There is a cyclical nature to regular sales training that reinforces the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. How do you create long-lasting, significant change that allows your sales team to develop habits that allow them to be consistently successful?
The story plays out in sales organizations around the country. Salespeople learn about Spin Selling, Consultative Selling, Solution Selling and other sales approaches, in brief bursts of training conducted once or twice a year. But those approaches aren’t integrated into the sales process and the sales managers are too busy trying to hit quota to think about capturing those things that are working so the team can repeat them.
Why is the sales manager so busy? Because the bottom half of their sales team isn’t pulling their weight and the manager must do their job for them, effectively selling out the future for the present.
Why are the bottom half of salespeople so ineffective? Because the company doesn’t know how to hire top sales talent – and even if they did, they don’t really know what they are looking for. They can’t put their finger on exactly what the problem is with the sales team and don’t even imagine that half the problem is with the marketing, messaging and competitive differentiation.
So salespeople don’t have the tools they need to win business and aren’t being coached effectively to improve their performance. Instead, sales managers threaten their salespeople because it is more expedient. So salespeople get tired of being threatened and leave and new ones must be brought in.
And so it goes . . . around and around.
How do you get off this crazy cycle of ineffectiveness? How do you train your managers to manage and your sales people to sell when you aren’t even sure what is broken? How do you create true competitive differentiation that allows your sales team to win more deals? How do you create a closed-loop sales system that uses real time feedback to continually improve the sales process and to feed vital information into the marketing engine? How do you build a farm system of sales talent that provides continuity and scalability in your business?
The answer is with a third-party program like SalesPOP! that can dedicate attention and focus on the real problems while your team is out chasing deals.