TRAINING
methodology, then the ability of the company to make the right investment decisions and continue to expand their existing relationships is greatly enhanced.
SECRET #7: MAKE LINE MAN- AGERS RESPONSIBLE FOR TRAINING SUCCESS.
Managers should actively participate in the sales training – either through a manager briefing or through actu- ally participating in the full program – so they can reinforce the training through coaching and role modeling. When managers participate in the training with their reporting team, the role of the manager should be as a coach working with the trainer. Acting as a coach forces the manager to grasp the concepts, skills, language, and tools that will be necessary for post-training coaching and feedback. (To make this effective, line managers must sometimes receive additional training on how to be good coaches and how to give useful feedback.) Most important, make sure there’s a way to measure the result of the post-training coaching, so the line managers can assess how they’re doing. Typical measurement methods include benchmarking before-and-after training performance and setting criteria, such as cross-selling goals, increased number of
SELLING TIP
A Checklist for Mastering the Basics of Closing Closing is simple – if you remember six fundamentals.
Fill out the following checklist after your next sales call. Whether or not you made the sale, you’ll see where you can improve your technique and your closing rate. Did you clearly describe all the benefits your product or service offers – what it will do for the client? Did you ask the client to buy? Did you come right out and ask for the order? Did you discover the key issue to your client’s buying decision? (Examples: you’re too new; you’re too much like XYZ Company, which burned the client last time; your company lacks name recognition.)
Did you uncover the key benefit – either perceived or real – that your client wants from your product or service? Did you make lots of little closes so the client had an opportunity to make small decisions rather than one big threatening one?
Did you try one more time – when you thought the sale was lost? Use this checklist after every sale for two weeks and you’ll be a master closer. The fundamentals will become second nature and you’ll be first rate.
– SELLING POWER EDITORS 24 | MAY 2018 SELLING POWER © 2018 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION. referrals, and higher closing ratios.
SECRET #8: USE REAL CUSTOMER DATA FOR THE SALES TRAINING. All too many sales training programs are heavy on the theory of selling and the importance of sales process, but they are not tied to the day-to-day reality of selling.
The best way to ensure sales train-
ing isn’t just academic and theoretical is to use real customers as part of the sales training process. For example, if part of the training is building a com- prehensive sales campaign for a major customer, use currently active custom- ers in the pipeline as the example. In addition to ensuring accuracy, you can bet that the reps who are assigned those customers will be paying close attention and thus are more likely to incorporate the skills being taught into their day-to-day work. But using real customers has another extremely important benefit. At the very least, when those reps walk out of the sales training session, they’ll have a much better chance of closing business with those customers. Even if they completely forget what they’ve learned (which is highly unlikely under these circumstances), you will have gotten substantial value for your training dollars.
SECRET #9: RUN A PILOT PROGRAM TO PROVE THE TRAINING’S USEFULNESS. When a company’s top management is convinced a certain kind of sales training will increase revenue and profit, there’s a tendency to roll the training out to the entire company in one gigantic rush. However, even if the powers that be are completely convinced a program is a panacea, it should be rolled into a sales organiza- tion gradually. The best way to do this is to always start with a pilot program. There are three reasons this
is effective. First, starting with a relatively small program allows the sales trainers to focus their energies on a small group, which makes the pilot more likely to be successful. Second, every training effort requires some fine tuning, and the pilot allows the sales trainers to make adjustments necessary to make the training as effective as possible. Third, and most important, when the pilot is successful, especially in terms of increased sales, that success will quickly become clear to the other sales teams, who will clamor to get trained. This is a far cry from the usual scenario in which sales reps resist training because they see it as distracting them from the business of making their numbers.
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