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Improving Business to Business Selling
Effectiveness The Sales
Director’s Newsletter
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TRAINING
SALES PEOPLE IS A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY
Selling
coach Graham French argues that companies
routinely squander valuable budgets
with very little to show for it
I once had an MD who used to enjoy winding up his sales
managers by maintaining that sales training was a “waste of ***** time.... you
can either sell or you can’t” he liked to say.
He had the luxury of being able to deliver this level of poker-faced
sarcasm because we were actually one of the best trained sales forces in the
software and services industry.
That was some time ago and I now make my
living as an independent sales coach whose job it is to improve the selling
effectiveness of business-to-business sales teams. The MD may have been joking at the time, but
I’ve since developed the view that much of the sales training that is conducted
day-in, day-out is indeed a waste of time and money.
It seems that I’m not alone in holding this
view. Huthwaite Inc, a highly-respected
The good news for those of you now
calculating mentally how much money you may have inadvertently squandered in
the last few years is that Huthwaite believes that it is not all wasted… just
87% of it. It may be a surprising conclusion but one that resonates well with
my experience as a salesman, sales manager, sales director and now as a sales
coach.
That fact is most of the money, effort and
time that companies spend is on generic, formulaic “drive by” sales
training. You know the type - sales
trainers stand up in front the group and teach by talking to endless slides -
death by PowerPoint. This litany goes on for days only broken up by role-
playing sessions. Salespeople usually take part in the role play games with
gusto and determination. But the money would be better spent on a party for the
sales team. And that might produce
better results.
Here’s the reason. Huthwaite’s research showed that within a
month of a sales training course sales people typically had lost 87% of the new
skills they had learned. They had simply
forgotten. Outcome? No change in behaviour: no improvement in selling
effectiveness and no consequent improvement in sales performance. That means
that for every £1,000 most companies spend on sales training nearly £900 is
wasted.
So should we forget about developing our
sales people and just focus on hiring `sales superstars`? The latest CSO
Insights 2006 report on selling effectiveness says that most companies are
looking to increase their sales teams in 2006 and are mainly looking to hire
experienced salespeople. This won’t work. There aren’t enough of them to go
around. If it does happen, sales directors can expect increased voluntary
senior salesperson turnover this year. But that’s another topic.
Is it even worth trying to develop the skills
of our people? Of course it is. As John
Williams, former Senior VP, World-wide Operations at StorageTek, says
“I’m a firm believer that as a manager today
the most effective action you can take to deliver the biggest return is not any
of the usual suspects. It’s not
optimising back office processes. It is not fine tuning finance. It is not
about improving the quality of manufacturing. The biggest contribution will
come from increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales force.”
Williams knows what he’s talking about – he
grew sales at StorageTek over a four year period from $700 million to $2.2
billion – without adding a single extra sales person.
The reality is that better sales people with
an inferior offering do tend to win against less effective sales people with
the better products. And the good news is that studies show that there ARE more
effective ways of bringing about an improvement in sales performance than
traditional sales training.
Sustainable improvements in sales peoples’
behaviour can be achieved but to do so will require changes in the way
companies usually go about things. Success starts with five key techniques:
1.
Identify and understand what selling best practice looks like for their
particular business unit;
2.
Add to this internal best practice some fresh external ideas that work
well for other businesses;
3.
Gain the commitment of management to adopt the new approach;
4.
Run short workshops with the salespeople to explain, discuss and try
out the new best practice;
5.
Teach sales managers to effectively coach their people in the field.
`Sounds like it needs a lot of commitment and
effort and time, ` I can hear you saying, `and very expensive`…`not sure we are
ready for it`... `too much of a distraction`... `we haven’t got time to do it
this year`... `we’ve got incredibly tough targets to achieve.`
But moving through the above five stages will
require you to looks closely at your current techniques and re-evaluate the way
you sell. This can be tough. And you may
decide that you want to work with a specialist to help you face some painful
realities but then develop an integrated and highly specific training and
coaching programme to help you move forward.
This is likely to cost a little more in
external fees than buying-in conventional off-the-shelf sales training. But you will have a far better chance of
creating sustainable change in your sales peoples’ behaviour. And if it works and the sales force does step
up its effectiveness, the results will be more competitive wins, fewer no
decisions`, sales cycles shortened, and effort focussed on those opportunities
that have the best chance of closing. Overall, fewer resources spent winning
each piece of business and more business won.
That should more than pay for any extra investment.
But I don’t assume that everyone will buy
into this idea. Should someone in your
company propose spending, say, £20,000 on traditional training that will be
forgotten shortly, get them to calculate what 87% of that figure is. You could
have quite a party with that!
If you don’t fancy endless socialising but
would like to find out more about a newer, smarter and more business-specific
way to improve your team’s selling effectiveness and increase your competitive
edge, give me a call on….. I’d be pleased to talk with you.
If you would like a copy of my paper ‘Why Sales Managers Don’t Coach – Even Though They Think They Do’ please click here
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