Sales Understanding

Danita Bye, CEO at Sales Growth Specialists in Long Lake, also prefers an objective assessment that’s designed specifically for salespeople. She says it takes away the halo effect—the tendency for managers to be unable to see their salespeople’s flaws because they like them as individuals or they see them performing really well in certain areas.

She says there are two sides to hiring an outside party to perform these assessments. “On one hand, they don’t have any emotional ties that would steer them toward a particular answer,” she says. “On the other hand, they are selling a solution, and they’ll have a tendency to recommend their solution no matter what the problem is. So you really want someone who’s got a broad enough perspective and background that they can figure out what needs to be done and provide resources accordingly.”

Another way is to have sales leaders join salespeople in the field and look for missed opportunities, says Matt Norman, vice president of consulting for the Minnesota office of Dale Carnegie Training in Edina. “It’s always tempting for sales leaders to be out doing work themselves, since often they’ve gotten to a leadership role because they were really good at sales,” he says. “But to be an effective leader, we need to invest time with other sales reps who are up and coming. We need to go on their meetings and observe them so we can find out what their needs are.”

Hakko says you figure out which parts of the sales process to focus on by looking for bottlenecks. Out of 100 cold calls, are you getting as many meetings as you expect? Out of those meetings, are you getting a reasonable number of orders? After those transactions are completed, are you getting as many repeat orders as you ought?

“You find that bottleneck, and then you train to it,” he says. “This is a never-ending process. Once you correct the most apparent weakness, you’ll uncover the next. If you stick with it, it will be worth the time and money.”

Don’t look for a quick fix, Bye says. “A one- or two-day workshop is not going to deliver the result you want,” she stresses. “I would caution against holding a training event that doesn’t have any coaching, reinforcement, or accountability ties to it. To change long-term behavior, you need to change mindsets.”

Active Listening

Almost all sales trainers agree that empathy is one of the traits salespeople need to work on. It turns out that talking isn’t everything; listening to the customer is just as important, if not more so.