What Sales Training Mostly Misses
Telling is not selling. Conversations sell.
Every sales training program out there has, as its goal, to reduce the art and science of selling into a neatly packaged book, one day seminar or two week intensive boot camp.
Or worse, create a litany of platitudes and quotes all designed to “motivate” salespeople. Sales offices are mostly littered with posters that shout out to them on a daily basis to work harder, work smarter, keep focused, never give up and to dream of success.
Does a poster or a quote really make you work harder or smarter?
If you have to rely on a poster to motivate you, you’re likely in the wrong line of work. Seriously.
Sales training has evolved over the decades but traces its roots to the most hallowed of sales training books ever written.
Virtually all sales training is derivative from Mr. Whiting’s well crafted work on “how to sell”.
There you have it in 5 words. Now you’re trained to be a sales person.
If only it were that easy, huh? Selling today has progressed far beyond the “Features, Advantages and Benefits” approach and beyond the “solutions” selling approach.
Selling today is much more about having a serious, and sometimes tough conversation with buyers than it is about “positioning”, “strategic partnerships” and “add-value” selling.
Sales training today doesn't quite cover that topic as much as it should.
Yes, you can find seminars and websites that cover the topic of conversations in selling but generally speaking they tend to be formulaic, which essentially turns the conversation into a preplanned event with the salesperson’s focus turned on following the process.
How do you have a serious and tough conversation with a buyer? First you absolutely have to be the expert in your field. Whether you selling tangible products, like mattresses to hotels or services, like cloud computing services to Fortune 500 companies you better know your product and your competition’s product cold.
Second you better know your customer’s business almost as good as she does. With today’s resources available and the flight to transparency any salesperson who opens the conversation with “Tell me about your business.” deserves to be thrown out of her office for dereliction of duty.
Finally, you better be equipped to ask questions that differentiate you from the dozens of other sales people out there. Questions that can’t be scripted because if they were scripted they’d defeat the purpose of the conversation.
Think about the last serious conversation you had with your doctor, your pastor, your sister, or your spouse: did you go into that conversation with a list of 6 topics to cover? And didn't you ask tough challenging questions along the way?
Why would we presume selling is any different?
A conversation flows from one person to another prompted by questions and followed by listening — really listening. Not silence while you think in your head what you will say next. How will you know what questions to ask unless you REALLY listen.
There is no magic formula to follow. That’s the key to it all. There is no formula. You have to be able to speak like an expert and ask questions like an expert.
What’s the hardest question sales people have to ask:
“How did I lose this business?”
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“There is no such thing as a worthless conversation, provided you know what to listen for. And questions are the breath of life for a conversation.”
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