Train to Win
Top sales trainers reveal ways to keep your team at peak performance

Selling Power, March 2004

AN IFFY ECONOMY can be a triple whammy for sales managers. Sales teams must still make quota, even when customers aren't buying.

The difficulty of making sales creates a "hurry-up-and-sell" mentality, which leaves little time for honing sales skills. Many companies tend to cut the sales-training budget in response to hard times, denying the sales team the training they need to increase their effectiveness. While the pressure may be severe to cut the budget and still perform at high levels, sales managers should realize that sales training is the only real way to increase sales productivity, and many continue sales training during hard times. Four of the world's top sales trainers explain how to extract scarce dollars from the corporate training budget, how to motivate management and staff to embrace sales training, and how to create a sales environment that makes constant improvement part of the culture.

Here's what our virtual panel had to say:

Selling Power: In many firms, sales professionals are struggling to close business and may resent spending time on sales training. What do you say to sales groups who are in this position?

Ron Wittingham: That attitude is essentially a misunderstanding about the nature of sales training. Salespeople should be encouraged to view training not as an academic exercise but as a process of ongoing coaching. A sales team is like a sports team. The manager of a football team would never bring the players into a classroom for three days, draw a bunch of diagrams on a blackboard and then expect the team to execute complicated plays. Sales training needs to be a process of ongoing development so that effective selling becomes an unconscious behavior.

Linda Richardson: There's a reason why sports teams have coaches, and often bring in specialized trainers to help hone skills. People – even top performers – need constant reinforcement. Training is a vehicle by which a sports team, or a sales team, builds a common language and common source of motivation. The same is true for the actors in Broadway plays, by the way. Even though the action is completely scripted, the director works constantly with the cast to keep the performances fresh.

SP: But isn't there still a reluctance to participate in sales training, especially among top performers? How does a sales manager convince his best salespeople to treat sales training seriously?

Tom Hopkins: Strong sales managers are constantly looking for new people. They are always in the recruiting mode. Because of this, they need to have ongoing training to keep everyone's skills at a level that's acceptable to the company. This strategy keeps the current sales team on their toes. They know they must produce or could possibly be replaced. This push to achieve should make them ask for more training, thus instituting a culture of continuing education in the company.

SP: With corporate training budgets decreasing, how can a sales manager ensure that his team gets its fair share?

Hopkins: The number one job of a sales manager is to sell selling to salespeople. Managers must keep their teams motivated to move product every day. The number two job of the sales manager is to sell training to the sales manager's superiors. Motivation only lasts so long without sustained education as a reinforcement. I strongly recommend that sales managers exert the same amount of effort they would expect of their top salesperson going after a large client. The sales manager should research companies that have strong sales forces and find out how much they invest in training. The sales manager should gather statistics about large corporations like Citicorp and IBM, which have large training budgets, and statistics about companies that are around the same size as the sales manager's own firm. Then the sales manager should give a formal, in-person presentation of facts and benefits to upper management explaining how an increase in the training budget will increase the company's bottom line. The key notion is to present the facts from the perspective of what's in it for the company.

Richardson: Sales training firms should be able to help you with the research that will be required to sell training to upper management. Sales managers should talk to the training firms about results and get an idea of how much the training will cost. Sales managers should also visit their human resources group, see what is allocated for training, and then try to get a champion inside senior management. Ideally, this should be somebody from outside the sales management chain who is willing to go to the CEO and drum up support for the sales training.

Hopkins: Knowing the upper management and situation of your company is also important. If they're not big fans of investing in their people, sales managers should suggest an increase in the training budget that's relative to the increased sales they expect from the training. For example, if a manager believes that he or she could increase gross sales by 10 percent with the implementation of a better training program, the manager could ask for a percentage of the future net sales profit for the sales training budget.

SP: While most sales teams often hire outside trainers, doesn't the sales manager have a major role to play as the team's primary coach?

Hopkins: I recommend that a portion of every sales meeting be dedicated to training. If you're seeing that a few of the team members are struggling with sales of a certain product, make that a topic for your meeting. Present new ideas for ways to move that product. Sometimes, you'll want to have your salespeople conduct the training portion of the meeting. It helps them "buy into" the training. Also, they'll work harder to come up with the right answers to sales challenges if they'll be presenting as the in-house expert.

Richardson: When times get hard, companies put more pressure on the sales force to generate revenue. Because it may not always be possible to add sales staff, the only way to increase sales is through remotivating the sales staff. However, that forces sales managers to provide the training themselves, which can be a challenge. However, sales managers should also be aware that they don't have to go it alone and that in-person training isn't the only option. Online training or e-learning can be a cost-effective way to deliver sales training, because there's no travel expense and salespeople can complete their course work at their own speed. E-learning is also less expensive on a per-person basis. It makes an excellent supplement to the training that the sales manager provides.

SP: What about ROI? Shouldn't it be possible to measure the positive effect of sales training?

Richardson: Most companies don't measure ROI on training because they intuitively know that the sales team needs it. If a company is meeting its goals, even though you can't attribute that completely to the training, it's a healthy sign. Companies that are doing well don't tamper with their sales training programs. But if management notices that the sales teams are having troubles in specific areas – such as closing or referrals – they may want to consider sales training to increase skills in that specific area.

Willingham: A good way to measure training is to run a pilot program with a limited number of participants and then measure the results. If the people who attend the program experience a marked increase in sales compared to similar employees who don't attend the program, then it's relatively easy to project the financial value of the sales training when it's rolled out to the entire sales organization.

SP: How can sales managers make sales training a part of their corporate culture?

Richardson: Sales managers need to foster the notion that companies that lack an effective plan for ongoing improvement of the sales force are ultimately doomed to failure. The best companies know that they can't compete unless their organization is constantly adapting the corporate strategy – because both the market and the customer demand it.