Salespeople and sales managers have been trained and retrained, often on the same topics, because sales leaders frequently look for quick fixes to deeper sales organization problems. Explore three reasons for lukewarm training reception and suggest how the sales training community can improve enthusiasm by linking training directly to outcomes for which sellers are held accountable.
Resistance to Repetition… and Change
Sales training tends to focus on an in-depth approach to one specific set of sales activities. The most common sales training programs are designed to help sellers:
- Develop strategic plans for key accounts
- Develop strategies to qualify and win individual opportunities
- Plan and conduct more effective sales calls
Every major sales training company has programs for at least one of these areas, quite probably all three. By the time a seller has been in sales for a few years, it is highly likely that they have attended one or more of these three types of sales training. What kills seller enthusiasm is the idea of being trained again on something they feel they already know. Also, receptivity may be lukewarm because sellers do not relish having to adjust their approach from the old to something new and different.
In recent years, sales training programs have been introduced to the market positioned in a slightly different way, with emphasis on sales messaging, and have subsequently become all the rage. Such programs receive slightly higher acceptance because they are “new” and not necessarily a re-tread on an old idea; however, many training companies are now jumping on the “messaging” bandwagon and it is only a matter of time before more of these programs are widely available and meet with the same salesforce resistance.
Training and Real Life Problem Solving: The Missing Link
The second reason receptivity to sales training is tepid at best is the fact that companies don’t make it abundantly clear how training will address a real problem sellers face in the marketplace. For example, if a seller is struggling to differentiate their company offerings from those of a thorny competitor and has also lost several important deals to that competitor, it is highly likely that the seller would be very willing to be trained on how to better differentiate their own company’s offerings. Likewise, if a seller is struggling with moving deals to a close and is losing many to “no-decision,” that same seller would most likely be highly interested in ways to drive urgency to help bring deals to a close.
Without a clear and direct link between the problems sellers face in their day-to-day job and the specific ways in which training will help overcome these problems, sellers will likely see the training as a nuisance that decreases their selling time.
The Role of Sales Leadership
The last and perhaps most problematic reason for poor receptivity to training is the fact that new sales leaders typically want to make their mark on the sales organization when they arrive. One common means of achieving this is by introducing a new sales methodology. Many long-term sellers have lived through multiple changes in sales leadership. They also have confidence that if they keep their heads down, they will outlast the next “flavor of the month.” Naturally, they are not thrilled at the notion of new training. There is nothing wrong with a new sales leader wanting to make their mark; however, the same rules of engagement identified above are still necessary. The sales leader needs to ensure that he or she is lining up training that actually solves a problem that sellers care about.
To conclude, the link between the problem and the solution needs to be made explicit by sales leaders and L&D leaders in three ways: before training to ensure receptivity, during training to ensure learning, and afterwards to help drive adoption. If and when sales leadership and L&D ensures that training solves a very real sales problem, not a symptom of a larger systemic issue such as product positioning or organizational design, receptivity to training will no longer be an issue.
Michelle Vazzana is a partner at Vantage Point Performance and co-author of the book, “Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance.”
