Sales Obedience School

If you have ever had a dog in obedience school, you learn real quick that the training is not for the dog.  It is for the master.  As a sales force development consultant I have discovered sales training should most often operate the same way.

I thought I would revisit an earlier subject on bad sales rolling downhill.  If you recognize your company here, take notice, it could save your investors and your employees (often the same thing…)significant heartache, if you are a sales person here, I don’t mean to make you cry.  Really.  If you have been a customer of an overzealous sales person, please remember, no mother ever gave birth to someone who wanted to grow up and be obnoxious.

Solomon Says: “The difference between sales people we like and sales people we don’t is always, whose agenda we are on.”  We like sales people who care about our agenda.  We avoid those that only care about their own.

The most important premise is to recognize that though some sales people are organically impure, most of us have the same level of ethics, integrity and dignity as everyone else.  When we are placed under pressure however, survival mechanisms will kick in and we will do what is necessary to feed our families.

Pressure on us, universally comes from management.  More often than not, management does not have a good understanding of how to hire the right sales professional.  They then alternately bribe, cajole, reward, threaten and ultimately fire the guy because they weren’t right for the position in the first place.  It costs the company well into the tens of thousands of dollars to do that but they repeat the process with regularity and grumpiness.

The right person will have a comfort level talking with the target demographic, have experience or at least understanding of the value of the product for the customer, have a certain amount of freedom from fear of asking for the order and according to an important study that has held up well since it was published in the Harvard Business Review in 1964, ego drive and empathy.

Pressure on sales comes also from unreasonable expectations where the company has no idea what it takes for a sales professional to find an opportunity, prosecute it to fruition and then support the buyer at the end of the sale so much that the buyer WANTS all their friends to know about the sales person.  Instead, many companies look at the amount of money they need or want, count the number of sales people they have and divide the latter into the former.  When the sales people don’t hit the number, it is obviously because the salespeople were incompetent and the should all be fired.  Management doesn’t understand that at best sales people can operate at the front of the pack but there is always a cycle of both finding buyers and then another cycle of bringing the sale to fruition.   Whatever time it takes is what it takes and no more than you can make a tree grow faster than it chooses to, you can’t make a sale happen faster than the buyers choose to move.

Finally, pressure on sales people comes when the resources to complete a task do not match the expectations of the sales effort.  If the company expects fast results, what has the company done to source qualified leads to the sales professional?  Something?  Anything?  Often not enough.  Many companies expect the sales people to prepare their own marketing materials, many expect them to find their own prospects and most expect the sales professional to manage the sales project through out the lifecycle.  While this is okay, it all takes time.  Time that reduces the time to find the money on the next sale.

When management doesn’t recognize itself as the problem, it spends tons of money not earning money and blaming someone else.  Then they call a guy like me.  I teach them a few simple things.  “Sit”, “Stay”, “Shake.”  I try to avoid “Play dead” though.