Business mentor: How not to train your sales team

Q: There seems to be an avalanche of sales training available and yet this training often appears to be a cost rather than an investment. Why is this and what can we do to make sure it is an investment that produces a return?


A: John Lees, one of Australia's top sales trainers, replies:

Often it can seem like the advice is to take the sales team off the road, pay big money to feed them nonsense, send them back to market worse than ever ... and watch results plummet.

Some "sales training" of the most available and favoured variety, the kind that damages salespeople in the way junk food impairs the health of our children, will affect your business in the following ways:

* The sales team's results will begin to suffer the moment they hear that more of the usual sales training is planned.

* Income will be lost when the sales team move off the road and attend the course.

* The direct and indirect training costs will be an enormous drain on funds.

* The irrelevant nature of the training will subtract from the sales team's value, causing further deterioration in service and sales levels after the course.

Here is how to recognise the most damaging type of training course:

* The actual trainers have limited experience or success in selling and management.

* The training course will be offered as a "customised" programme (meaning your company name and products will be inserted occasionally in the standard course material).

* The training emphasis will be on memorising puerile "sales techniques"; for instance, the sales force will have to remember "how to handle objections", rather than learn "how to defend beliefs".

* The sales team will not be consulted about their training needs, and not one customer will participate in the course (thus ensuring the programme's irrelevance and defectiveness).

* The cost of the actual course will be excessive (structured to help the company feel "this must be good").

When salespeople are made to endure an occasional and ruinous training pig-out, as opposed to a valuable diet of professional motivation, real business education and strategic selling tools, they become "Scud missiles" in the market, missing key targets and acquiring the image of product-pushing predators.

The best salespeople need to be trained and equipped to become self-managers who can see immediate sales potential.

They need to be provided with the apparatus to create simple customer and territory development plans.

They need to understand their customers' businesses and their business needs, and the knowledge and skills to satisfy those needs with valuable solutions.

They need to be held responsible for achieving excellent and profitable sales, and they need a first-class service from management - which includes productive meetings, regular training, lots of exposure to customers (away from transaction mode), an equitable and exciting incentive scheme and a system of reporting that reflects service and sales performance.

When management attends to these needs, the expense of serious sales training becomes a wise investment and not an extravagant, wasteful and counter-productive cost.

* John Lees is conducting a series of day seminars put on by Executive Knowledge in Christchurch next Tuesday, Auckland on Wednesday and Wellington on Thursday. For more information go to Executive Knowledge

* Send Mentor questions to: ellen_read@nzherald.co.nz. Answers will be given by Business in the Community's Business Mentor Programme.