight hours of high-energy training to answer all of your burning questions, mainly, How do I become a sales superstar? Like a monk in an ancient monastery you put your quill to paper and guard it like a zealot holding on to the holy scroll of sales secrets.
The next day you arrive early in the office, hyped up on bad coffee with every intention of using the new secrets you learned in the seminar. As the morning starts, the overwhelming load of paperwork, weekly sales reports, customer complaints and e-mails creates the perfect storm, leaving you swamped and fighting to stay above water.
Why do salespeople do this? Because theyre human. The discipline to prepare to win is far more important than the discipline to win. The discipline to lose is the far easier path of all three. Winning in sales is not about showing up to a seminar. It is about training yourself and learning on a regular, daily basis. Daily. The best athletes in the world spend far more time practicing then they actually play. We watch in awe as they enact their feats of glory. We dont see them in a pool at four in the morning. We dont see them high jumping a bar at 7 at night in sweltering summer heat.
When we look at salespeople we constantly ask, why are these salespeople not learning? One big reason: learning is usually seen as a burden. Its seen as one more thing a salesperson must do as part of the mutating virus that is their typical day. But learning isnt a burden. Its a benefit. If you see it any other way, youre screwed.
Learning is different than selling. Selling is an action that you do to make money today. Learning is a process that you go through to make sure you can make more money tomorrow. Most people will take today over tomorrow. Its really as simple as that. Which will you choose?
If you want to become better at sales you need to take ownership of your training. You cant just attend a seminar and let someone else train you for a day. You cant just buy a book, read it and hope the lesson gets absorbed. You need to commit to train yourself.
The only way to increase your sales success is to make yourself better. Your commitment to learning will define what you do to survive and prosper in your company. If you do not commit to learning and training yourself, you will not succeed.
