Develop Winning Salespeople

The starting point of building a top team of excellent salespeople is to carefully recruit them in the first place. Generally speaking, people don’t change. This is why 95 percent of your success as a sales manager will be determined by your selection process in the first place.
The second key to motivating excellent people is continuous training and development. It is not possible for your sales team to achieve peak performance without continual training, just as it would not be possible to field a winning sports team without training them continually.

Achieve Sales Fitness

If you were a coach responsible for training athletes to perform in the Olympics, you would be directing their training and development every day. Just as you require regular physical exercise to attain and maintain high levels of physical fitness, you require continual levels of training and development to maintain high levels of sales fitness.

The highest-performing sales organizations are those that train every week or even every day. Many sales managers and company owners from my seminars have told me that, as a result of daily training, they were able to increase the sales of their companies by 200 percent, 300 percent, and even 500 percent in a single year. They almost always admit that they were astonished at the improvement in sales results they achieved when they began a regular training program for their salespeople.

Develop Personal Learning Programs

It may be that your schedule does not allow for daily sales training of your entire team. In this case, you can lay out a personal and professional development program for each salesperson. You should have a chart or a list that lays out the subjects that your salespeople need to acquire and the activities your salespeople are going to engage in to develop these skills. This list should include audiobooks that they can listen to as they travel to sales meetings with customers. You should recommend books and articles for them to read. Your list can include online videos that they can watch in the morning before they start work.
You should have an internal sales training program that new sales employees are required to attend when they begin, and an ongoing sales training program that is mandatory for all of your salespeople on at least a weekly basis.

Engage in Weekly Sales Training

One of my clients, the sales manager of a division of a multinational company, told me that he started a weekly sales training program that consisted of playing one sales video per week, followed by discussion. Within one year, this division was turning in the highest levels of sales and profitability in the worldwide organization.
He said that the day after the sales training day was the highest sales day of the week. By training salespeople for one hour per week, and then discussing how they were going to use what they had learned when they went out to talk to customers, the whole organization increased its sales to the highest levels ever experienced.

The Basic Rule for Performance

There is a basic rule in business and in sales: You cannot expect people to get a specific result if you have not trained them thoroughly in exactly what they need to do to achieve that result. Sometimes a single technique that has been tested and proved can help a person get more appointments, or make more effective presentations, or close more sales.
The additional benefit of developing an ongoing sales training program for your people is that it helps them make more sales and make more money. It soon becomes known in the market that, if you want to make more money in this field, the best thing you can do is join this sales organization because it provides the best training in the industry.
One thing that salespeople like, as much or more than anything else, is to be trained to earn more money and to become more valuable. Salespeople think a lot about their “earning ability” and are always looking for ways to increase it.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Make a list of the seven essential sales skills that each person must have to be successful: prospecting, building trust and rapport, identifying needs accurately, presenting persuasively, answering objections effectively, closing the sale, and getting resales and referrals (see Chapter 14).
Next, on a scale of one to ten, evaluate how well trained each of your salespeople is in each of these key skill areas.
2. Sit down with each salesperson and develop a personal and professional growth plan with and for the individual. Encourage your salespeople to be learning and growing every day in some way as a regular part of their sales and work activities.