The New Role that Drives Sales Leader Value. The key to differentiating your company in the future will be the competence level of your sales force.

Transcription

1 The New Role that Drives Sales Leader Value The key to differentiating your company in the future will be the competence level of your sales force.

2 The key to differentiating your company in the future will be the competence level of your sales force. I think that sales leadership might be the toughest job in any company. Like any executives, we have more work to do than time to do it. But, in sales, the stakes are incredibly high. Just like people need oxygen to survive, companies need top-line revenue; without the top line, there can t be a bottom line. What s more, in sales there is nowhere to hide: What s more visible than a leader who isn t hitting sales numbers? In this paper I will argue that sales training is a critical job responsibility for every sales leader. I don t just mean that the leader is responsible for seeing to it that the sales force receives training. I mean that if sales leaders want to be successful, it is now critically important that they, themselves, become skilled sales trainers. Here is why: It is self-evident that if you want customers to buy from you instead of the competition, you need to distinguish yourself somehow. Yet in every industry, we are seeing the end of meaningful differentiation in products and services. As sales leaders, we can t count on marketing, product development, engineering, customer service, or any other company function to create continuous innovations that will position us as different from our competitors. When it comes to the capabilities of our products, our services, and our companies, the best we can expect is to leapfrog the competition from time to time only to be leapfrogged by them in the near future. Therefore, the key to differentiating your company in the future will be the competence level of your sales force. Sales leaders must recognize this and drive the necessary transformation. 2

3 We must end the focus on what we sell and begin to focus on how we sell... I have written about this differentiation issue for many years. I have pointed to it near the beginning of every book, workbook, and training video I ve ever written. The battleground for differentiation is the mind of the customer. More than ever before, the products, services, and company capabilities that we sell are perceived in the customer s mind to be virtually (or at least functionally) identical to those of other suppliers in our industry. Further, I have urged that we must end the focus on what we sell and begin to focus on how we sell as the only way to win the battle inside the customer s mind. This requires us to use a sales process that enables salespeople to become skillful at such things as identifying the unique needs of each and every customer, and demonstrating how their capabilities can satisfy those unique needs. Now here s the newest challenge and a cause for real alarm: What happens when salespeople from all of the companies against which you compete are also trained to identify the customer s unique needs and sell their products and services as solutions to those needs? Think about that. When it comes to differentiation, if you find something that works, you ll get copied in a heartbeat. That includes your sales process. As a sales leader, what can you do? That s what I want to discuss. 3

4 Critical Sales Leadership Duties Duty #1: Define and communicate a vision for success that is based on moving prospects through your sales cycle. Duty #2: Track sales-cycle metrics so you know when to get involved, who to recognize, and how to forecast. Duty #3: Build a team of the most competent salespeople in your industry through continuous training and coaching. What is the primary role of sales leadership? Let s back up a bit and take a look at the principal duties of sales leaders. Researchers and observers have identified any number of duties that are considered important, but I believe that the genuinely crucial responsibilities of sales leadership can be boiled down to three key areas. I would argue that when these duties are performed well, you are in a great position to achieve the sales numbers you ve been assigned. All of these duties are important. However, in this paper, I want to focus on Duty # 3: the critical need to develop the talents of your sales team. What has to be done, who should do it, and how? In the course of answering those questions, I propose to show you a solution to your company s differentiation challenge. Introducing the Consciously Competent sales force Decades ago a learning theorist named Noel Burch came up with a model that described the learning process in terms of consciousness and competence. I ve always been intrigued by this approach to developing skills including sales skills. However, I think of the model quite differently than Burch did. Now, a team of salespeople who meet that description might sound good, but sales work requires skills that must be applied flexibly with different people and situations. Selling is not like flipping burgers or any other static procedure, where you can learn to do it well once and then put yourself on autopilot. If the goal is to develop sales talent through sales training and sales coaching, I don t see Unconscious Competence as the ideal state. Here s why not: 1. I believe there is no such thing as a true master salesperson just like there s no such thing as a perfect sales call. The best salespeople continue to make mistakes (me included), and even the most successful sales call can always be improved. If you are running on autopilot, you ll never get any better than you are right now. 2. There are some salespeople I d guess 10% at most who seem to be born talented. They are naturals. That means they are in the Unconscious Competent box right out of the gate. They make sales naturally, but they can t really explain how they do it to someone else. By no coincidence, they usually make terrible sales leaders for the same reason that the most gifted natural athletes rarely make good coaches. 4

5 You know, you grow and it shows When salespeople are consciously competent about how to make sales, they know exactly why they are successful, they can continuously get better at it, and they can show others how to do it. Noel Burch wouldn t like this, but I believe that if we re talking about salespeople, the best box in his grid is the one labeled Conscious Competence. When salespeople are consciously competent about how to make sales, they know exactly why they are successful, they can continuously get better at it, and they can show others how to do it. They become dedicated to their craft. They practice, participate, and improve. Best of all, they can multiply success geometrically by helping others improve. What if you had an entire sales force made up of consciously competent people? What if your team knew exactly what it was that made them successful and they could explain it to others in clear, concrete terms? It seems obvious that this would be the best possible situation for any team. But, without sales leadership driving the process every step of the way, it s unlikely to happen. The best way to learn is to teach Here is another learning principle that fascinates me: The best way to learn something is to teach it. This is sometimes called the protégé effect. The idea is centuries old. Not long ago, writing in the magazine Science, an American professor of physics, Frank Friedman Oppenheimer, expressed it this way: The best way to learn is to teach and the best way to teach is to keep learning. Oppenheimer knew from experience that teaching calls for a complete understanding of the concept As a teacher, your ideas will never be more effective than your ability to make others comprehend them. you re trying to get across. You can t just kind of get it or know it well enough to get by on a test. As a teacher, your ideas will never be more effective than your ability to make others comprehend them. Teaching helps you develop the extremely important skill of describing your ideas or processes well enough for others to use them. 5

6 To best develop the skills of your team, I maintain that you, the sales leader, must become intimately involved with the sales training process and an effective sales trainer in your own right. That is the way to develop a sales advantage that will differentiate your company from the competition in a lasting way. But, aren t sales training and sales coaching the kinds of functions that you can delegate to someone else? No. But, can t you hire only experienced reps who don t need training? No. But, don t you already have too much to do? If so, you can forget about creating a sales advantage that is genuinely differentiating. And you can hope that the competition s sales leaders don t find the time you lack. Many years ago, I was dealt a hand like this: I was VP sales and marketing for a small player in a fast-paced technology business. Without a differentiated sales position for the company, enormous pressure was being placed on price as the only buying factor. Fortunately for my company and its employees, we declared that we would become the best-trained sales force in our industry and we meant it. Shortly after making that decision and implementing an aggressive plan for training our team, we began a seven-year spurt during which our growth was six times greater than the already explosive growth of our industry. That s when I learned the value of using sales leaders as sales trainers. Sales leaders can create exponential growth by becoming sales trainers Here s the logical path that leads to this idea: 1. Competition is intensifying due to dwindling differentiation in products, services, and company capabilities. 2. Executives are struggling to find a product/service distinction that they can run with for the long term. 3. Even if you identify a differentiation point, copying and cloning by competitors quickly results in a sales position that looks to your customers like everyone else s. 4. Without a distinction, you fall into the commodity-selling trap, where price is the only major buying factor a race to the bargain basement. 6

7 Here s how to stop the madness: BIC companies adopt train-thetrainer approaches 55% more often than the less successful laggards. 1. Drop the focus on trying to differentiate what you sell. Focus on how you sell as your differentiator. 2. Create a sales advantage over your competition by becoming the best-trained sales force in your industry. 3. Turn your sales leaders into sales trainers who know what to teach and how to teach it. 4. Sustain your sales advantage with continuous sales training. Why turning sales leaders into sales trainers is the ultimate solution I ve been involved in the sales training business for more than 25 years. Unfortunately, our multibillion-dollar industry has some dirty laundry. Studies estimate that between 80% and 90% of sales training fails. Why is that? Dozens of papers about the problem have been written by industry participants and observers, everyone expounding their view of what causes sales training to fall short and what to do about it. Most authors offer biased solutions that advance their own products. My most recent, slightly biased, white paper on the topic cites three major causes: Aberdeen also says that salespeople are getting twice as much training as managers this fact alone dooms most sales training efforts. 1. Wrong Content: Lack of focus on a manageable number of skills that can be taught, learned, and measured. A poorly documented sales methodology makes learning much more difficult. 2. Rejected by Salespeople: Salespeople must agree not only that there is a need to learn new skills but that they will benefit from learning the skills that a particular training program proposes to teach. If buy-in doesn t exist, no learning will occur. 3. Ineffective Transfer: Many factors are involved in the transfer of newly learned skills from the classroom to the job, including the degree of relevance of the learning to the student s work environment, reinforcement of the content in the field, and non-biased measurement of how much of the learning is being applied in the field. Sales training certainly can fail for any of those reasons. But, the greatest failure happens when managers are not integral to the training solution. Without active manager involvement, salespeople will reject the training, and new skills will not transfer to the field. I m not the only one who supports this idea. Aberdeen Research compares Best-in-Class (BIC) companies to others that they call laggards. BIC companies grow sales and profits at a much faster clip than the laggards. And, BIC companies adopt train-the-trainer approaches 55% more often than the less successful laggards. Here s the biggest part of the problem: Aberdeen also says that salespeople are getting twice as much training as managers. Because managers are the key to learning transfer, this fact alone dooms most sales training efforts. 7

8 When sales leaders are trained to be effective sales trainers, these difficulties disappear. When you train the trainer well, you get a sales leader who has the confidence to go into the field and support what was taught... Let s hear those objections I ll bet I can guess some of the objections that occur to you. But, what if our sales leaders aren t good presenters? If your goal with sales training is to entertain the troops, then go ahead and waste your money on a polished sales entertrainer. For far too long, sales training has been thought of as a pep rally or a stage act. We ve all been through some of this stuff. The presenter might be spellbinding, but a month later nothing said in the program is being used in the field. Certainly presentation skills are important; but they are not the key to unlocking performance change. But, what if our sales leaders lack the field experience of skilled salespeople? Well, good heavens, wouldn t this be the best way for sales leaders to gain what they need? Remember what Frank Oppenheimer said: You can t just kind of get it. Teaching calls for a complete understanding of the concept you re teaching. If the sales training course is positioned correctly, and if it has a built-in capacity to be tailored to each person and situation, then the trainers don t need to be field experts. All they need is to be trained well enough to be experts in the sales process they are teaching. A great train-the-trainer program is what s needed. But, what if our sales leaders don t want to be sales trainers? You should consider the motivation behind this objection. Aside from the fact that very few managers are born talented (a Gallup study published in the Harvard Business Review found that only 18% of serving managers are talented at all, whether by nature or nurture), they may not want to become sales trainers because it exposes a weakness. It s a confidence issue. This probably helps to explain why the sales training industry is littered with so many carnival acts and variety shows. But, it also accounts for sales training s high failure rate. When the trainer leaves the building, so does the in-depth knowledge of what just got taught. The clear answer to this objection is that even though sales leaders may not have the stage presence of professional speakers, they will more than make up for this with an ability they are guaranteed to have by virtue of their job roles: the ability to make sure that salespeople apply their new skills in the field. When you train the trainer well, you get a sales leader who has the confidence not only to conduct training but also to go into the field and support what was taught, using a common language that everyone on the team speaks. 8

9 That s the advantage of turning sales leaders into trainers. In order to accomplish this, however, sales leaders need more training than their sales teams not half as much, like they get now. Should we do it? Let me summarize the case for preparing sales leaders to serve as sales trainers: 1. One of the primary roles of sales leadership is to build a team of salespeople who are more competent than their competitors. That requires training and coaching. 2. A key strategy for differentiation is to become the best-trained sales force in your industry. 3. The best-trained sales force would be made up of consciously competent salespeople. 4. The best way for a sales leader and sales team to achieve conscious competence is for the leader to train the team because the best way to learn is to teach. 5. If sales leaders are to become skillful at developing and coaching their sales teams, they ll need to be trained as trainers. So should we teach sales leaders to serve as sales trainers? Yes. The final big question is: How, exactly, can we accomplish this? How to turn sales leaders into effective trainers and great sales coaches Unless you ve got years to develop a system for training people to be capable sales trainers and sales coaches (and a lot of money to invest in doing it), I suggest that you seek a sales training program that has already been created with the train-the-trainer element in mind. You ll need to look at four major elements of the program: 1. The Sales Process that is being taught. 2. The Training Method that is used to develop salespeople, sales trainers, and coaches. 3. The Train-the-Trainer tools incorporated into the program. 4. The Sales Coach Training elements that every sales leader ought to be able to digest regardless of the busiest schedule. Here is an Evaluation Checklist pinpointing the top seven items to look for in each of those four categories when you set out to find a sales training program that not only will boost your bottom line but also will help turn your sales leaders into consciously competent sales trainers. 9

10 An Evaluation Checklist For Sales Training Programs with Train-the-Trainer Capabilities 10

11 As you look over that checklist, I m sure you wonder if a sales training system with all of those characteristics already exists. Of course it does. After 25 years of development, we have perfected the train-the-trainer components of Action Selling so that the system accomplishes all of the goals laid out in this white paper. When it comes to turning sales leaders into sales trainers, Action Selling is the gold standard. The only way to create a long-term sales advantage is to continuously develop your sales force. The best way to do that is to focus your training at the real point of impact. That point of impact is in the field, not in the classroom. Equip your sales leaders with the tools and skills to become great sales trainers and coaches. The reward is a form of lasting differentiation that your competitors will find extremely hard to copy. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Duane Sparks is chairman and founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based strategic sales training company that has trained and certified more than 400,000 salespeople in more than 3,500 groups in the system and skills of Action Selling. Sparks has guided companies through every phase of business development, from startup, turnaround, survival and rapid growth. Having written five sales books and personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions, he continues to engage in the business and art of the strategic sales process. Learn how to grow your skills and everyone else in your sales organization. Contact: The Sales Board (800) or 11