teaching sales Archives

I’ve seen it time after time—small business owners who aren’t happy with their sales team or their results. They call me with a single goal in mind—help me hire better salespeople.

That’s rarely the solution. If you aren’t training your current team, you haven’t set them up for success. Adding more untrained bodies will only subtract from your bottom line, demotivate your existing salespeople, and increase competition for the same meager sales. Firing and replacing your underperforming salespeople doesn’t address the problems in your program, like poor sales management, a lack of performance measurement, poorly designed incentive structures, and misalignment between sales and marketing.

I’ve been looking for sales training to recommend to these clients, but the few programs we’ve found are woefully out of date for the current marketplace, and none address entrepreneurial businesses.

That’s why we’ve launched our new sales training program. It’s called the Engagement Selling System, and it directly addresses the chronic struggle entrepreneurs face building and growing successful sales teams. Entrepreneurs’ business development is different in almost every way from large corporations, but no one has designed an approach specifically with them in mind.

For entrepreneurs, cash flow is a continuous stressor as revenue peaks and valleys are part of the business landscape—29% of businesses fail due to a lack of positive cash flow. All businesses need revenue to survive, and they need to increase that revenue every year to grow without taking on debt or selling equity.

According to trainingmag.com, training is largely deprioritized by SMBs. The average amount spent on training per individual in small- to medium-sized companies has been as low as $554—or less than .02% of their annual operating budget.

When companies spend $5,000 or more for things like a great website, but spend virtually nothing on improving the capabilities of the people responsible for generating their revenue lifeblood, the writing’s on the wall.

We designed ESS to improve conversion rates and create sales professionals who are prepared to outperform their competitors. It’s not enough to have a great sales system, it has to be easy to use and applicable across the wide variety of circumstances salespeople face. The goal of our sales training program is to move the needle by giving your team an approach they can apply immediately and affordably.

Learn more and register.

Over the last 10 years “Sales” has been renamed “Marketing” or “Business Development.” I recently heard about an organization calling their salespeople “Revenue Engineers.”

Baloney…

It is true that “sales” as a function has changed and some organizations have not recognized that yet. They are still sending their salespeople on what I call “Pitch and Prays” where the sales process is still just a numbers game and anything that moves gets pitched. Or even worse, they are asking their sales folks to makes hundreds of contacts through email or phone calls which is the equivalent of driving at night without lights. That leaves sales pros and customers describing those experiences in dirty words that would make George Carlin blush.

While we spend significant mental energy renaming sales functions, we aren’t supporting or developing sales leadership like we should. According the Harvard Business Review:

“To put a finer point on it, of the 479 U.S. business programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, only 101 have a sales curriculum, and a mere 15 offer either an MBA in sales or some sort of sales-oriented graduate curriculum. Sales may be vital to businesses, but of the 350,000 students a year who earn bachelor’s degrees in business from American universities, and the 170,000 who earn MBAs, only a tiny fraction have been taught anything about it.”

But, there are organizations that are starting to realign the value of salespeople with their customers. This is demonstrated when sales people focus on facilitating the purchase for a customer. Every organization has a different process for purchasing products or services and many of those processes can be difficult or time intensive. Successful salespeople are realizing this and creating value by navigating those processes with or even for potential customers by preparing documentation, gathering required information or even writing RFPs for prospective clients.

If you want to see this practice in action, visit an Ethan Allen retail location. Those folks are tremendous at facilitating customers’ purchases.

Most customers already have the relevant information about your product, your competitors’ products, pricing differences and has probably called a colleague or two before you get to actually engage them. You need to add real value to your sales process by thinking about how you can facilitate purchases more than selling something.

The difference in winning new business can be as much about “how” the sales process works and the customer’s experience buying from your salespeople. This is especially true in highly competitive markets or in commoditized products.

When an organization does not recognize and act on this shift in a sales function’s value to their customers, there may be a very dirty word used to describe their performance- failing.

Teaching Sales– Harvard Business Review

teaching sales

Why We Created Our New Sales Training Program

Sales is Not a Dirty Word

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