As a trainer, especially a trainer of salespeople and sales managers, you bust your butt to do a great job. You know you must deliver effective strategies and tactics that help your team produce revenue, more revenue and more revenue to cover the costs of business and make profits.
And you have to deliver this material and have it implemented by whom? Salespeople?
You mean those prima donnas and hot dogs who know-it-all, make tons of money and party all the time? You have to deliver meaningful content to them?
You have to get ADHD- and ENTP-type salespeople (e.g. me) to actually absorb your outstanding training materials, then put them into action to achieve the desired results?
Well, yes.
So you work hard to keep up with current ideas and processes to sell better and sell more. You share these your people and train them in the implementation of these strats and tacs.
You’re halfway missing the boat
Why I Can Say That
I’ve been one of those prima donnas and hot dogs for four decades – salesman and sales manager. I still have the “HOT DOGS” ball cap featuring an Oscar Meyer on a bun with mustard that our 20-person squad wore to greet the HQ VP, who called our Dallas sales team a bunch of hot dogs.
And though the expression, “I loved every minute of it” is trite, it is true in my case because learning and mastering the essentials of successful selling from outstanding trainers in the field made me perennially No. 1 in sales in every organization I joined.
I also spent the last 40 years training and developing thousands of salespeople and managers. Before I even knew I was about to begin on a career journey in successful selling, managing and business ownership I was hired to write sales training materials by the late, great Joseph J. Charbonneau.
Joe was one of the greatest speakers in the world, focused on overall human development and career success. For decades, he traveled and delivered more than 220 speaking gigs every year. And he transferred a preponderance of his knowledge to me during our intense five-year work relationship that turned into lifelong friendship.
Why Was I No. 1 in Sales and Sales Management?
Joe taught me to learn from the masters. And I did. One of his pet expressions was, “If you want to be a master at anything, study the masters who have gone before you. Learn to do what they did, have the guts to do it, and you will be a master, just like them.”
So I studied the masters. I began by internalizing our training programs that we organically developed. These took the wisest works from the wisest experts and put them together on a topic-by-topic basis.
For example, our sales training series featured these skills training modules: Profitable Prospecting, Getting Qualified Appointments, Making Remarkable Presentations, Closing Sales, Staying Calm Under Stress, Satisfying Your Clients’ Emotional Needs, and many more.
Our sales management training programs featured titles like: Getting Off to a Winning Start, Step-by-Step Training, Getting the Most From Your People, Creating a Loyal Staff, Managing Problem People, Delegating for Results, Reaching Profit Objectives, Coaching Your Team to the Top, Leading Sales Meetings Your People Will Love.
When I built new sales teams and trained them into action in the field, I had the benefit of having written and delivered many of the titles listed above. I knew these things internally, which made it easy to implement these programs to my own teams.
Likewise, when I was in sales, having written and delivered many of the sales training learning modules listed above, I had internalized all that material as well. This made it second nature to put into action when I was actually selling in the field.
I was successful in a career that was like the joke with the punch line, “Do I know it? Lady, I wrote it!” And I’m still writing it.
I expanded my learning and skills with “The Psychology of Selling” by Brian Tracy (I still have it all, on cassette tape). I read all the “Greatest” Books by Og Mandino (The Greatest Salesman In the World, etc.); “As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen; “Relationship Selling by Jim Cathcart”; “Mean Business” by Alfred J. Dunlap; “Quantum Leap Thinking” by James J. Mapis; “Selling to The Very Important Top Officer (VITO)” by Anthony Parinello; “How to Be a Great Communicator” by Dr. Nido Quebein; “Speak and Grow Rich” by Dottie Walters; “The Achieving Society” by Dr. David McClelland, and many more over the years.
And I attended many speakers’ presentations and PMA rallies. Some were excellent. Some turned out to be frauds. Pretty much the same as with anything else.
Learning from the Masters
So I learned from the masters and became, in some short form, a master myself. Now I pass those histories, skills, stories and adventures in selling to the next group to run wild and sell! Sell!! SELL!!!
Undoubtedly, finding, reading and hearing lessons from these great masters helped me become a top-tier salesperson and sales manager. However, it is not what made me successful. Putting these new ideas into action in my own way, in my own life made me successful.
I learned that in training:
- Motivation without information produces a bunch of excited failures.
- Information without motivation produces a bunch of intellectually mediocre people.
What makes a person successful?
The single most important quality in human beings to become successful, including success in their jobs and careers, is their own internal belief in themselves – the level of value they place on themselves as human beings, their self-image, self-concept, self-awareness, personal value, whatever you want to call the power of that belief inside us, that energy that drives us.
I call it self-image. I call it confidence, commitment, desire and determination.
That is what makes a person successful.
If you are providing sales training materials that rate a perfect 10, and you’re delivering it to a person with a self-concept of five, you might as well flush half of your outstanding training down the drain.
A person with a five as a level of self-concept and self-confidence cannot possibly see themselves doing things that people who rate themselves 10 do. Therefore, that part of your outstanding training goes unused. Ineffective. Down the drain.
If you have a person with a self-concept of eight, you get about 80% of the results you’re looking for from your training. A 10 gets 100% of it, or tries to.
Robert Danger Workman is the author of the best-selling “Hired Gun: You’re #1 and Somebody Hates It.” His book due for publication in 2021 is “Becoming the Boss!” He is presenting a free webinar entitled “How to Get More Implementation from Your Outstanding Training Programs” on March 10 at 2 p.m. Eastern. Learn more about this webinar and register to attend here.
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