Why Your Company Sales Training Isn’t Working
“What if we train them and they all leave?”
“What if we don’t train them, and they all stay??”
One of the most dangerous decisions companies make is to hire a sales executive and only develop their product knowledge. Yes, it is important to make sure your sales team has a solid understanding of your company’s offerings. Moreover, it is even more important to have a solid understanding of the client. For some sales managers — this becomes an awakening which then alerts them to provide sales training for their sales team. Arranging for sales training is a step forward, and here are some mistakes to avoid to get a better return on investment for your efforts:
#1 — Sales Training filled with Processes
Years ago, I attended a sales training in Hong Kong, where the instructor filled the training room up with flipcharts, posterboards — all of them filled with details of sales process steps. Seriously, even if my brain was a computer, it may take not be able to load all that information. Reality is, no one is going to remember it and no one is going to be able to fully execute it.
That is the common dilemma we see with many sales training providers — they dictate processes for the sales executives to follow. For the simple reason that humans are not robots, we need versatility in the way we connect and work with clients. While I would agree there is a universal sales cycle which is followed, it would be unrealistic to expect that all clients would follow a single decision making stream. Furthermore, asking a sales executive to follow fixed processes instead of activating thought processes is mechanical — which is entirely contradictory to why a sales executive needs to be hired in the first place.
Instead of making sales training fixated on learning steps and processes, make the sales training about provoking thought for the sales executive during the different stages of the sales process. When sales executives have a greater awareness of their own performance, they will have a better sense of what they need to modify or adapt to further the sales process.
#2 — Sales Training driven by lectures
Sales executives are not grade school children. You hired them for a reason, and they would bring some experience and knowledge to the team. When sales training workshops are lectures, engagement and retention becomes almost non-existent. Going back to that sales training in Hong Kong that I sat through years ago — the highlight of the workshop was when a majority of the participants revolted against the instructor because they all felt the instructions were not practical or realistic. I remember watching the poor instructor attempt to justify his teachings, and it became a situation of the Participants vs. The Instructor. That’s when I stepped in and simply asked the instructor to just to hear out the participants’ views. With that one action, participants shared thoughts, experience and ideas that helped each other with their sales challenges. The instructor became a facilitator that drove a discussion and a brainstorming of ideas. Now, everyone was together, working towards a better sales team.
If it is essential to be able to listen to our clients, sales training workshops should also be a ground for sales executives to share their thoughts and inputs for others to listen to. Sales professionals do not want to be lectured in a sales training, they want to use that opportunity to discuss and resolve many of the challenges they are facing out in the market. Instead of filling a sales workshop with instruction, let’s fill it with inspiration.
#3 — Unrealistic Role Plays
Role Plays and sales training go hand-in-hand. While the purpose of the role play is for practical application of the learnings, the role plays are not always practical. A few years back, I was in a sales training in Bangkok, and the company running the sales training insisted on using scripted role play scenarios. Each of the participants were assigned a role and a briefing document, and that’s when disaster started to brew. Participants lacked industry knowledge on some of the briefing scenarios they were assigned on, some grew frustrated because the relevancy of the role play case was far from their reality. Brewing altogether, the role plays became a checkbox exercise without any satisfaction.
Instead of role plays, let’s have real plays. Use client scenarios or cases which are relevant to the participants’ workplace. If writing the real play is an issue, perhaps you can have the participants come up with the details of the client scenario they are using for the role play. This way, the details would be similar to their work environment. I’ve seen participants really enjoy doing this, because they can use a client scenario they are familiar with. By doing so, they would also be able to experience how others would handle this client situation, and perhaps develop more empathy for their (actual) client.
#4 — Sales Training Initiative Needs the Right Sponsor
Sales training benefits the sales team, and ultimately, the sales leader. Whether that be a Director, Head of Sales or even the COO, you rarely would find that the department directly benefiting would be Human Resources. Yet, so many organizations assign the sales training initiative to be led by HR or Learning and Development. While we can agree that sales training is for the learning and development of sales executives, it is also agreeable that sales training must align with the sales strategy of the organization. That is driven by the sales leader.
From the beginning of the sales training initiative, the sales leader should be involved to input what he/she believes is helpful to progress the sales team forward. What are the goals for the upcoming sales quarters? What has been the common challenge? What kind of feedback have clients expressed? Upon designing the sales training, get the sales leader’s input as to what a successful sales training would look and sound like. Get the sales leader’s input as to how the momentum can be maintained post the training experience. This is where HR can provide support to develop the right activities to meet the sales leader’s direction. Throughout the sales training initiative, open communication between the sales leader, HR and the sales training provider should be maintained. Discussions should be centered around trackable progress and ways to sustain momentum. Should there be any modifications to planned activities, the sales leader should be aware and share expectations of the impact to the sales team.
#5 — Sales Training as a 1-off event
The entire objective of any sales development initiative is to have continuous improvement for the sales team. I’ve seen many instances when participants leave the sales workshop energized and ready to take on the world, yet to have that momentum drop as the weeks go by. As with most learnings, active reminding and practice develops change in behavior and performance. According to Hermann Ebbinghaus, pioneer of the “forgetting curve”, one of the best methods for increasing the strength of memory is repetition based on active recall.
Active recall can come in many forms post the sales training experience. Small group coaching, buddy systems, mini-projects or even team lunch & learn meetings can allow the sales team to discuss their progress and seek opinions on how to overcome challenges. One company I had worked with before first had their sales management team attend the workshop, to get them familiarized with what would be shared with their team. Moreover, the sales management team also shared what they expected their team to say or feel when they go through the workshop next. Once the entire sales team went through the sales training workshops, the entire sales team would be able to speak a common language — and the active recall would occur in daily team conversations.
These days, technology can also assist with the active recall of the learning process. Scheduled emails, eLearning modules and even gamification of learning concepts make the continual learning process more convenient. The availability of these technologies gives users the flexibility to learn at their own pace, select the topics which are of priority to them and allows them to refer back to the content anytime. On the flip side, some users can also easily skip through the technology with a click of a button. So how can technology, learning retention and engagement co-exist? Recently, I attended a sales training in Malaysia and witnessed their team using social media to announce their elearning progress. In addition, they would tag their peers to challenge them to further their progress with the elearning process — almost like the “Ice Bucket Challenge”, except no one got wet. Using social media to interact is so common these days because it allows people to share their progress, interact and stay updated with others. Combining social media with learning technology can add more engagement.
Sales training doesn’t need to be expensive and extensive. It should be interactive and inspiring. Work with a sales consulting company to tailor what would be suitable to your sales team, because that’s what your sales consultants would do with your clients as well.
