Health Care or Entertainment?

While writing this book, Neil Rackham commented to us how sales training can be compared to two industries: health care and entertainment. We hadn’t thought of it quite like this, but we certainly see the same thing. When sales training is like health care, its purpose is to make something better. For health care–style sales training to succeed, you need the right understanding of the issues, the right treatment plan, and dedication from the health care provider and the patient to stick with the plan. When sales training is more like entertainment, it’s just an enjoyable diversion. It might make an impression—you might even remember months later how fun it was—but it doesn’t accomplish much beyond that.

We recently spoke with a business leader who was planning a half-day sales training program. His desired outcome was transforming a service and delivery team into a proactive sales force tasked with increasing sales to existing accounts by selling new offerings. How did they want to do it? Insight. They also communicated to us that success was critical. The future of the company literally hung in the balance.

We asked if there was any training delivery time available over and above the four hours? No, a half-day was it. We asked if it was possible to invest time and energy before the training through e-learning or after the training with learning reinforcement and coaching. No, just the half-day, and could we focus on really jazzing up the team?

The training needed to be health care but the approach was entertainment. We didn’t think it was going to work. The proportion of the input (i.e., the training initiative) needed to be rigorous enough to produce the desired output (i.e., account penetration with a team not used to selling, let alone inspiring buyers with new ideas, which is what they had to do). In this case, the business objective was clear, but the learning and change effort was nowhere near aligned to achieve it.

Assess the Learning Needs of Your Team

When it comes to learning needs of sellers, leaders need to figure out:

• Where the sales team is now regarding the skills, knowledge, and attributes needed to succeed (this is the starting point, or point A)
• Each individual’s improvement potential
• In which sales role each individual is most likely to succeed (and whether the person is a good fit for becoming an insight seller)
• What it looks like when they’ve succeeded (this is the new reality, or point B)
• What kind of effort and time it’s going to take to get from point A to B

When leaders don’t dig to find out what sellers need to produce the outcomes they seek, it makes for sales training initiatives that:

• Focus on content the team doesn’t need
• Leave out content the team does need
• Fail to deliver content at the right level of sophistication (e.g., too basic or too advanced—getting it just right is left to chance)
• Fail to build learning processes that are rigorous enough to actually develop needed skills and knowledge to the point they transfer to on-the-job behaviors

Before implementing any sales training program, the companies that succeed are serious about making sure the learning approach is rigorous enough to do its part in producing behavioral change and getting results.

Assess Attributes along with Skills and Knowledge

Researchers publishing in refereed academic sales journals assert assessing competencies (we use the word attributes) is a must.^{8, 9} When sales leaders don’t assess their team’s attributes, sales training fails because:

• Sellers don’t have the drivers to succeed. People end up in sales training and may actually gain the requisite skills and knowledge to succeed, but they don’t have the drivers in place to achieve top performance, or sometimes, any performance at all.
• Sellers have detractors holding them back. Even those who have some drivers in place to succeed have detractor attributes that act like weights pulling them down.

If the drivers of success aren’t in place—meaning the person doesn’t have, for example, passion for work and for selling, performance orientation, sense of urgency, assertiveness, and so on—it’s quite possible the person shouldn’t even be in the training at all. Much as you might want your kids to go to medical school, if they fail biology and what they want to do is teach art history, medicine rarely works out.

If too many detractors are in place, the salesperson might have capability but can still fail.

Neglect real, incisive inquiry into each person’s attributes (described in Chapter 8), and sales training initiatives leave the gate with weights tying them down.

Process and Methodology

Here are how process and methodology help.

• Process: a systematic series of actions, typically grouped in stages, aimed at producing a specific output
  • Process is a guide to action. For sellers to bring insight to the table systematically, companies must build it into the process.
  • Process helps sellers be efficient and get more done.
  • Process prevents reinventing the wheel.
  • Process allows for process improvement. If you can measure it, you can manage it. Find the people who are succeeding, and learn what they’re doing to succeed; then you can help other people do the same.
• Methodology: a system of strategies, principles, guidelines, tools, learning approaches, language, and evaluation methods for selling
  • Methodology provides guidelines and tools for how to do specific things in the sales process, such as leading sales conversations, prospecting, delivering presentations, gaining commitment, goal setting, account management, and so on.
  • Methodology creates a shared language that everyone in the company understands, uses, and follows.
  • Methodology helps define what works in various areas of the process and provides a platform to share that across the sales force and company.

The companies that make insight selling work make it a part of the culture. Process and methodology are major parts of that.

From the process perspective, here is an example of how RAIN Selling has been tailored and overlaid into a major customer relationship management (CRM) system (Figure 11.1). When sellers have visual cues to remind them what they are supposed to do, real-time training and tools available, and tracking directly in their CRM, both the process and the method have a much better chance for adoption.

If you want sales training to succeed, don’t let it float in a vacuum without process and methodology.

Goals and Action Planning

Process and methodology are essentially guides for behavior. They help you know when to do certain things (process) and how to do them well (methodology). Sales training that gets this far, but doesn’t focus on goal setting and action planning, misses a huge opportunity to boost results.

When researching one of our other books, we spoke to Dr. Jim Harter, Gallup Consulting’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being. Gallup has asked over 12.5 million people, “Do I know what is expected of me at work?” Slightly more than half answered, “strongly agree.” In other words, slightly less than half are not so sure what’s expected of them at work.

Dr. Harter further told us, “Workplace performance suffers dramatically with those that answer below ‘strongly agree.’”

When sales training helps sellers build and track goals for themselves, it not only erases the problem of sellers knowing what’s expected of them but also maximizes motivation and commitment. With action plans, take care not to build them without first focusing on goal setting. Without clear, written goals, action plans aren’t meaningful to the individual. Without meaning, execution over the long term suffers.

When goals are in place, not only do they have the effect of maximizing action, but they can also increase the sellers’ attributes of passion for work and sales, their performance orientation, and their money orientation. Together these often increase motivation to succeed in sales.

Earlier in this chapter we discussed building capability. When sellers are capable, they can sell. Just after that we discussed attributes. When the right attributes are in place, they will sell and sell well. Add process and methodology and goals and action planning to the mix, and you add the catalyst to bring it alive: what to do to sell.

When process and methodology are in place, and sellers have goals and action plans, sales activities are more organized, more energetic, higher volume, more effective, and more efficient.

Reinforce Training for Lasting Impact

Adult learning is an ongoing process. Only through repetition and practice will your sales team internalize the training and put it to use consistently. Let’s assume a sales training event is well received. After the event, you can either build on its effectiveness or let it fade (Figure 11.2).

As Aberdeen Group found in one of its studies, “Best-in-class companies outpace laggards by nearly a two-times factor in providing post-training reinforcement of the best practices commonly learned in classroom-style instructor-led sales education sessions. These firms have learned that long-term success depends on underscoring the best practices in sales training deployments.”¹⁴

And the reinforcement makes a difference in results (Figure 11.3).

The concept that learning needs to be reinforced won’t be much of a news flash for most readers. Still, strong posttraining reinforcement is the exception in sales training. For those companies that apply reinforcement that works, it makes a tremendous difference in training effectiveness and sales results.

Evaluating Sales Has Its Advantages

Those companies that do evaluate sales performance systematically have a number of advantages:

• They can measure the effect of sales training and performance improvement initiatives.
• They can improve sales strategies and rollout successes across the team.
• They can remove ineffective sales strategies and training components in favor of those working better.
• They can shorten learning curves and get new salespeople producing faster than before.
• They can improve continuously.

The evaluation process itself also has a positive effect on sales results. Customer renewal rates, deal size, team achievement of quota, and salesperson achievement of quota are all positively affected by performance management processes.¹⁶

Without effective training and sales performance evaluation processes, sales training can fail simply because companies have no idea if it has succeeded. Moreover, without an evaluation process, it’s nearly impossible to hold salespeople accountable for changing and improving behavior or for taking actions and achieving results.

No evaluation = no accountability.

Implemented in the right way, sales performance evaluation analytics can be the source of significant competitive advantage. In fact, 67 percent more best-in-class companies have sales analytics than laggards.¹⁷

As Thomas H. Davenport wrote in “Competing on Analytics,” “Organizations are competing on analytics not just because they can—business today is awash in data crunchers—but also because they should. At a time when firms in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technologies, business processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation. And analytics competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes.”¹⁸

Employ analytics and you’ll be able to join an elite club: companies that actually succeed with continuous improvement. When everything comes together (Figure 11.4), you’ll have salespeople who:

• Can do
• Will do
• Know what to do
• Get it done and keep getting better

Many sales training dollars go to waste because leaders don’t pay proper attention to what needs to happen to make sales training work. When leaders turn these seven failures into successes, insight selling truly comes alive.