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| Shaken not stirred - the best sales training has two key ingredients |
This is one of my soapbox issues. I've blogged along similar lines before. As Neil Rackham says at the end of his famous book SPIN Selling:
"Start by picking just one behaviour to practise. Don't move on to the next until you're confident you've got the first behaviour right." *So this means that when teaching people new skills, you can’t expect them to learn and perfect more than one or two new things at a time.
But what do we typically do? We give our salespeople some sales skills training - with lots of different new skills to learn at the same time. Then in a different session, we give them some product knowledge training - with lots of different information to learn at the same time. Then we expect them to somehow piece all this together by themselves and turn it into an effective sales approach, or we rely on their managers to take the time to help them figure all this out.
The problem is, most sales managers either can’t or won’t coach their people, and in any case, most of the time they aren't fully aware of what their salespeople have been trained on, because they don’t have time to attend the training themselves.
And why is this? Most salespeople and sales managers are heavily incentivised to achieve short term sales outcomes, and unfortunately this often comes at the expense of long term effectiveness. It’s difficult to make the decision to take the time out to coach or be coached when your sales VP is breathing down your neck to hit your number for this quarter.
This is one of those timeless ironies of human behaviour – we orient our behaviour around short term goals and in doing so we stifle our ability to meet long term goals. Aesop spotted this 2,500 years ago when he wrote one of his most famous fables, The Goose and the Golden Egg.
How does this irony manifest itself in sales? Despite all the pressure to sell as much as possible this quarter, in most sales organisations, a large proportion of salespeople don’t hit their targets in the long term, because on a day-to-day basis they allow short term goals to take priority over investing in their long term effectiveness, and their managers are similarly disincentivised to invest in them.
Mr Rackham’s assertion certainly highlights best practice. Take the time to train and coach people thoroughly, step by step. But as long as most sales organisations continue to use short term sales incentives, sadly I think this approach isn't realistic in actual practice.
So what can we do about this? As sales enablement leaders, the least we can do is give salespeople a little extra help to apply what they have learned about selling (not just in the training we give them, but in their experience to date) to the new product training we are shoving down their throats. That means that giving someone a week of fun, inspiring, activity-driven sales skills training, followed by a week of PowerPoint-based product training, just won’t cut it.
You need to get all that product training into the sales training, or all that sales training into the product training. Either way, you have to do the two things together. This means sales enablement training that delivers all that new product knowledge in an activity-driven learning experience format that brings out the sales skills, old and new, and applies them immediately to what people are learning about the products they will sell, and the new customers they will sell to.
Marsha Speck, a Professor at Arizona State University, summarises the key principles of learning at work in Best Practice in Professional Development for Sustained Educational Change (1996). For me this is how it applies to salespeople:
- Sales training must be applied to the real world - with real products and real customers
- Salespeople need direct, concrete experiences in which they apply their learning to reality
- Salespeople need to receive structured feedback on how they are doing and the results of their efforts
- Salespeople need to participate in group learning activities to help them apply what they are learning
- Salespeople have a wide range of previous sales experience and this must be accommodated in any training
- Transfer of learning is not automatic - coaching is needed to help salespeople transfer learning into practice
What have you done in your organisation to improve the effectiveness of sales training, or other types of soft skills training?
* If you want to see this for yourself, it's on page 183 of the 2007 edition
Picture: RLHyde, Flickr
