Sales Understanding

“We are trained to become experts in the product,” Hakko says. “Yes, we need to educate the customer. But you know what? We haven’t earned the right to give a recommendation until we understand what the customer needs.”

Bye agrees. One of the reasons salespeople don’t listen is that they think they know everything, she theorizes. In reality, they know a lot about their company and their product, but they usually don’t know enough about the client or prospect.

“The problem most salespeople have is they don’t ask good questions and they don’t listen to the answers,” says Robert Cavanna, CEO of Resource Training & Solutions in St. Cloud. “Depending on how sophisticated they are, they might be pushing their product rather than really trying to identify a problem and propose a solution to that problem.”

Role-playing in particular is a good way to practice asking the sort of open-ended questions that elicit real information, rather than just a yes or a no, Bye says. “Salespeople need to have a bank of questions that will differentiate them from the competition really quickly,” she says. “In sales training, you need to develop those questions and then practice and role-play them so they know what to say if the client throws them a curve ball.”

Salespeople hate role-playing, she admits, but it’s the best way to learn and reinforce new behaviors in a low-risk environment. (She jokes that trainers may be able to make role-playing more palatable to the trainees by calling it something else, such as “rehearsal.”) Once the salespeople have rehearsed enough that they are asking good initial questions, the next task is to teach them to really hear and understand what the prospect says, and to empathize with it.

“From my perspective, the biggest need for salespeople at any level, but particularly for new salespeople, is the mental ability to focus on others more than on ourselves,” Norman says. “It sounds obvious and almost too simple, but it’s so profound to try to see the world from their perspective.”

Norman trains for empathy by demonstrating how it works via video or group role-playing, then teaching the skill in one-on-one sessions with feedback and coaching. It’s role-playing with a difference: As the trainee asks the trainer follow-up questions and gains a greater and greater understanding of the “prospect’s” needs, the trainer provides critiques and positive reinforcement.