All These Years, You ve Been Misled About DIY Sales Training By Randy Illig and Craig Christensen FranklinCovey Sales Performance Practice
Ever wonder why there s never been a really good off the shelf alternative to instructor-led sales training for those who need or choose to go the do-it-yourself (DIY) route? The truth is, it is possible to facilitate DIY sales training that is both high quality and highly effective. The industry simply hasn t responded to the market need. Recognizing that countless sales organizations have been left stranded without a gold-standard alternative, the Sales Performance Practice of FranklinCovey is making available for the first time a new and unique DIY facilitated-training option based on our award-winning Helping Clients Succeed TM methodology. It s on a par with our instructor-led training (ILT), and provides an easy, economical and sustainable way to bridge the gap between more costly ILT and time-consuming, subpar DIY training or worse yet, doing nothing. Not only is it possible to facilitate and customize your own best-in-class training, but here s the best part: You don t have to create it yourself. 2
How Did We Get Here? Okay, there s no evidence of an orchestrated conspiracy (at least not as far as we know), but the sad reality is that for decades the sales training industry has been guilty of widespread neglect. Huge numbers of DIYers have been stranded when it comes to sales training. They ve either had to create training programs from the ground up often a misuse of a sales or business leader s time or they ve resorted to doing nothing and taking a hit on sales performance. The ongoing lack of a strong DIY alternative to the more costly instructor-led training programs has only served to reinforce the misperception that sales training is a highly specialized form of knowledge that can only be delivered by experts and in person. There s a belief that DIY training isn t possible or easy to facilitate on your own. There s a belief that off-the-shelf training can t be customized or made directly relevant to the unique sales challenges of your particular team. How did we get so far from the truth? The Stranded Salesforce For decades, when sales managers and learning and development professionals have set out to find ways to improve sales productivity of their teams, they ve started by looking at the stark reality of their budget. If you simply didn t have the financial resources to provide your team with traditional instructor-led sales training, what was your stranded salesforce to do? And if you were among those who were constrained by budget, or if for some other reason you decided that using an outside expert to deliver sales training wasn t the way you wanted to go, you ve had exactly three choices each with fairly predictable and unappealing results: 1) Do nothing: You lose employees and you don t maximize the capabilities of those who stay. 2) Build it yourself: An option that appears inexpensive but is full of hidden costs. Training takes time to build. After you ve done all the hard work, you find that the results lack all the good things that come with professional instructional design not to mention the research, experience, best practices, and the tools and resources to make the program engaging, effective and sustainable. 3) You buy something that s already out there: You search high and low without finding an option that s high-quality, current, engaging, easy to facilitate and customizable to your situation. Or you find that what is available isn t relevant to your industry and your clients. 3
Why Isn t There a Home Depot of Sales Training? It turns out that a full 50 percent to 60 percent of the market for sales training is actually Do-It-Yourselfers. With that many organizations in need, it s natural to ask: Why isn t there some kind of Home Depot of high-quality sales training products at warehouse prices? The fact is that the business model of the training industry simply hasn t lent itself to the development of high-quality DIY alternatives. Firms naturally want to maximize the return on their intellectual property rather than cannibalize their own market. Why would they sell something for $300-$400 per person when they can command 10 times that amount already? Not to mention that creating training with Hollywood-level production quality requires a serious upfront financial investment. Someone might do it if they thought it was possible to create a product so good that it would truly meet the needs of all those stranded sales professionals, and in the process achieve reasonable scale. But to date, training companies haven t had the will or the wherewithal to invest in building a world-class product that can be used off the shelf. What Would Best-in-Class DIY Training Look Like? If you could get your hands on a superior DIY training product, what would be on your wish list? To be best in class, it would need the following: Relevant to most sales challenges. The training would be skills-based and relevant to each part of the sales cycle: prospecting, qualifying and closing. Easy to facilitate and customize. With instruction being delivered through videos and other methods, the person leading the discussion would need a facilitator s guide and other tools to readily customize the experience and help connect participants to the content and exercises that are most relevant to their situation, product and environment. Economical. You wouldn t need to stay up all night for weeks to create your own program if the price point made it a no-brainer for you buy a far superior product off the shelf. Focused on live deals. It would include a work session component where individuals can roll up their sleeves and actively apply what they re learning to real opportunities in their pipeline. 4
Sustainable. People never make great performance leaps in a one-day session, no matter how good the training is. Research shows that with many programs, about 87 percent of what participants learned is gone after 30 days unless they have the tools to practice the skills they ve learned and they re instructed in the right kind of practice. So it would make good sense to focus on execution, the things that happen after the training to get results. Effective. What are the mindsets of the top 5 percent of performers? How do they develop and deploy their skills? The training should include the tools you can use to create and reinforce the common application of those top-performing mindsets and skills across your sales team. Engaging. Your people should enjoy the training experience as well as learn from it. A significant financial investment is required to create training that is carefully designed, choreographed, scripted and filmed to be entertaining and engaging and that s probably why, to date, there s been a lack of it. Accessible virtually as well as live. The training would need to be as effective virtually as it is in person, so that if your sales team is geographically dispersed, you don t have to bring them together. You can save the travel money, or invest it in more training. That s a tall order. And that s what FranklinCovey has worked to fulfill. To Rescue the Stranded Salesforce FranklinCovey has a 30-year heritage of creating first-class training that achieves results. In tasking ourselves to serve those who ve been stranded in the DIY desert, we invested millions and incorporated the proven, award-winning content from our Helping Clients Succeed methodology to create a newly available, best-in-class DIY sales training product. Following the FranklinCovey model and our own Sales Performance Practice s instructor-led training, the content is based on principles that are timeless, universal and create a foundation for lasting effectiveness. It s been designed to maximize your budget for example, by enabling participants to experience the training on a virtual platform without having to spend extra time and money on travel, unless you choose to bring attendees together. In fact, the training platform we developed allows you to facilitate a virtual class attended by team members located all over the world. 5
In covering everything on the wish list, we leveraged a core competency of FranklinCovey in developing and testing the right way to deliver the content. All of the heavy lifting is done by experts who are captured on tape or video, or cited in story form. The facilitator doesn t need to be an expert he or she can focus on customizing the training and helping participants concentrate on what s most important or relevant to their specific business. Research shows that without practice and a routine and an expertly designed system that you re disciplined enough to use performance doesn t increase sustainably, no matter how fine the training is. In response to the reality that previously available DIY products haven t focused on sustaining performance improvements over time, we incorporated our own scientifically based program of teaching and tools to foster deliberate practice designed to systematically continue to improve performance over time. Making It Easier for Leaders to Lead While learning and development professionals often become certified as facilitators, we encourage sales leaders to become the facilitators for their own sales teams. Having seen firsthand over the past 15 years that the best way to learn and coach the material is to teach it, we created a virtual certification platform to make the process easy and economical. A year ago, if you d said, I d really like to facilitate Helping Clients Succeed TM in my company, it would have required a week of your time out of the office, a pile of money, and 10 or more co-taught sessions not to mention the inconvenience of traveling to an offsite location. With our new solution, the whole certification process can be done online, supported by a facilitator guide, a video exclusively for facilitators, dos and don ts, and everything else you need to teach the content yourself. One of our ILT clients in the high-tech industry, for instance, is implementing a plan to have each of its sales managers become certified and teach the modules to its teams in small increments over a six-week period, training more salespeople than was previously possible with ILT. The content is divided into three modules, making it easy to take each piece, become certified, and then lead the training and discussion. We advocate that sales leaders lead. When a leader can model the skills (instead of do as I say, not as I do ) he or she is in a far better position to coach and to become enablers of talent in their organization, not just a manager of numbers. 6
With all of this in mind, you might wonder if the new approach is as thorough and effective as all this, are we willing to threaten our own instructor-led training business? The answer is yes. That s how much we believe in our solution as a world-class DIY alternative. There are still customers who would prefer to have someone from the outside come in and work with their teams, and we re happy to serve them. But if our product proves to be so helpful and popular that it eliminated ILT for us and others and gave sales organizations the affordable, accessible expertise they ve long been denied that would be just fine with us. No lie. Are You Responsible for Finding DIY Sales Training? I know we need to do training, but we don t have the financial resources to pull it off, and we end up doing nothing. At $395 per person, our solution is designed to be affordable to anyone. A virtual platform for certification and training means our team s time is minimized and there are no added travel costs to factor in. I know my team needs to develop skills, and they re being underserved by HR or not served at all. If you re a sales leader who recognizes that if it s to be, it s up to me, our solution is not only easy to implement and facilitate, but it s also designed to give you the tools to be the mentor and teacher for your team. The sales leader expects me to deliver some sales training, but my choices are few and feeble. There s not a lot out there, and what I can find isn t very good. Our solution has been designed to be relevant to most sales challenges, easy to facilitate and customize, sustainable, effective, engaging and, best of all, economical. 7
Meet the authors When it comes to sales, Randy Illig is one of the go-to professionals. An idea guy with a point of view who has an uncanny ability to also be a great listener, Randy is the global leader of Franklin Covey s Sales Performance Practice, which helps to train, consult and coach clients on how to win more profitable business. He s co-authored a book (Let s Get Real or Let s Not Play Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship) and is an avid reader in the sales space, constantly challenging his own ideas and those of others. He consults from experience, having successfully founded, built and sold two successful companies and winning awards along the way, including Ernst & Young s Top CEO under 40, CEO of one of Inc. 500 s fastest-growing companies, and the Arthur Andersen Strategic Leadership award. Most importantly, Randy is known for his sense of humor and storytelling just ask him about fishing, hunting, golfing, and his wonderful wife and daughter. A committed long-distance runner and father of six, Craig Christensen knows all about endurance. Since earning his MBA at Harvard, Craig s career has included previous responsibilities as a Wall Street banker, commercial developer and leading organizational consultant. Those early experiences have shaped Craig s current work as a pre-eminent sales trainer and coach, influencing more than 550,000 professionals around the globe. Serving with Randy Illig as global leader of Franklin Covey s Sales Performance Practice, Craig helps clients succeed by combining the best of leadership development, behavior change and sales management into smart, simple and sustainable solutions. For more information about Franklin Covey s sales training solutions, call us at 1-800-707-5191. You can also visit www.franklincovey.com/salesperformance. Leadership Execution Productivity Trust Customer Loyalty Sales Performance Education