Sales Training

The vast majority of sales training solutions are action oriented. They tend to focus PURELY on sales strategy, consultative selling, sales management, effective selling skills, closing skills, cold calling, account management, negotiation skills, and so on. On the surface, this may seem to make complete sense however sales training that is purely action oriented will never improve performance in any significant way over the long term.

Who need trainings? All trainings have different content and methodology but all of them are aimed to learn you sell. You must select a specific training basing on your present skills, knowledge, experience, and abilities. If you are new to direct sales and marketing business area and have none or small relevant experience trainings can help you to better understand essence of working skills and get necessary practice in conditions the closest to real sales.

From your real estate training you’ve probably been told you need to stake out a farm. The concept is that you can be the expert for your farm, and represent the buyers or sellers in your staked out area. Woohoo, in most cases there aren’t enough property transfers in your farm in any given year to feed your dog. Don’t bet your success on your farm. Most real estate training focuses on getting you to do the exact same thing the other +300 plus real estate agents for every property transfer are doing. So what’s your competitive advantage to doing that? How can you expect to even get in the real estate game when there isn’t an advantage to working with you. Your clients really aren’t dumb enough to believe that you’re an expert in your farm anyway.

It doesn’t matter if you are in an auto sales training, TV and radio sales, estate sales or time share sales in my conversations with sales management over the years, I’ve found that top producers all have one thing in common: they’ve taken the time to sit down and create goals for themselves and committed to sales training. Even if during the sales seminar they were skeptical when they started the process of goal setting and planning, every one of them has become a true believer.

All too often getting the appointment is the crescendo of your sales training program and then things fall a little flat after that. Getting the appointment is just the entry to begin the sales process. It’s what you do during and after the appointment that determines the sale. In many cases, especially when the item involves a service is more expensive or binding, you won’t close the sale in one appointment; so it’s the next steps that really determine if you have a sale or no sale. Meeting with absolute strangers can be a big mistake on several levels. First, they probably aren’t really even prospects so you’re wasting your time and theirs. Second, you need to know the people you’re meeting with well enough to have a pretty good idea of the ultimate result they want. This is very hard to accomplish if you’re making cold appointments with people you know little about. Ideally you want to be targeting very specific people that you know enough about to understand what they’re looking for or want.

Ask any CFO what their first impression is when they hear the words ‘Sales Training’ and they might communicate back their ‘Real world’ vocabulary of ‘un-accountable’ and ‘un-measurable’. Simply put, they know they’re wasting at least half their sales training budget dollars; the problem is they don’t know which half. And from a sales management perspective, if you don’t use your training budget, you’ll lose it.

Part of your career sales training should get you to think about what kind of career you want to have. If you were to equate sales people to runners there are two types of performers. The type of performer you choose to be has long term impact that will affect your overall success. Sprinters focus on fast starts, fast finishes, and depending on what they are selling burn out fast. The sprinter just wants to get the appointment, and close the appointment before the suspect knows what hit them. Sometimes sprinters have existing connections that make it possible for them to look like the early super stars. If you’ve been in sales long you’ve known folks like this. They get a lot of attention from your sales manager and they’re held up as the folks to emulate. Sprinters are well suited for product sales where you aren’t counting on repeat business and referrals. When you’re selling services and/or big ticket items where it’s really important for the customer to buy from you again, and tell others about you sprinters can be a bad fit. In your zealousness to get the appointment and close the sale, as a sprinter, you overlook the other half of the transaction; the customer.

The prosperity and popularity of successful companies is obviously the result of continuous training. Without proper sales training, a business is unable to stand out from the rest, thus having poor exposure and low credibility on the market. In order to achieve and maintain the success of their companies, business owners need to make sure that all their team members benefit from frequent sales training. While a short sales training course or seminary can familiarize your sales staff with the fundamentals of sales, the long-term success of your business can only be achieved through the means of ongoing sales training. Ongoing sales training is vital for maintaining the pace with other businesses in your branch and it can also help your company to get ahead of the competition.