The Deadly Sins of Sales Training
Petr Zelenka
8K+ leaders coached ?? B2B Founders: Sales, GTM, or team issues?? 2x results (ROI) in 180 days with proven Playbooks?, Elite network & coaching – OR we’ll pay you double??Just 50 spots. ? Claim free Growth Audit??
Sales training investments are getting wasted!?
So we asked badass revenue leaders a simple question that made many of them smile: What are the deadly sins of sales training??
Well, here you have their most interesting answers:?
The best messenger of sales training should be the leader who is responsible for the results. Ideally, the Chief Commercial Officer or the first-line sales managers. It shows everybody they are fully bought into what they train on, so sellers would actually adopt the new practices.
One and done training. What's the reinforcement? We need to have buy-in from managers
We need to slow down to go faster, but we lack the luxury of slow today.
Sales leaders and managers can, and should, be a training and enablement
Salespeople do not listen to their senior leaders as much as they care about what their first-line sales managers have to say day to day.
When I want salespeople to attend a sales training program
Getting buy-in from sales leaders is key. If sales managers help build it, they do not tear it down.
Another thing is communication. We should ask: who is the preferred sender for the audience we want to enable? Let them be the messenger because they have the influence, not the enablement department.
We deliver too much content at once. We should only deliver content in small chunks at the time the learner needs it.
Training is still about lecturing and talking at people rather than learning and upskilling.
There is too much content in sales training, which dilutes the more substantive insights. We have to distill the material and methodologies down to a handful focused on selling techniques that are highly relevant for all participants. It would make the training more efficient and impactful and more easily reinforced through consistent application.
Sales training is not engaging; there is too much PowerPoint and not enough good real-life examples from the industry. It's not relevant.
Sales enablement is not about passing knowledge and lecturing but about building skills. It needs to be active, live, and student-led.
Sales enablers don't need to show how much they know. They often overteach. They should only teach what the learners need to know at that moment. They will not need to know everything. Competency levels occur with both training and experience.
We need to minimize the number of action items we train and coach on.
Sellers should not always depend on the company to educate and should make self-educating a priority.?
Outside companies do not always provide exercises that are relatable. It's not always customized. At times, there is not enough peer-to-peer interaction. A combination of self-education and in-house sales enablement works best.?
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Training is only as good as those executing on that.
Sales training should be easy to understand and implement immediately, creating more buy in from your team and ultimately stronger adoption.
Sales Leadership needs to follow up after training their teams to inspect what they expect.
Everybody is looking for short, quick fixes on Linkedin instead of proper training and coaching on skills.
Salespeople want to learn from other salespeople. Being mindful of engaging your sales leaders in teams at every step of the design process is crucial. From leveraging top performers in your analysis, providing feedback on the design, to bringing leaders in for facilitation of elements of the experience, they are your most critical partners and champions in the change curve.?
The biggest deadly sin is to follow the training flavor of the day rather than focusing on your own sales methodology
Companies need to be wary of 'sales training du jour.' Rather, they should decide on what is believed to be the best tool(s) for a sales team and invest in that methodology fully and completely. Adopt it, own it, live it, and decide what determines the success (or failure) of that methodology, including a timeline before hopping to the next methodology in the queue.
If the training is not fully supported by me, salespeople won't take it seriously. If you do not have any refresher, the investment is probably gone. Also, are we training the right things? Sellers have got short attention spans. It has to be engaging and relevant.?
Sales training is only based around the product rather than around the customer pains. Customers do not want to listen to product descriptions.
Also, you learn more from your teammates than from the coach. Peer-to-peer training
Partner sales professionals are trained using the same materials as the direct sales teams. Partner sellers need to focus on "what is in it for the Partner" and how they can position their product or solution to assist the partner in generating revenue with the customer. The job is to show the art of the possible. Sales training is often around the process of executing a direct sale - MEDDICC to progress the deal and booking the deal in the CRM or QTC, not helping a partner build a business or practice around a product or solution.
The biggest issue with sales training is not having any and assuming people do things well. We have to involve the leaders because, without their buy-in and their reinforcement via 1:1 follow-ups
One of the most valuable things a sales leader can do is act as the frontline training manager, especially in the early stages of scaling the sales org. At SinglePlatform, I ran our training program up until we had 50 AEs on the floor. I think that was a large part of the reason we were able to scale so effectively.
Based on our experience at Hackerly, sellers do not really listen to trainers or enablement.?
They only relate to their peers and change their behavior based on the priorities of their first-line manager.?
If the messenger of training is the manager who coaches their team (not pretending to “know-it-all”), then people stay, solve problems together, and hit sales targets.?
However, according to HBS, most salespeople wouldn't pay $1/hour for coaching from their manager, and 60% of sellers quit because managers don't have the skills to coach.?
If you have 20% attrition, you lose 1 seller/team of 8, which might be worth $350,000- $450,000.
Without training sales leaders on how to coach, enablement initiatives are wasted due to poor reinforcement, and the company typically leaks 7-25% of revenue.
Therefore, we decided to solve almost all the above — coaching sales leaders to upskill their teams with our Sales Coaching Guides to lead coaching sessions and reinforce key skills. (Yes, shameless plug here)
Finally, sales training of the future requires a different approach based on social engineering, the science of behavioral change. It should be live, peer-based, yet manager-driven. Without the buy-in from managers, sales enablement does not exist.
Chief Marketing Officer @ SpeakDuo | MBA, Artificial Intelligence | AI & SaaS Marketing Consultant | Techstars FCP ‘23
1 年Now here's the thing about sales trainings ?? Training - done once, 80% of it forgotten the next day ? Coaching - done all the time following the changing buyer behaviours & sales peoples types. Same goes for the playbooks: ?? Playbook - static, done once, updated too little ? Conditional guidance - supposed to be done all the time, but often not followed as it takes time. PROBLEM: - When you change the playbook, you have no idea how it will affect your revenue by the end of the year. Conditional guidance would be so useful to follow on the revenue prediction along with the actual forecast sales people are bringing in. Try out ValueOrbit?and see how smartly this gap can beclosed through predictive AI.
Family-oriented | Thrives on empowering others | Addicted to learning | Lover of nature
1 年Thank you for sharing these insights. I am especially passionate about this “Sales enablement is not about passing knowledge and lecturing but about building skills. It needs to be active, live, and student-led.”
Director of Sales Enablement
1 年Everything here is resonating. As I am now overseeing more responsibility in our enablement department I am going to take this particular edition of your newsletter to my senior sales leaders to hopefully get everyone on board to point us in the right direction. Everything listed here was an issue that road blocked our organization from reaping the benefits of any training in the past.
Director of Sales Enablement, Sales Recruiting & Training at Positive Promotions
1 年Great read! It’s tough when you train a successful class and then the coaching doesn’t continue or the message isn’t the same! This is how bad habits form and complacency sets in.
Fun Aunt, Learning & Development Leader, & Past President of ATDChi
1 年I'm honored to be a bad ass revenue leader! Thank you for my new favorite title Petr Zelenka! And thank you for gathering these fantastic reminders!