sales training melbourne Archives - Page 7 of 7 - Kona

An astonishing 85% of sales training falls short of delivering on its ROI. Additionally, approximately 80% of new skills are lost within one week of training if they are not used, and about 87% of skills are lost within a month of training if they are not used regularly. Sales is the lifeblood of a company. Therefore, without steady sales, companies fail. Yet, some sales teams receive little, if any, training. Others receive inadequate one-hour seminars and are told they have just completed sales training. Is it any wonder why sales training doesn’t work? The best salespeople in the world are akin to Olympic-level athletes. However, companies treat them as if they can simply hit the ground running and sell, sell, sell without any training at all.

Consider how many hours go into training for the Olympics. Ultimately, an Olympic gymnast trains for years before hitting the mat with her teammates. So, we should do no less for our sales leaders! There are many reasons why sales training doesn’t work. The right sales training techniques, however, can help your sales team train for their own unique “Sales Olympics.”

Sales Training Not Working? Here are Five Reasons Why Your Training Fails

A typical sales training scenario is a one-day, half-day or even shorter training session. That involves, an expert, consultant or high-producing salesperson to be invited into a company to speak to their sales team. The expert may hand out books or binders, encourage team members to participate in team-building exercises and listen to plenty of motivational speeches. After a day of receiving exhaustive knowledge on communications, persuasion, prospecting and follow-up, the sales team is told they have successfully completed training. They return to their regular work the following day, and soon the old habits return.

There are many reasons why some sales training sessions fail and others succeed.

Here are five common reasons why sales training often fails.

1. Activities are not tailored to adults. Considering the typical sales training model, it is unsurprising that companies fail to achieve their training ROI. KONA Group CEO Garret Norris, an expert in adult education, identified several key factors for best practices for adult learning. Adults need training that speaks to their learning needs, not training modelled after typical university classroom practices.

KONA Group CEO Garret Norris on Why Training Does Not Work

Adults engaged in learning activities need to:

Know why they are participating in an activity.
Feel invested in the outcome — “What’s in this for me?”
Learn through doing. Newly learned activities must be practised to become second-nature.
Solve problems. Solving problems helps place a new activity into an adult’s long-term memory.
Learn in a social setting. Adults, even more than children, prefer to learn while among peers.
Tap into their life experience. That is, so they forge connections between what they have just learned and real-life scenarios and situations they remember.
Integrate new knowledge with existing information. They like to see a connection between what they have just learned with things they have previously learned.

Assuming adults who attend a one-day seminar will become exceptional salespeople the following day is an unreasonable expectation. Sales training issues aren’t problems with salespeople — they are problems with the model used to train adult learners, whose needs remain unmet by lecture-style workshops.

2. Not enough time allowed for results.

Another factor often overlooked in why sales training doesn’t work is leadership. Companies may invest in sales training, but if the company’s leadership team doesn’t support the time required to learn new skills, sales training may fail. Companies often seek immediate ROI for investing in sales training, but as we have seen, this is an unrealistic expectation. Failing to give the participants enough time to learn, practice and perfect new skills is like asking an out-of-shape adult to run a 10K next week — you can ask, but the person is likely to fail (never mind get hurt!). To truly enact a culture of continuous learning in your organisation, you must “put your money where your mouth is” and pay more than lip service to sales training. Corporate leaders must be willing to allow salespeople to attend training. They must be patient while new skills are learned. Systems must be set up to monitor, measure and report on sales results, with the data used not to punish low performance, but instead to coach and train for improvement.

3. Lack of leadership buy-in and participation.

Can you imagine a NRL team coach who never attends practice? Or the captain of the AFL team telling his players he’s too busy practising his surfing to attend team practice? The same thing happens with many sales managers: they assign personnel to training without attending training themselves. When sales managers fail to attend training, it leads to a big disconnect between “Do as I say” and “Do as I do.” They give mixed messages about the importance of training. Perhaps more importantly, they cannot model the appropriate behaviours because they haven’t learned alongside their staff what’s important.

Managers must be willing to commit the time and effort to sales training alongside their team members. Actively participating in sales training not only encourages team members but demonstrates support for the key concepts being taught. Whether it’s participating in classroom activities alongside trainees or role playing along with them, when the manager participates, training is more effective.

4. Start With the End in Sight: Set Goals

The first step to creating an ideal sales training model is to begin with the end goal in mind. Establish key goals, metrics and measurements first, before creating your training.

Identify what you would like the sales team to learn, know and do after the training is completed. The goals for product knowledge sales training may be quite different from the goals for sales skills training. Identifying which skills to focus on first, and the desired outcomes, will have the most impact. Additionally, practising in a safe, supportive training environment takes much of the risk out of trying new activities. A supportive and encouraging coach ensures people know when they have demonstrated a new skill successfully.

To GET YOUR TEAM INVOLVED IN ACTIVE LEARNING AND ENGAGED IN THE ART OF SALES contact

KONA 1300 611 288 | info@kona.com.au for a confidential conversation today.

In Sales Excuse #1 we looked at the common excuse of “No One is Buying”. In Sales Excuse #2 we looked at ways for sales people to improve their time management

In Sales Excuse #3, how often do your sales team say they didn’t make the sale because “Our price is too high? We are too expensive”, “Our competition is cheaper than us!”, “If we were cheaper we could sell more!”?

This is just another excuse where sales people focus on their own ‘3Ps’ of Product, Price and Problems rather than on the value they can add to customers. There are some simple things we can all do to have quality conversations with our customers, which in turn, leads to better quality sales and repeat business.

At The KONA Group we train and coach Sales Teams every day that are looking to improve their results and when price is a common excuse for underperformance we recommend the following 3 insights as a starting point.

1. Have the right conversations.

Quality Conversations start with Quality Questions. Asking interesting ‘High Value’ open questions that encourage your prospects and customers to talk about themselves and their business is critical. You want customers to value having a conversation with you, not look for a reason to get rid of you as early as possible, so how do you have these conversations? It’s easy really, you ask the right questions based on your customers Business, Market, Competition and Future…. and then you shut up and listen.

In meetings with customers and prospects your salespeople should only be talking 20% of the time. Listening means really listen, not just be quiet whilst waiting for your turn to speak.

2. Adding value to your customers BUSINESS is the key to make selling easy.

Adding value to an existing or potential customer is not just about selling your product or service. Often during a quality conversation with a customer many opportunities to add value will emerge and while some of these will involve your products and services, if you look at the non-product related challenges they face from a Business perspective, you will find more opportunities to add value.

Most businesses are bombarded with salespeople trying to flog them a product or a service regardless of their need however your Sales Team will be amazed at what happens when they start to have quality conversations focused on the customer’s Business rather than the 3Ps. Think rapport building on steroids!

3. Make it about the customer, even when you want it to be about you…

It is easy to say ‘Put the customer at the centre of everything your do’ but salespeople rarely do. It is not about you but rather is always about the customer, even when it really is about you. The moment a customer or a prospect believes that you are only in it for yourself then TRUST melts away and you are back to a price based haggle.

Put your own self-interest to one side and focus on the customer, their organisation, their issues, their strategy and allow the opportunities to add value with your products and services to emerge. You may even find that you never have to actually close the deal, your prospect may do it for you! At the end of the day, all else being equal, most customers will make a price-based decision. It a salespersons job to make sure that all things are not equal.

They need to be the difference, the X factor, the point of differentiation, and then their customers will buy from them, regardless of price!

Going forward: If Quality ‘non-product’ conversations are a challenge for your team then customised sales training and coaching WILL help your people to become more successful. Constantly ‘sharpening the saw’, as Stephen Covey puts it, is a critical component of being a sales professional.

So to discuss how we can design a customised sales training and coaching program for your organisation please contact the KONA Sales Performance Specialists via email at info@kona.com.au or call 1300 611 288.

Because Hope Is NOT a Sales Strategy

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Author – Garret Norris – https://www.linkedin.com/in/garretnorris/