Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

I have participated in both workshops. They are first rate. The issue that I have with them is that they are just that, workshops. In order for them to make the kind of impact you want/need it is important that you have more than a workshop.

I believe in developing a sales process - a small step at a time. And that comes from a person who sells workshops...

I'm certainly familiar with Miller Heiman, the Conceptual Selling and Strategic Selling books and concepts, and the workshops -- though I have not personally attended the workshops.

I've recommended all of the above to clients over the years and they've always been quite satisfied. The Miller Heiman company reputation is excellent.

As Frank said, though, workshops are just a starting point. If you don't implement what you learn, they're not worth a lot.

First of all, I would like to preface this with the fact that we are a competitor of Miller Heiman. And as a Marketing Director for Action Selling, I know what other companies in the sales training industry are providing. Some of their content is very good. The problem is simply this: They fail to produce any long-lasting impact on increasing sales revenue.

Investing in training for your sales force seems like a perfectly sensible business practice. It must be a smart thing to do; after all, sales training is estimated to be a billion-dollar industry.

Here's the problem: According to ES research, nearly 90% of all Sales Training Fails. A billion-dollar industry with a failure rate approaching 90%? Why would any company want to waste training dollars and everyone's time doing something that has a one-in-ten chance of producing a significant payback?

With the ever-accelerating speed of change in both knowledge and technology, it is clear that we have a choice: We either continue to learn or we allow our skills and knowledge to become obsolete.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "We only hire experienced salespeople," as if that were a solution. The idea that sales experience is a "living textbook" has two major pitfalls.

1. As the world changes, our methods for dealing with situations lag the change. Old techniques become ineffective without us ever realizing it and we continue making the same selling errors time and time again. Remember the two choice option: "Would Wednesday work for you or would Tuesday be better?" That might have worked 25 years ago, but in today's economy, propects are far more sophisticated.

2. In a sales career spanning 30 years, the same one-year's experience can be repeated 30 times. The quantity of experience is not necessarily connected to its richness or intensity. Following Action Selling workshops, I’ve heard hundreds of veteran salespeople say, "I wish I'd learned these skills 30 years ago."

Here’s the situation:

1. Individuals, as well as the companies that employ them, must continue to learn in order to remain competitive.

2. Experience and learning are not synonymous.

3. Since 90% of sales training fails, there must be some special characteristics about the 10% that succeeds. Identifying those characteristics is crucial if you want training to pay off.

Everyone has experienced a great seminar. You laughed, you cheered, you took notes. But a month later, I'll bet you could barely recall the name of the speaker, much less the things you "learned." Research shows that 87% of the information delivered in seminars and workshops is forgotten in 30 days. After that, the retention rate gets worse.

Trainers and educators attribute this mainly to a lack of learning "reinforcement" following the event. They're partly right. But there's more to it than that. Because the learner's inability to recall information isn't the only reason why most sales training fails. It isn't even the primary explanation.

Here are the three biggest reasons why any given training program will fail to produce lasting performance improvements:

A. Wrong Content - First, you have to teach the right things. Many skills, traits, and qualities contribute to sales success. For example, personality and motivation definitely have an impact on performance. The trouble is, you can't teach personality and motivation—and salespeople can't "learn" it! Training has to focus on skills that can be taught, learned, mastered, and measured. Yes, there might be a hundred skills that are teachable and learnable, and that contribute to sales success. But you can't teach anyone how to do a hundred things well. You need to identify, teach, and reinforce the handful of skills that are most critical to high performance in a sales role.

B. Rejected by Salespeople - You've seen them—the sales reps who come to a training session with the attitude that they already know it all. The body language alone speaks volumes: arms crossed, eyes rolling, virtually daring the instructor to say something that might interest them. These people were not properly prepared to come to your training. And without motivation, there can be no learning at all. Salespeople need to be sold on the need for training and the benefits it offers them. This sale is no different from any other sale. The buyers (your salespeople) must see the program as a solution to needs that they agree exist. For example if salespeople take a benchmark sales skills assessment and it measures and shows them that they lack skills in asking the best questions, they would be more willing to grow in this area.

C. Ineffective Transfer – Transfer is a term we use for learning that actually gets applied in the field. It's the only reason why a business organization would want to do training in the first place.

Most people mistakenly think of transfer as a synonym for follow-up or reinforcement—things that happen after the training program is over. Sure, that's part of what needs to be done. But other factors play into the transfer process as well.

Here are the critical elements that determine whether learning will transfer from the classroom to the job.

1. Students must be actively involved in the entire learning process.

2. Early in the training process, students need to connect the learning to their life experiences. It has to make sense in the world they know. They need to see relevance right away.

3. They must know that there will be follow-up activities and assessments that measure what they learned and how well they are applying the new skills in their day-to-day work.

4. They must be held accountable by their managers to demonstrate the use of new skills and knowledge in the field. This cements the message that management believes the learning was important.

5. Managers must minimize the transfer distance by helping learners apply new skills and knowledge on the job—quickly.

Most sales training programs contain some good useful information. Immediately following a training session, some salespeople will pick up an idea, take it to the field, and score a sale that they wouldn't have gotten before. Instant ROI! Terrific! But a few months later they're back to their old behaviors. It's called relapse.

So the relapse problem isn't apparent until sometime down the road. Only when you look back a year later do you realize that nothing that was taught actually stuck. Surely you should be able to expect more than a short-term blip in return for your investment of time and money in sales training.

Do you recognize and agree with the dilemma as I've described it? Then suppose we talk about the solution.

Look us up if you want a real solution to sales training that sticks.

To Your Success