What Kills Sales Training Efficiency?

Strong, skillful sales team can be the competitive advantage your company needs. And a comprehensive training program to develop your sales team can be a smart investment. Salespeople today are trained rigorously on product specifications, prospecting, presentation, time management, the intricacies of the sales process, closing and many other things. However, when it comes to the crucial dynamics of human interaction and customer relations, salespeople are often abandoned to their own devices. The assumption that every salesperson is a "people person" leads to a glaring void in training. The unfortunate truth is that many salespeople find customer interactions intimidating, leaving them psychologically unprepared to handle the complexities of human relationships in a sales context.

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I n the words of one of Ingmar Bergman's characters, "We're emotionally illiterate. And not just you and me, but practically everyone, that's the depressing thing. We're taught all about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever it's called, but not a word about the soul. We're abysmally ignorant, both about ourselves and about others... it doesn’t dawn on anyone that we must first learn about ourselves and our own feelings". Sales is not just a transaction; it's an intricate dance of interpersonal relationships, encompassing trust and friendship, but also alienation and sometimes even animosity. The emotional rewards and pitfalls of the profession can swing from extreme satisfaction to a bleak landscape, echoing the tragic fate of Willy in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman."

In essence, management wants salespeople to learn to

(1) know the product

(2) work hard

(3) make numerous phone calls

(4) get the order

(5) do the process all over again.

That's all well and good, but where is the salesperson's motivation to sell? Money is an incentive, but it has no effect on the customer. Goading the salesperson doesn't necessarily goad the customer. What about sales meetings? Motivational seminars? That doesn't help the salesperson either, because all of these approaches only influence the salesperson, not the customer. When the excitement wears off, every salesperson embarks on the lonely journey of meeting and selling difficult customers, meeting cool prospects, and navigating mental confrontations for which they are all too often unprepared. The problem with motivational seminars is that most of it is designed for a group of salespeople rather than an individual. In the outer boroughs, where an individual salesperson has to do his/her job, the encouraging group spirit quickly fades. Under sales pressure, good ideas that originated in the group can be forgotten.

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The astute salesperson quickly understands that techniques aimed at getting more and more sales out of him are repetitive, rather than improving his ability to make more sales. And what he really wants is something that will help him in his dealings with the consumer. Something that will help him improve his own negative thinking and address the main cause of sales failure. Something that will work in any customer situation, a source of confidence, self-control and a technique to read and predict the customer's actions and words.

For the salesperson to be effective, his company needs to put money not only in his pocket, but also in his "mental bank." The salesperson must not only know more about the customer, but also about himself and his/her relationships with others. He must also learn to recognize where he — and his customer — are mentally during the sales process. Unfortunately, such training is hard to come by. For such training, necessitates the use of instructors with special knowledge. This is not to say that many sales managers are not capable of teaching interpersonal skills. However, they can only train a limited number of people at one time. Since this is primarily individual training, classes should be kept small and training time extended.

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Conclusion

The efficacy of sales training doesn't solely lie in product manuals or motivational speeches. True sales success can only be achieved when salespeople are taught how to interact, connect, and form meaningful relationships with their customers. It is a glaring oversight to invest in training without considering the emotional intelligence and psychological resilience that the role demands. An effective sales training program should be as focused on imparting these "soft skills" as it is on any other traditional metric. Filling this gap is not just beneficial; it's imperative for the modern salesforce to succeed in an increasingly competitive and emotionally complex marketplace.

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