Marketing
Sales Training--Fact or Fraud?by Robert Ayrer
A contractor turned consultant was invited to sit on a committee for a national association related to the building industry, to help them develop an industry sales training program. Everyone in the industry agreed that margins were not where they should be and that the sales people didn't really know what they were doing as far as selling skills were concerned. The industry has a long history of low margins and poorly performing sales people who perpetuate the "low bidder" myth.
It soon became clear that they were creating a camel (that's a horse designed by a committee). All sorts of political pressures were exerted by people who had no expertise in developing a sales program, curriculum design, or even implementing an effective program themselves. It became an ego showcase for the biggest fish in the association.
When the performance criteria was finally developed, the consultant resigned from the committee so as to be able to bid on the project without conflicting responsibilities. When the final interviews were held for possible candidates for delivering a program, our guy was in a room with three other bidders to make a presentation to the managing board of the association.
Each of the competitors took the floor and extolled their long association with the industry and their vast experience in working with companies familiar to all. They talked about how their programs would deliver the goods and train sales people. And then it was our guy's turn.
In a former life, he was a contractor and around the building industry for over 30 years selling to the same markets and customers as the association members. After giving his credentials to establish credibility, he asked the competitors a simple question; "If you have been working with the industry for so long, and done so well, why is the selling culture of the industry so bad?" "Gentlemen," he said, "More of what hasn't worked in the past still won't work! It is time to stop treating the symptom and start correcting the cause of non-performance."
That contractor turned consultant was me, Bob Ayrer.
In an article in the San Francisco Business Journal I was quoted as saying, "Most claims of success by sales trainers are a fraud." Sales trainers are like roosters taking credit for the dawn. They crow about the effectiveness of their workshops when, in fact, there is virtually no way to substantiate their claims.
If you think sales training is effective, take a look at the high rate of failure and the cost of attrition. If the traditional sales training is working so well, why do we lose so many sales people? How about the hidden costs of the underachievers who have gone to workshop after seminar and are still limp along just above the "firing line." Take the difference between the poor performers and the average of the good performers and multiply that dollar figure by your gross margin -- that is the real cost of carrying a poor performer!
Wowsers! I can hear you now -- rationalizing the dollars you've thrown away on some brash guru with the latest "secret" of selling that promised you that knock-your-socks-off seminar. "We got earned value from the workshop!" "Everyone came back from the workshop 'motivated' and full of enthusiasm." Blah, blah, blah.
Most sales training is done because management doesn't know what else to do to improve performance! Wake up! Come to the party! More of what doesn't work still doesn't work!
"But," you say, "we've got a young sales staff who don't know the fundamentals." That may be true, and they may get some skills and technique training that will help somewhat, but if you don't correct the underlying causes of nonperformance, they too will become tomorrow's underachievers. You will fire some and tolerate others, and the cycle goes on. Peter Schutz, former CEO of Porsche AG of Stuttgart, Germany, says, "You can't clean up a whore house by firing the piano player!" You may get a better piano player but it ain't much of an improvement.
How do you make sales training work? First you must have the required machinery[1] in place to make it work. Yelling at the sales people, sending them to seminars, bringing in the latest wizard, or replacing them and trading a boot for a shoe, will only get marginal improvement at best.
What kind of business machinery do you need? You need a selling process -- a protocol; a standardized, systematic way of selling that everyone understands and practices. That's not the same thing as techniques and "cute" stuff presented at seminars. You will also need a regular coaching schedule to turn knowledge into skill. You will need a strategic planning process for the sales people to create S.M.A.R.T. personal plans -- Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Reality-based and Timely action plans.
Then you need an effective reporting system that measures and monitors the right things if you are to manage the selling protocols and activity -- not the typical "gotcha" reporting of mere activity. You will need a recognition and reward system that recognizes the achievement of the strategic plan and compensates the results.
Add to that a constructive review process that periodically matches actual with the planned so as to takes the right corrective action, and you've got the machinery in place. You can now take the selling information learned in workshops and seminars and convert it into behavioral skills, and eventually into sales.
Wait a minute, I can hear it. There you go again, "I've already got a reporting system. I've already got a planning system, etc. etc. etc." My friend, you can go to a computer superstore and buy perfectly good components, but if they were not designed to work together, you won't have a computer. Sure, you'll have a bunch of good parts -- but good parts are not enough.
What happens all too often in a sales program is that a bit is taken from here, and a piece is taken from there, and another part from somewhere else. They're jumbled together, but they weren't engineered to work together and they don't produce the ultimate product -- a top performing sales person.
What are you left with? No measurable process to manage; no definable skill/objective matrix to coach; no solid base for corrective action when things don't go right. What you're left with is dismal sales figures -- the results from not having the right components in your sales machine. The month end numbers come out and you run around telling everyone that they "gotta do better."
Stop trying to manage a sales organization by last month's results and instead, get control of the process to change next months results. When trying to manage by last month's results you should think of what the total quality guys taught us, "Even an Iowa pig farmer knows that you can't fatten a pig by just weighing it."
Start building your "sales machine" and start getting the performance you wanted when you hired that entertainer.
[1] "The organization of the powers of any complex body"-- Doubleday Dictionary
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Bob Ayrer, President of REA Performance Consultants, is a consultant, speaker & trainer specializing in driving up revenue, increasing market share & margins. His FUTURE$ELL program is an internationally proven program for building effective sales organiz
