Sales Training - How to Maximize Sales by Changing Your
Sales Training Focus
by Alan Rigg
Published on this site: November 23rd, 2005 - See
more articles from this month
Maximizing account penetration is one of the most critical
functions in sales. Why? The depth of account penetration
has an enormous impact on revenues and profitability.
Think about it - if every one of your company's salespeople
sold every product and service in their portfolio to every
business unit, department, and division of every account,
what kind of number would they produce? Something huge, right?
From a sales management perspective, few things are more
frustrating than having a bunch of "one trick ponies"
on a sales team. These are salespeople that have developed
a comfort level with one product or service, and that product
or service makes up 80% to 100% of their sales.
I used to work for a computer distributor that had numerous
salespeople that fit this mold. They would congratulate themselves
for selling servers to an account, completely oblivious to
the fact that the very same account was also buying storage,
networking equipment, software, and professional services.
The distributor's salespeople only scratched the surface of
the total available opportunity in most accounts.
Here is a second huge frustration for sales managers and
executives -- salespeople that don't produce "traction"
with new products and services.
When your company introduces a new product or service, you
make a pretty sizeable investment to train your salespeople
to sell the new product or service, right? Doesn't it drive
you crazy when only a fraction of your salespeople actually
sell the new product or service? The return on your sales
training investment stinks, and your company never sees the
revenue boost it expected to receive from the new product
or service.
Why do I bring up lack of account penetration and lack of
sales traction for new products and services in the same article?
Because the same problem is often at the root of both issues!
That problem is an excessive focus on technical details.
Many managers and salespeople believe that salespeople need
to become experts in order to sell a product or service effectively.
To develop this understanding, companies invest enormous amounts
of time and money in exhaustive training to educate salespeople
on product features and benefits, performance characteristics,
industry information, pricing guidelines, promotional activities,
available collateral material, etc.
Unfortunately, when salespeople leave these training sessions,
they often have no idea how to find or qualify opportunities
for the product or service they were just "trained"
to sell! This leaves the salespeople frustrated, as they feel
the time spent in training was wasted. Management is equally
frustrated with their sales team's inability to gain traction
with new products and services, and their inability to learn
to sell their company's entire portfolio of products and services.
This mutual frustration results from a lack of recognition
of one very important fact:
When a salesperson identifies a qualified opportunity, there
is usually no shortage of knowledgeable resources that can
assist the salesperson with converting the opportunity into
a sale.
These resources may include technical or other specialists
from the salesperson's own company, or similar resources that
are employed by suppliers or channel partners.
If salespeople have access to product/service experts, why
should they spend time learning technical details? Instead,
why don't they laser-focus their learning on how to find and
qualify opportunities?
Your company can facilitate this kind of focused learning
by redesigning product and service training curriculums to
address the following topics:
- Product/Solution/Service Overview: What does the
product or service do (in plain English)?
- Differentiation: What are a few KEY differences
between this product or service and competitive products
or services?
- Business Problems: What business problems does
the product or service solve?
- Qualifying Questions: What questions should salespeople
ask to determine whether a prospect or customer has the
business problems that the product or service can solve,
and to quantify the impact of these business problems?
- Expert Resources: What expert resources are available
to help salespeople manage technical details?
If your salespeople have access to product/service experts,
you can turn them into prospecting and qualifying machines
by focusing your company's product/service training curriculums
on how to find and qualify opportunities. This strategy will
help your organization maximize account penetration and jump-start
sales for new products and services.
Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author
of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: Why Most Salespeople
Don't Perform and What to Do About It. His company, 80/20
Sales Performance, helps business owners, executives, and
managers double sales by implementing The Right Formula™
for building top-performing sales teams. For more information
and more free sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com
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