Sales training and techniques

Do you want a results guarantee with that sales training?
http://www.onirik.com.au/whitepaper%201%20-%20guarantee.htm
Extracts:
Several research and consulting firms (e.g. Huthwaite Inc) 1 have carried out studies of sales training to see the carryover from classroom to the job behaviour. Their studies tell how, on average, only 8% to 12% of traditional training works. In simple terms this means you get 10 cents in every training dollar you spend!

The same research found some instances where sales training actually resulted in real behaviour change and business results. There were two factors common to the successes. One was training that developed behavioural competence and the other was follow-up on-the-job coaching. However, based on experience I’d also propose a third – integrated consulting services.

Impact of sales training programmes (in "Sell Like A Woman")
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/Blog/Sue-Barrett-Blog/Sue-Barrett070312.html
Extract:
A study conducted a number of years ago found that within one week of leaving any sales skills training program, salespeople had lost 87% of the new skills they had learned during the training program.

Recent research by ES Research Group shows that 90% of all sales training programs result in a 90 to 120 day increase in productivity — but after that, nothing. It is only a temporary blip! Fewer than 20% of companies show sustainable productivity gains that last a year or more.

What I have found is that sales training only works if it is carefully matched to and directly supporting the use of your sales model, methodology and sales force profile. It really is the last 10%.

Then it needs the role of infield coaching to provide the reinforcement needed to maintain and enhance skills and behaviours. In fact, a well-designed combination of training and coaching is by far the most effective and economical way to develop the “right” skills, behaviours and knowledge and see a change in sales performance.

Effective sales training can be defined as a planned program within the organisation that endeavours to bring about relatively permanent changes in employee knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours. Behaviour modelling training has been found to be most effective.
To make sure that you are not wasting your money on sales training, I always suggest that you run through a checklist. Check your ongoing sales training agenda. Does it include the following?

• Company knowledge, especially current strategy.
• The promise-expectation-experience proposition delivered to your clients.
• Product knowledge, value propositions, competitive edge, marketing tactics and tools.
• Market, industry and competitor awareness.
• Prospecting strategies and plans.
• The “right” selling communication process and techniques.
• Human relations; self awareness; salespeople motivations; values, behaviours and attitudes; problem solving and decision making; self management, planning, etc.
• Clear performance, expectations and rewards.
• Levels of authority and responsibility.
• Sales management support.

To give a long-term benefit, the training needs to give your sales staff the opportunity to apply what they learn in real life situations out in the field, and have regular reviews as to effectiveness and efficiency of application.

Managing a marketing and sales transformation
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Sales_Distribution/Managing_a_marketing_and_sales_transformation_1843 Extract:
In our experience, the following five critical ingredients of transformation are key to ensuring transformation:

Leadership, aspirations, conviction, and clarity of purpose: committed leadership that can bring together disparate parts of an organization to achieve an ambitious and clearly articulated aspiration

New ways of working: a combination of improved processes and tools that help make sense of complex information, redefined pivotal roles, and performance management that drives the transformation forward; together, these serve as the foundation of a commercial operating system that, when fully developed, improves consistency, coordination, insight, and decision making

Capability building: on-the-job apprenticeship and high-caliber coaching designed to upgrade critical skills while delivering results

Changes in mind-sets and behavior: necessary steps such as removing cultural barriers to change and developing a tailored set of interventions to shape behavior

Transformation design: an approach that delineates the scope of the journey of change and the support needed to meet its objectives

Refocusing the sales force to cross-sell
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Sales_Distribution/Refocusing_the_sales_force_to_cross-sell_2086
Situation
Business units within large organizations often resist company-wide cross-selling initiatives. The operating units of an industrial-products company, for example, had a track record of rebelling when asked to share customer-specific sales records. This aversion to cross-selling became problematic when the company recognized that assembling and selling bundles of products from different business units was critical if it hoped to exploit its most compelling growth opportunity: a previously unaddressed midsize tier of customers. Moreover, the company’s practice of rewarding business unit leaders and salespeople on the basis of individual performance—not their support for the efforts of others—thwarted cross-selling endeavors. One business unit executive said, “I actively discouraged my sales team from playing ball, because it didn’t help our business unit.”

Complication
The company’s leaders weren’t confident that the business units had the will to develop or implement a new incentive system. Further, salespeople held a deep-seated bias against sharing information, because they believed that doing so was quite risky. Their concerns—often born of experience—included fears that other units would disappoint their customers with late deliveries, anxiety about the quality of some products that were candidates for bundling, and a general belief that disparities in the importance of customers to different business units could undermine relationships that were critical to one unit but not another. To promote cross-selling, the company would therefore have to allay such concerns while shifting mind-sets from “How do I protect my business?” to “How can the company strengthen its relationships with customers and boost profits?”

Resolution
To address these interrelated incentive and mind-set issues, the company developed a series of somewhat unorthodox workshops for salespeople, business unit leaders, and sales managers. Some of the workshops encouraged people to reflect on their tolerance for risk, their high and low career moments, and their motivations at work. These exercises led many sales reps to recognize that the foundation of their desire for strong customer relationships was a need to have something to offer potential employers. Demonstrating that effective cross-selling efforts could actually strengthen relationships, and thus help salespeople achieve their personal aims, was critical in exciting them about the new initiatives. More senior executives came to see that risk aversion was driving many of their decisions and that the risk to their own careers would rise considerably as the company’s growth slowed—a problem the new cross-selling efforts were designed to overcome.

As a result, it became far easier for business unit leaders to have faith that if they addressed their own delivery and quality issues, their counterparts in other business units would as well. Increased trust also spurred them to urge their sales groups to agree on a new compensation system that tied 10 percent of each salesperson’s bonus to peer assessments of his or her individual contribution to collaborative sales efforts.

Meanwhile, sales managers created and led small teams of sales reps from a number of business units to flesh out the details of account plans for shared customers. Sales managers and high-performing sales reps served as “navigators” who provided hands-on coaching to frontline sales teams and circulated early success stories to overcome skepticism. A priority was to familiarize salespeople with a new data-sharing system and a dashboard of metrics, including the number of joint sales calls, the percentage of offerings that bundled products from more than one business unit, and the percentage of sales—for a given client or territory—that involved collaboration across business units. Such metrics let salespeople see whether joint sales teams were making progress with specific customers and convinced many that the new cross-selling goals weren’t just empty talk. As the mind-set of cooperation took hold, salespeople identified opportunities to raise the company’s total revenues by 25 percent solely through cross-selling.

Rapid transformation of a sales force
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Sales_Distribution/Transforming_a_large_and_distributed_sales_force_2178
Situation
Changing the way a large, dispersed sales team operates is hard, and implementing a sales program quickly and making it stick is even harder. Yet that was the challenge facing a direct-service company’s commercial-business unit, which had 20 area managers, 200 sales managers, and 2,000 sales representatives spread across North America. The unit was struggling with high staff turnover and poor performance: each year, for example, a third of the sales leads coming in through the call center—roughly 100,000 calls—were never followed up on, because of weak management tools and processes.

Complication
Investors were looking for quick results, so the company’s senior leaders insisted on a program that would raise sales almost immediately. They therefore decided to implement it in 6 months rather than the 12 to 24 typical for a project of this scale. Additionally, in recent years the company had conducted a number of sales-improvement programs, with mixed success, which suggested that employees might be reluctant to attempt another complex change program.

Resolution
Rather than relying on a central team of change leaders and rolling out the program in sequence, from area to area, the company adopted a phased “university approach,” which enabled it to launch the program in all areas simultaneously. The 20 area managers, who had a pivotal role in the sales hierarchy, attended central “academies” along with sales managers. Here they all learned to use new tools and processes, including standardized performance metrics, diagnostic reports, and a custom-designed tool to track and promote accountability for every sales lead. Once the area managers “graduated” from the academy, they rolled out the program in phases, starting with high-priority markets in their own areas. Sales managers and the reps they supervised applied the new tools.

To ensure that these changes endured, the company instituted recurring structured-coaching sessions where area managers used the performance tools to evaluate sales managers and to pinpoint and address their weaknesses. The sales managers in turn coached their reps in the same way. Both the tools and the coaching sessions played a crucial role in the success of the program, which was implemented in most markets within the required six months. By the end of a year, the unit had increased its lead-conversion rates by 20 percent and the number of self-generated leads by 25 percent.

Implications
Just having the right tools won’t force quick or lasting change in the way a large and dispersed sales force operates. But companies can achieve that kind of transformation by identifying an appropriate group of managers, distributed across the organization, to take the lead in promoting change and by adopting the university approach, in which trainees in turn train the employees who report to them.

Ten Seconds to Better Rapport
http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=405&tag=nl.e808
Here’s a ten-second method to build better rapport with a customer. I can testify that it works, as I’ve used it literally hundreds of times. It’s a close to a “Jedi Mind Trick” sales technique as I think you’re ever going to find.

This method based upon the scientific observation that people have what are sometimes called “thought modalities” or, more colloquially, “have their brain wired different ways.” Research has shown that most people favor one of the three different modalities:

• Visual. The person values and responds to what he or she SEES. A visual person will tend to dress flashy, talk quickly, and use plenty of broad hand gestures.
• Auditory. The person values and responds to what he or she HEARS. An auditory person will tend to dress conservatively, talk in an even tone, and use subtle hand gestures, usually synchronized with what’s being said.
• Kinesthetic. The person values and responds to what he or she FEELS. A kinesthetic person will tend to dress casually, talk quite slowly, and make many “checking” gestures, like touching their chin while thinking.

People tend to feel more comfortable with, and prefer to spend time with, other people who share the same modality. They tend to dislike or distrust people who have a different modality. For example, if a prospect is a “visual” and you normally speak like a “kinesthetic,” the prospect is likely to think that you’re dull or stupid. Similarly, if the prospect is a “kinesthetic” and you talk like a “auditory,” the prospect is likely to think you glib or vapid.

Here’s how you use this phenomenon to build rapport almost instantly.

When you have your first real meeting with a prospect, listen to the way that they speak — before you get into the business end of the discussion. A good way to do this is to ask the friendly personal question. I usually use something like: “Before we get started, I’m really curious…how did you end up in such an interesting job/industry/career?”

When the prospect answers, notice carefully the speed with which the prospect talks and the vocabulary that he or she uses. The combination of the two almost ALWAYS reveals the prospect’s primary modality. Example:

• Visual. The prospect will speak very fast and use words like bright, brilliant, clear, demonstrate, focus, frame, glimpse, highlight, illuminate, imagine, light, magnify, perspective, reflect, scan, see, shine, show, viewpoint.”
• Auditory. The prospect will speak at a moderate rate and use works like articulate, assert, audacious, banter, boast, call, crunch, dictated, discuss, edit, note, persuade, promise, recap, ring, say, speak, talk.
• Kinesthetic. The prospect will speak a bit slower than average and use words like bask, blink, bounce, breathe, catch, chop, crawl, friction, heart, impact, impress, move, post, push, sense, sharp, smell, smile, strike, throw, touch, walk, weigh.

Once you’ve determined the prospect’s modality, speak at the same speed and use the same kind of words. The prospect will immediately feel that you understand them better. If you’re sitting across from the prospect, you may even see the prospect physically relax and smile. And why not? You’ve proven, at a visceral level, that you’re on the same wavelength.

This technique really works. It’s one of the main reasons that I’m so good on the phone, and can pretty much get in sync with anyone. By the way, while I’ve practiced this technique for years (I original learned it from Tony Robbins), the specific list of words in this post came from Steve Martin, the author of “Heavy Hitter Selling” and “Heavy Hitter Sales Wisdom”. Smart guy.