One of the most common complaints that sales trainers get from both salespeople and companies is that sales training in any form, whether via book, workshop, seminar or online course, has little or no impact for most of the men and women who take the training. Unfortunately, their complaint is backed up by a number of studies that confirm that training does not change the behavior, attitudes or results of the vast majority of salespeople.
Where does the fault lie for the miserable return on investment from training? With the sales trainer? With the content of the training? With the teaching methods employed? Or perhaps the problem is with the salespeople themselves?
No doubt blame can be affixed to all of the above. But there is a more basic issue that is obvious but often overlooked:
Sales training is not simply an intellectual activity; by its very nature it demands behavior change.
To be effective, sales training requires that negative or ineffective behaviors be replaced with positive or effective behaviors. Sales training has more in common with sports coaching than it does with academic teaching. It is action oriented. The lessons must be integrated into one’s behavior, not just filed away in one’s mental filing cabinet.
The basic problem with sales training is that the delivery format — even in a workshop that entails role play and group interaction — is predominately information oriented.
To be effective, sales training must be converted from information to behavior. That can’t be done in an hour, or in a half day, or even in a two- or three-day training session. It takes time. It takes repetition of action. It takes making and learning from mistakes. It requires the student be able to analyze performance, isolate mistakes and institute new behavior that corrects the mistake.
It takes coaching
Most of us don’t have the ability or the patience to implement the training, work through the issues, and hone the skills while consistently “blowing” the implementation on our own. We need help. We need an outside observer, a sounding board, an encourager, a disciplinarian. We need a coach.
Coaching has been a staple of sports for thousands of years. Every athlete, from the youngest to the best player in the world, has a coach. Their coach performs a number of duties but the primary duty is to oversee behavior change. Teach information, yes. Discipline, yes. Encourage, yes. But all of those are supplements to the primary goal — behavior change.
Selling is no different. Knowledge in sales is useless unless you use the knowledge, and that comes in the form of action — whether that action is instituting the referral generation process, dealing with those pesky objections, or closing the sale. And just as with an athlete, translating the information into action requires coaching.
Individual salespeople must find their own coach, whether through a formal paid coaching arrangement with a professional trainer/coach, their manager or another member of their team.
More and more sales trainers include group or individual coaching in their corporate sales training proposals. Some trainers include “coaching the coach” segments into their training proposals where they train the management team to be the team’s coach.
Sales training doesn’t work if it is information-oriented only. Sales is a contact sport. It requires salespeople to learn not just information but to perform certain actions, and those actions don’t come naturally or easily for most of us.
If you’re not going to back the training up with active coaching, you may as well save your money.
Paul McCord is an author, speaker, trainer, consultant, and one of the country’s leading authorities on prospecting, referral generation, and personal marketing. Find out more at mccordandassociates.com
