Remember the sales training you ran at Sales Kickoff for 2013? Anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of sales reps missed their Q1 quota. When CEOs and CFOs see that gap, they ask, “why did we spend all that money on sales kickoff to come out of the gates behind?”
Your sales training initiatives may be labeled as failed and your bosses may question whether you have the business maturity to determine what investments will drive ROI.
Matt Sharrers of Sales Benchmark Index (SalesBenchmarkIndex.com) recommends taking ownership of your mistakes and deploying any of five quick fixes. “Leaders are judged not on making mistakes but how they react and take ownership,” he states.
1. No Problem Clarity – You rolled out sales training without a clear focus on the problem to be solved.
Quick Fix – Perform actionable discovery (sales rep ridealongs, customer survey, rep survey, pipeline analysis and mystery shopping). You may find you don’t have a sales training problem. You may have a territory design issue, lack of leads, poor quota setting or poor coverage model.
You utilized generic materials from a book or training company that were not tied to your current process. “A” players roll their eyes at off-the-shelf materials.
Quick Fix – Break down your current sales process into a series of modules or 101/201/301. Ask your training team to put a series of one-hour trainings together in the following format:
20 minutes teaching the process/30 minutes role playing/10 minutes of lessons learned.
current process and experience it through live application/scenarios.
Quick Fix – Start teaching. The goal should be 50 percent process/50 percent experiential learning. Sales training is absorbed best through application; it’s like sports and running drills. You can only watch so much film. Hold a monthly loss review for 60 minutes. On the call, two reps review a deal that got away, each for 30 minutes. Capture two to three key lessons and put these into a folder for future improvements to your sales process. Focus on one behavior change item per loss review that the team can execute tomorrow.
4. Led by Outsider –You committed the sin of paying a keynote speaker $50,000 and expected them to drive change in your sales force.
Quick Fix – Ask your best people to lead the rest of the team on key scorecard items (not just revenue). The best leaders are teachers. If you are developing future leaders, this is a great activity. You can assess presentation skills of your team when they have to present to their peers.
Quick Fix – Determine a multi modal reinforcement plan (online, classroom, field, home study). Assign reinforcement by role (VP of sales, sales manager, sales operations). Each stakeholder should have responsibility to help drive the new behavior. Publish quick wins via multiple communication channels (email, meetings, spoken, 1-on-1 recognition). Set small goals with the new behavior.
Q1 is over. As they say in golf, don’t follow a bad shot with a bad shot.
