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Making the Buy So They Can Sell
August 25, 2006
| Picking Up the Phone
What if one of your salespeople knows all the latest tips and tricks, has the fundamentals down pat and has a Rolodex full of potential customers-but won't pick up the phone?
Call reluctance is the hesitation many salespeople feel about picking up the phone to call prospects. It's a common problem in sales, and it's a mistake to assume that your people don't have it, even if they're succeeding.
For people whose livelihood is earned by picking up the phone, it's embarrassing to admit that call reluctance is a factor, but Greg Bennett makes a point of including phone time in his training so that learners have an opportunity to admit that they have it. Bennett is the founding partner of Altitude Profit Counseling, a sales training firm in Denver. "There's a tendency to focus on soft skills in sales training, but none of those skills matters if the person is call reluctant," he says.
The source of the struggle, according to The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance by George Dudley, is a fear of self-promotion. Salespeople who are afraid to promote themselves are lacking in a vital skill that lets more successful salespeople pick up the phone without hesitation.
"I think call reluctance is the basis of all sales problems," Bennett says. "If your sales training doesn't cover call reluctance, or if the trainer doesn't know that you're talking about when you ask if they cover call reluctance, then it's probably no good." - H.D. |
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By Holly Dolezalek
Four billion.
That's how much enterprises spend every year on training their sales professionals, according to ES Research Group, a sales training advisory firm in Mahopac, N.Y. And fully half of that amount goes to third-party training firms. The investment should be worth it, because a more effective sales force can translate into the kind of bottom-line results that would make any VP giddy. But more training, if it's the wrong training, can translate into nothing much. If you promise to increase effectiveness and revenue through training, you'd better make a good choice-and the odds are against you.
According to ES Research's 2006 Sales Training Vendor Guide, 90 percent of all sales training programs do yield an increase in sales productivity. The catch is that that increase only lasts 90 to 120 days.
Fewer than 20 percent of companies manage to sustain that productivity gain for a year or more. Now, if you only make promises about the first quarter after your training, you're good to go. But if you want more than just a blip, and you've decided that buying a vendor's program instead of developing your own is the way to go, then you've got some research to do.
"Some of the most well-known companies have called me in, crying that they've spent millions on sales training providers and nothing has worked," says Dave Stein, CEO and founder of ES Research. "They wind up with a solution to a problem they don't have and no solution to the problem they do have."
How do you avoid that? We talked to several sales trainers who have been on both sides of the equation: They've had to sell, and they've trained others in selling. They gave us their best advice for how to be a savvy purchaser of sales training.
Where to Start
As with any purchasing decision, you have to start with a careful evaluation of whether to purchase at all. Is the effectiveness of your sales force really going to be improved by any training, whether store bought or home grown? Gill Wagner is the president of Honest Selling, a sales training firm in St. Louis. Wagner, whose bias might be expected to be in favor of more sales training all the time, says that the woods are full of vice presidents and training managers who were too quick to throw training at a problem that couldn't be solved that way. "For example, they look for a training program in telephone skills or cold calling, but the real problem is their salespeople's willingness to pick up the phone and dial it," Wagner says. "It doesn't help to teach them skills for calls when the problem is that they're having a hard time making calls at all."
That's why, Wagner says, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble if you investigate the real reasons for your sales force's difficulties. Before you start talking to vendors, talk to your salespeople and your supervisors, and find out what their problems are. Wagner says he begins with an audit of his client's sales efforts.
"It's both critical and complex to do it, but you have to consider all possibilities and not just throw solutions at a problem," Wagner says. "What if your real problem is a hiring problem, or a motivation problem or a people problem?" In fact, Wagner says, for people who are comfortable with calling, it almost doesn't matter what sales training program you use-and the same is true for people who just aren't comfortable. "If you're hiring the wrong kind of people, you may end up putting tons of training into people who are never going to be successful," he says. So make sure you know what's wrong before you try to fix it with a couple of days in the classroom.
For example, consider your product development division. This is an area that has a huge impact on whether your salespeople will be able to sell well. "We tend to look at the entire customer acquisition life cycle," says ES Research's Stein. "Ideally, your products or your services are priced right and they work. But a dysfunctional product development division can lead to products that don't work and prices that are too high, and that's not a sales problem, even if it looks like a sales problem."
Taking the Plunge
Let's say that you do discover that your problem is a training problem and that buying a vendor's services is the way to solve it. There's one potential difficulty that can cause you to fail that has nothing to do with the quality of the programs you evaluate, and everything to do with the way you evaluate them. In short, if you're not careful, you can be your own worst enemy.
Stein suggests that a lot of sales vice presidents or training managers, who have done their own selling in the past, fall into that right-brain, creative, gregarious category of the population.
Their strengths are people strengths, rather than the kind of symbolic and analytic thinking characteristic of the left-brain, engineer/mathematician/accountant part of the population. "This is not a judgment of them, and it's an oversimplification. But I think for a lot of sales VPs, being creative and social and building relationships has worked for them in the past. It works well for them in selling situations, but then when they get into a buying situation, something process-oriented like requests for proposal (RFPs) and evaluating those RFPs, being creative and spontaneous doesn't work for them all that well."
To protect yourself from an emotional or simply incomplete decision, Stein suggests starting with a clear definition of your requirements for whatever sales program you buy. What do you want your salespeople to be able to do after they've had more training? Do you want to increase annual sales by 12 percent for each participant? If you know that, you can convey that clearly to the vendors you're considering.
Stein says to think in terms of your customer, and to ask yourself what you know about the way they buy. Are there customer requirements that your sales force isn't meeting? What do they know about those requirements, and what don't they know? In what areas are they strong or weak? An assessment of this nature will tell you more about what you need from training, and also give you criteria and methods for assessing the success of that training once it's complete.
It also puts you in a better position to create a cost/benefit analysis for whatever training program you're considering. "In this day of tight budgets and oversight, it's almost impossible to get a budget for anything as complex and expensive as training," Stein says. So for every dollar you want to spend on training, you'll be in a better position to ask for it or to justify it if you can say what kind of a return you expect. And you don't have to come up with that alone. This is an opportunity for the vendor to show you that they want to partner with you, not just sell to you.
"You can be really clear and tell them that you need to show a tangible ROI," says Greg Bennett, the founding partner of Altitude Profit Counseling, a sales training firm in Denver. "A lot of vendors won't want to have anything to do with that, and they'll talk in generalities, like 'new skill sets.'
The good ones will work with you to create a snapshot of where you are now." That snapshot can be in terms of whatever variables you're able to track with your sales force.
"ROI is hard if you don't have any data that shows where you are," Bennett says. But once you know where you are, he says, it's easier to determine your goals, and to evaluate the sales force's progress after 60 or 90 days. In fact, you can even ask the trainer if he or she is willing to tie a chunk of his or her compensation to whether or not those goals are achieved. But, "most trainers won't be up for that," Bennett warns.
What to Look For
When you start shopping and see there are herds of vendors in the marketplace, you may feel overwhelmed. But by giving thought to some fundamentals, you can winnow out the non-starters and get to the vendors that are most likely to be able to help you.
Honest Selling's Wagner suggests that any buyer should give some thought to his or her company's core philosophy and search for training that fits accordingly. In theory, he points out, if your company's philosophy is to take care of the customer first, it doesn't make sense to select a vendor that teaches salespeople to lie to prospects or not to take no for an answer.
Once you've eliminated some candidates on this basis, the ones that remain can be sifted again, this time by examining vendors' content. More importantly, says ES Research's Stein, how will that content be tailored to fit your unique situation? This will probably eliminate a few more contenders, because not all vendors will be willing to customize their program to fit your needs. Depending on your training requirements, a one-size-fits-all program might be just fine, but if your salespeople are conducting a complex buying process, it won't.
"Many sales training companies make the most money when they can bring people in and get their cash without modifying their program," Stein says. "So you have to find someone who will willingly adapt their curriculum."
Ask vendors about their curriculum. When did they develop it? How did they develop it? Was it created in-house 20 years ago and never updated? Does the company have curriculum development people who design the instruction, or do they hire designers to look over what they've already created? The quality of a program can be seen in its design and methods, and that's especially important in the current business environment, where people's time is fractured and their attention has to be everywhere. Says Stein: "If the company you're looking at hasn't developed or updated their content and delivery mechanisms and medium of training programs in the last five years, they're probably out of date."
When you find vendors that offer training that fits your problem and is up to date, you've solved the first half of the equation. The other half is making that content make sense so that it sticks.
Altitude Profit's Bennett has a favorite analogy for training. "It's like cotton candy," he says. "You get a great sugar buzz, but it wears off quickly." Training has a way of inspiring but not sticking, and one reason for that is that a lot of training is long on content and short on execution. So when you find a vendor with content you like, look at that vendor's plan for teaching its execution. If there isn't a plan for how to not only teach the material but help salespeople apply it, then you're going to have to be the one to figure that out.
"A lot of trainers are more likely to give you their program and essentially say, "Hope you can make sense of this,' " Bennett says. "But when you get back to the office, it's frustrating if you know it but don't know how to apply it. So if a vendor's idea of follow-up or help with execution is 'buy more of my training,' they may not be the best choice."
So ask the vendor about their plan for execution and follow-up. "This is something that has to be led by the purchaser," Bennett says. "You have to push them. Don't just pay for what they give you. Tell them, 'I need an implementation plan with six follow-up exercises and some help in what to review regularly with the salespeople.' "
One great way to get right to the heart of whether or not a trainer is going to teach execution is to ask whether he or she is going to make his or her own practice calls while trainees observe. "If they're not willing to do that, that's really telling," Bennett says.
Once you know the basic outlines of a vendor's content, there's another easy way to assess the vendor's commitment to it: Ask yourself if they're eating their own dog food. "As they're going through their sales pitch to you, evaluate whether that salesperson is doing what their own program is supposedly going to teach your people," says Honest Selling's Wagner. "Training programs can sell well even if they don't work. If they're not walking their own talk, it probably doesn't work."
Finally, when you meet with the vendor, make sure you talk more than once with whomever will actually conduct the training. Ask for everything you want-you're the customer, after all, and you don't have to just take what they give you. Ask in more detail about execution and follow-up, and make sure the trainer is planning activities that will let your people practice what the trainer will preach. And assess how successful you think this trainer can be with your salespeople. The trainer may be a successful salesperson, but that doesn't mean he or she will have the coaching mentality that will let him or her convey useful knowledge and skills.
"You don't want someone who will say, "I'm a great salesman, be just like me!' " Bennett says. "People tend to resent that. You need someone who has a coaching mentality, and is willing to say that they struggled, and who can help others with their struggles."
Holly Dolezalek is a contributing editor for Training. E-mail story comments to edit@trainingmag.com
| Don't Discount the Fundamentals:
Greg Bennett sometimes thinks of sales training in terms of football.
Every year, one National Football League team wins the Super Bowl. But the next summer, no matter which team won, all the teams hold a training camp.
"I have yet to see last year's Super Bowl winner skip training camp," says Bennett, founding partner of Altitude Profit Counseling, a sales training firm in Denver. "The best teams always return to the fundamentals, year after year."
When you consider buying sales training, it's a good idea to consider new ideas and methodologies. But don't assume that your sales team doesn't need to brush up on the fundamentals, especially your high performers.
"As sellers get more and more experienced, they start taking shortcuts," Bennett says. "In my sessions, I always have people admitting that they skip steps. You need to return to the fundamentals at least once a year."
Gill Wagner agrees, because he sees talented salespeople making mistakes in the sales funnel every day. Wagner is the president of Honest Selling, a sales training firm in St. Louis, and he says he always evaluates salespeople in terms of their sales funnel. "Let's say you have to close two sales a month," Wagner says. "A nice, generic average is that that the salesperson has to send out four contracts to get those two sales. To get those four, they have to go through the sales process with six prospects, and to get those six, they have to set a first-time appointment with eight possibilities."
Obviously, Wagner says, if that funnel breaks down-say, if the salesperson needs to send out four contracts, but is only going through the sales process with three prospects -- the salesperson will never reach his or her goal. Yet Wagner says he sees situations like that all the time, even with top performers.
In fact, he has seen many top performers make the same kinds of mistakes despite knowing the fundamentals, such as having two prospects in the sales process and 10 contracts out, instead of six prospects in the process and four contracts out. A return to the fundamentals reminds everyone of what they should be doing, and that can be more valuable than new tricks.
"Good salespeople study sales and marketing and prospecting their entire careers," Wagner says. "I'm a sales training guru, and I'm still learning." -H.D. | Training Magazine
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