Chapter 3 Ninety Percent of A

Table of Contents

Chapter 3. Ninety Percent of All Sales Force Training Fails..................................................... 1Section 3.1. SALES TRAINING'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET............................................................................................................................................................ 1Section 3.2. BUT YOU STILL NEED TO PROVIDE TRAINING.................................................................................................................................................... 1Section 3.3. WHY DOES SALES TRAINING FAIL?....................................................................................................................................................................... 2Section 3.4. LOTS OF TALK AND FAILED ATTEMPTS................................................................................................................................................................ 4Section 3.5. THE VISION FOR EFFECTIVE SALES TRAINING................................................................................................................................................... 4

Chapter 3. Ninety Percent of All Sales Force Training Fails. Mastering the World of Selling: The Ultimate Training Resource from the Biggest Names in Sales, ISBN: 9780470617861Prepared for [email protected], Sumit SolomonCopyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing Inc.. This download file is made available for personal use only and is subject to the Terms of Service. Any other use requires prior written consentfrom the copyright owner. Unauthorized use, reproduction and/or distribution are strictly prohibited and violate applicable laws. All rights reserved.

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Ninety Percent of All SalesForce Training Fails

Duane SparksAction Selling

‘‘Here’s the problem—and the solution.’’

& SALES TRAINING'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Investing in training for your sales force seems like a perfectly sensi-ble business practice. It must be a smart thing to do; after all, salestraining is estimated to be a billion-dollar industry.

Here’s the problem: 90 percent of the training that salespeoplereceive fails to produce meaningful, long-term performance gains.

A billion-dollar industry with a 90 percent failure rate? Even I’mdisgusted with that.

& BUT YOU STILL NEED TO PROVIDE TRAINING

With the ever-accelerating speed of change in both knowledge andtechnology, it is clear that we have a choice: We either continue tolearn, or we allow our skills and knowledge to become obsolete.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘‘We hire only experi-enced salespeople,’’ as if that were a solution. The idea that salesexperience is a ‘‘living textbook’’ has two major pitfalls:

1. As the world changes, our methods for dealing with situations lagbehind. Therefore, we continue to make the same selling errors timeand time again.

2. In a sales career spanning 30 years, the same one year’s worth ofexperience can be repeated 30 times.

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Aberdeen Group, a highly regarded research firm, reports thateven in a constricted economy, best-in-class companies are in-creasing revenues by 20 percent more than laggard firms, throughthe use of sales training. So, how do the top 10 percent of compa-nies leverage sales training while others waste their time andmoney?

& WHY DOES SALES TRAINING FAIL?

Everyone has experienced a great seminar. You laughed, youcheered, you took notes. But a month later, I’ll bet you could barelyrecall the name of the speaker, much less the things you ‘‘learned.’’Research shows that 87 percent of the information delivered in semi-nars and workshops is forgotten within 30 days. After that, the reten-tion rate gets worse.

The following sections outline the three biggest reasons why anygiven training program will fail to produce lasting performanceimprovements.

� A. Wrong Content

First, you have to teach the right content. Many skills, traits, andqualities contribute to sales success. For example, personality andmotivation definitely have an impact on performance. The troubleis, you can’t teach personality and motivation—and salespeoplecan’t ‘‘learn’’ it! Training has to focus on skills that can be taught,learned, mastered, and measured.

There might be a hundred skills that are teachable and learnableand that contribute to sales success. But you can’t teach anyone howto do a hundred things well. Instead, you must focus on the skills thatare most likely to lead to high performance in a sales role: the FiveCritical Selling SkillsTM.

1. Buyer/Seller Relationship: When sellers understand the series andsequence of sub-decisions that customers go through when mak-ing a major buying decision, and skillfully match their sales pro-cess with the buyer’s decision-making process, success ratesimprove dramatically.

2. Sales Call Planning: What is your Commitment Objective for thissales call? That is, what do you want the customer to agree to donext? Failure to have a Commitment Objective is the most frequentmistake made by salespeople. That’s followed by failure to devise aquestioning plan for the sales call and failure to prepare a CompanyStory. Poor planning skills often result from the lack of a clearlydefined sales process to follow.

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3. Questioning Skills: The impact of poor questioning skills is horren-dous. Eighty-six percent of salespeople ask the wrong types of ques-tions. The question is the number-one tool in the salesperson’s kit.Unfortunately, it’s either used improperly or it’s rusty.

4. Presentation Skills: Most salespeople think that they are fantasticpresenters. They can spew large quantities of data about their prod-ucts. The problem is, customers don’t want that. They want you tozero in on specific solutions based on their unique needs for yourproduct or service.

5. Gaining Commitment: Most salespeople agree that this is the skillthey most need to improve. If a salesperson is not good at gainingcommitment from the client, why is he or she on anyone’s payroll?Yet research shows that 62 percent of salespeople don’t ask for com-mitment consistently on their sales calls.

� B. Rejected by Salespeople

You’ve seen them—the sales reps who come to a training sessionwith the attitude that they already know it all. Their body languagealone speaks volumes: arms crossed, eyes rolling, virtually daringthe instructor to say something that might interest them. These peo-ple were not properly prepared to come to your training. And with-out motivation, there can be no learning at all.

Salespeople need to be sold on the need for training and the ben-efits it offers them. And I mean they have to be sold on the need forthis particular program—not on the idea of training in the abstractor on learning as a swell thing.

This sale is no different from any other sale. The buyers (yoursalespeople) must see the program as a solution to needs that theyagree exist. If they don’t recognize and agree on the need, the train-ing will be a waste of time. The benefits of using and mastering theskills have to be perceived as far greater than the investment of timeand effort required.

� C. Ineffective Transfer

Transfer is a term we use when learning is actually applied in thefield. It’s the only reason why a business organization would want todo training in the first place.

Most people mistakenly think of transfer as a synonym forfollow-up or reinforcement—events that happen after the trainingprogram is over. Sure, that’s part of what needs to be done. But otherfactors play into the transfer process as well.

The following are the five critical elements that determinewhether learning will transfer from the classroom to the job:

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1. Students must be actively involved in the entire learning process.

2. Early in the training process, students need to connect the learningto their life experiences. It has to make sense in the world they know.They need to see relevance right away.

3. They must know that there will be follow-up activities and assess-ments that measure what they learned and how well they are apply-ing the new skills in their day-to-day work.

4. They must be held accountable by their managers to demonstrate theuse of new skills and knowledge in the field. This cements the mes-sage that management believes that learning was important.

5. Managers must minimize the transfer distance by helping learnersapply new skills and knowledge on the job—quickly.

& LOTS OF TALK AND FAILED ATTEMPTS

Corporate trainers, including sales trainers, have discussed theseissues for decades. And companies that create their own sales train-ing or buy it from sales training companies are certainly aware ofthe questionable benefits they usually get. Why, then, does the prob-lem persist? My answer is that most sales training does produce animmediate result. It just doesn’t last.

Most sales training programs contain some useful information.Immediately following a training session, some salespeople will pickup an idea, take it to the field, and score a sale that they wouldn’t havegotten before. Instant return on investment! Terrific! But a fewmonths later, they’re back to their old behaviors. It’s called relapse.

Let’s talk about the solution.

& THE VISION FOR EFFECTIVE SALES TRAINING

The following table describes the problems and three solutions foreach one.

Problem Solution Solution Solution

A. Poor orwrongcontent

1. Well-documentedsales process

2. Focus on criticalselling skills

3. Custom-tailoredcontent to yourcompany’s needs

B. Rejected byyoursalespeople

1. Student andmanager areproperly prepared

2. Needs fortraining must beagreed upon

3. Student involvementin best sales practices

C. Ineffectivetransfersystem

1. Implement fieldcoaching procedure

2. Install systematicreinforcement

3. Measure learning andapplication

Note: If these capabilities are present in your sales training methodology, you’ll escape the 90

percent failure rate.

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No doubt this table makes effective sales training sound like adaunting proposition, difficult to pull off. Sorry, but it is. I’ve in-vested 20 years in the development of content and systems for stu-dent motivation and transfer. I wouldn’t suggest that you try toduplicate this effort when the results are available from my com-pany for a very affordable price.

I know what other companies in the sales training industry areproviding. Some of their content is very good. The problem is simplythis: The reason for the 90 percent failure rate of sales trainingcourses has to do with all of the factors I’ve described. You can’t coveronly one or two bases and expect to get long-term results.

All of us in sales have developed certain habits, no matter if ourcareers span 5 days or 50 years. Some of those habits work against us;they’re dead wrong. Changing habits is the hardest thing that a hu-man being is ever asked to do. But when sales organizations ap-proach training in the way I have described, it works every time.And with Action Selling, it’s not that hard to do.

Name: Duane Sparks

Company: The Sales Board—Action Selling

Web Site: www.ActionSelling.com

Biography: Duane Sparks is chairman of The Sales Board and author of Action Selling.His company has trained and certified more than 350,000 salespeople in the skills ofAction Selling. Duane has personally facilitated over 300 Action Selling training ses-sions and has written five best-selling books: Action Selling: How to Sell Like a Profes-sional, Even If You Think You Are One; Selling Your Price: How to Escape the Race to theBargain Basement; Questions: The Answer to Sales; Masters of Loyalty: How to Turn YourSales Force into a Loyalty Force; and Sales Strategy from the Inside Out: How ComplexSelling Really Works.

Selling Philosophy: Sustainable results from superior sales training

Target Industries: Manufacturing, distribution, medical, services

Best Sellers: Action Selling Sales Training

Sales Tip One: Focus on improving the five critical selling skills: (1) buyer/seller rela-tionship, (2) sales call planning, (3) questioning, (4) presenting, and (5) gainingcommitment.

Sales Tip Two: Without reinforcement and measurement, 87 percent of learning isforgotten in 30 days. What gets measured gets learned.

Sales Tip Three: Set a commitment objective for every call: A goal that you set foryourself to gain agreement from the customer that moves the sales process forward.

Book One: Action Selling: How to Sell Like a Professional, Even If You Think You Are One

Book Two: Selling Your Price: How to Escape the Race to the Bargain Basement

Book Three: Questions: The Answer to Sales

Product One: Action Selling

Product Two: Selling Your Price

Product Three: Questions: The Answer to Sales

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Chapter 3 Ninety Percent of A