Sales Understanding

If you’ve ever been a salesperson—or if you’ve just shared a cubicle wall with one—you know salespeople are often gifted talkers. Without public speaking and conversational skills, they would have no way to convey a message to potential buyers. It’s important for them.

Salespeople are in some ways quite similar to other “creatives” in the business world, such as marketers and advertising copywriters. All of these professionals constantly seek new and innovative ways to convince customers to buy certain products or services. And despite what Dilbert comics would have you believe, salespeople also tend to be well informed on the capabilities and limitations of the products they sell. Familiarity with product is often the foundation of a company’s sales training curriculum.

But what if your salespeople have the gift of gab, the spark of creativity, and a solid grasp of the product information, but your company isn’t closing as many sales as you feel it ought to? What other skills do they need to succeed, and how can you train them in those skills?

Am I Competent at That?

The first step toward a higher level of sales training is an objective assessment of the sales force’s current strengths and weaknesses. As tempting as it might be to simply ask them how they’re doing, this simple approach is unlikely to yield good data.

“We like to talk about our successes, but we don’t like to bring up our failures,” points out Thomas Hakko, business program coordinator at Rasmussen College in Lake Elmo. “What we should do is own our mistakes and put them up on our company intranet, so that we don’t repeat them. Some other division or unit can look online and say, ‘Nope, Tom’s group tried that, and it didn’t work.’”

To make that happen usually takes a cultural shift in the sales team—something that might be the subject of a sales training effort. If there’s enough camaraderie and support from management, trainers can create a culture in which it’s okay to fail, as long as everyone learns from it.

In the meantime, there are metrics to help companies figure out which sales skills to train in. “We have an assessment that looks at 45 different behavior areas,” says Jeff Thull, president of Prime Resource Group, a Plymouth-based sales training and marketing strategy firm. “For each of the areas, you answer two questions on a scale of 1 to 5: ‘Am I competent at that?’ and ‘How often do I use it?’ It’s a 360-degree [feedback] assessment, so it’s not just the salesperson who answers the questions. It’s also the sales manager, and maybe a tech service that works with them, or even a customer. It ends up being pretty accurate.”