Your Salespeople Running Out Of Gas? Supercharge Them With Neuroscience Based Sales Training

How Often Have You Heard Yourself Saying: “My Sales Team Has Talent, So Why Aren’t They Hitting Their Numbers???”

This is a problem that sales managers have been trying to solve since the dawn of business. You can almost imagine a merchant circa 1300 lamenting to a friend, “What stops my traders from calling on the bigger kingdoms and getting higher prices is beyond me!” This exact conversation is going on right now in the offices of sales managers and company presidents all around the globe. The commodity may have changed but the essence of the conversation is the same. What stops my salespeople from attaining the results I know they are capable of?

According to David Stein, the CEO of ES research group, an analyst firm focused on the sales training industry, “American businesses spend over $7B a year in sales training and yet the failure rate is over 80%.” ES Research’s data shows that sales training has a motivational effect that fades with time. Stein explains, “Most salespeople revert back to their original production level within 80 days unless there is some sort of intervention that reinforces the training.”

There are many approaches to solving this problem, most of which don’t work:

Reward success: Vacations, money, and public recognition work for some. For others there is little or no motivational value. Beyond that, there is ample research that says rewards start losing their effectiveness the more you use them.

Punish failure: This can be a great motivator for certain people, but overall it has a detrimental effect on the morale of the sales organization. And once again its effectiveness tapers off with repeated use.

Upgrade selling skills: The sales manager or a hired gun comes in and teaches the sales team sales skills that they usually already know. On occasion something new is delivered that makes a difference. Sales Training does deliver a boost in sales. Unfortunately, sales usually slide back to the normal level all too quickly.

Motivation: An impassioned speech from the CEO or a flavor of the month speaker can get the entire sales team fired up and ready to take on the world. Salespeople can usually maintain the fervor for days, sometimes for weeks, but eventually their fantasy collides with the reality. And the motivation fizzles out.

External Motivation is Short-lived – Internal Motivation is Permanent

One of the key elements of sales training is its motivational effect. There are two types of motivation; external motivation, which is transitory, and internal motivation, which stays with you no matter what. Unfortunately, sales training delivers external motivation. It’s no wonder that the “high” from a great sales trainer often fizzles out quickly. Furthermore, relying on external motivation means businesses constantly have to invest in ongoing sales training just to keep pace.

The key driver that determines sales success
Most sales professionals intrinsically know there has to be something more than traditional sales training. If we knew what the missing element was, we could transform training from just a motivational experience with short-term gains into one that provides a permanent change that delivers improved results.

Salespeople as a group are notoriously difficult to study because there is such a wide array of sales methodologies. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Even if a company standardizes on a particular sales methodology, an objective study is still challenging because the individual salespeople feel more comfortable reverting back to their native sales techniques. This creates a mishmash of techniques within a company.

Sandler Sales is a great sales training company that has hundreds of franchisees worldwide. These franchisees use the Sandler Sales system to sign-up new students. They also teach the system everyday as part of their job. They literally live and breathe this sales ideology. In fact, their commitment to the Sandler Sales System was so high they purchased a franchise ($60,000+). All of these franchisees are highly driven individuals who selling the same commodity, using the same methodology.

A number of highly successful franchisees are very comfortable charging twice as much for the same service. While other franchisees feel uncomfortable asking for a higher price. Keep in mind all of these franchisees would coach their students to sell on value and get the highest price possible while being fair to the customer. This means that the “weaker” franchisees know what to do but fail to take action when it comes to price. This highlights that what’s going on inside the salesperson’s head (the human element) is more powerful that their sales skill-set level.

With an empowering human element, a salesperson can attain results far in excess of what common wisdom would predict given their current skill level and drive. And conversely you can get a highly skilled and driven salesperson that gets less than stellar results because of a disempowering human element.

Sales training teaches new selling skills and provides much needed motivation to get out there and make things happen. Motivation can also temporarily overcome fear or inertia that hinders a salesperson’s success. The area where sales training misses the mark is in addressing the human element. This is a clear case of 2 out of 3 is bad. As long as the human element goes unaddressed, the only way to get a lasting performance boost is to engage in a never-ending cycle of sales training.

Understanding The Human Element

Salespeople are driven: they want to get better results, but sometimes it seems no matter how hard they try they can’t break the bonds of their human element. The human element trumps skill and drive every time. For lasting sales success it’s critical that we understand the human element.

The first thing you need to know is that humans have several neurological levels. At the deepest level is where we hold our beliefs. We have beliefs about being a man, the government, about selling, money, and self-worth; there is a belief about everything in our awareness. Researchers have discovered we have anywhere from 50,000 to a 100,000 beliefs.

Our beliefs shape our values, which sit on the next level. Values give us the rules of engagement that allow us to quickly navigate through our complex lives. These are the invisible lines that we will not easily cross.

On the next level we have our capabilities, where we define what is possible for us to do or not do. A good example of this is where others can clearly see person X has the capability to do something (ask for higher price) but they can’t even imagine it being possible for them (still cave-in on price). Paradoxically we call this prison the comfort-zone.

The final level is what we are most aware of our behaviors and actions. We can see the results our behaviors deliver. If one of the higher neurological levels like beliefs is out of sync with what our sales training dictates we will not do that behavior. If we do attempt it we will quickly revert back to the old comfortable behavior.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” -Albert Einstein

If you want to get better results, you have to change your behaviors. Changing behaviors is one of the hardest things on the planet to do, even if you really, really want to change. This is why sales training fails to deliver long-lasting results. In order to effectively change behaviors you have to go to a deeper level. The deeper you go, the faster the change, and the longer it lasts. In order to facilitate permanent change, you have to embrace neuroscience techniques to transform limitions in our higher neurological levels.

Change happens in an instant!

Change happens in an instant. People live under this illusion that change is hard to do or that change takes a long time. Another popular belief is that change is a painful experience. At one level, all of those statements are true because we try and facilitate change at the behavioral level.

“I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity”-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 -1935)

Simplicity on the far side of complexity is where elegance resides. And elegant solutions are simple to execute and deliver extraordinary results. I know this sounds cryptic, so let me give you an example of what is possible when change takes place.

I met Kim at a party where she told me that she was hitting a glass ceiling. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how much more training she received, she seemed unable to earn more than $150K/yr. All of her efforts were focused on changing her behaviors without changing her beliefs. She felt frustrated and stupid because nothing she did worked.

It turned out that when she was five years old her father came home one Friday afternoon and discovered he lost his paycheck. That was the only time she saw her father cry. That experience created a belief about having to respect her father around money issues. Her father never made more than $80K/yr and here she was earning $150K/yr “disrespecting” her father. The old belief sabotaged her efforts to succeed.

Using neuroscience she was able to transformed the old belief to an empowering one, the more I earn, the more I honor my dad. This new belief shattered her self-imposed glass ceiling that her sales career once again took-off. With the right neuroscience tools sales training becomes highly effective because the human element is addressed head-on. Bottom-line is with the right tools change happens quickly and permanently.

Umar Hameed, aka Mr.Breakthrough has helped hundreds of people bre

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How to Pay Less and Get More Results For Your Sales Training

When earnings fall, most companies do the one thing that is easy to implement, and will make the earnings look better. That is to cut costs and budgets. And one of the first, if not the first, to be cut is the training budget.

However, rather than deciding to cut or postpone all kinds of trainings, some companies are trying to retain the “must-have” trainings, i.e. the ones that are critical to the company’s performance, such as sales, supply chain management, quality management etc. Still, the budgets available for such training are still very tight, and these companies are looking into ways of dong more with less.

Some companies have tried to use internal trainers instead of external ones to conduct sales training. Others have switched to less “expensive” trainers instead. Well, the question here isn’t so much about whom to engage as your sales trainer, but rather how you can plan and execute sales trainings that deliver your desired results.

To achieve this, you will have to first overcome some of the common weaknesses of most sales training initiatives:

* Sales training content is outdated OR does not match the current buying practices of customers
* Ineffective reinforcement or post-training coaching
* No measurement of improvements after the training
* Getting the wrong person to do the training, etc

Getting Your House in Order

While the purpose of sales training is to improve the selling skills so that they generate better sales results for you, to achieve such an objective may require the orchestration of a few other components as well. These are:

* Hiring: Do you have the right sales person for the right sales job that will fit into your corporate culture
* Promotion: Have you promoted the right sales person to be your sales manager whom will lead and motivate your sales team effectively
* Incentives: Is your sales team incentivised to go the extra mile and get better deals for you.

If you need someone to get new customers and get quick deals, it will be very painful to train someone who is more comfortable cultivating long-term relationships with customers and grow their business. Similarly, if you need someone to spend more time partnering with customers and create strategic sales, it will also be quite masochistic to train a sales person who is highly skilled in high-pressure selling. Here are some statistics from HR Chally:

* Only 19% of effective new business developers are effective at maintaining long-term customers
* Less than 15% of key account managers are comfortable developing new businesses
* Nearly 65% of salespeople who fail could have succeeded in the right type of sales position for their skills

According to HR Chally, less than 15% of superstar sales people succeed in management. The job of selling is very different from managing a team of sales people. Some superstar sales people are so good in what they do, they don’t even know why they are good, much less impart their skills to others.

Here are some of the criteria of what a good sales manager should be:

1. Directs and controls others in your team
2. Optimise the company’s profits through the actions of your sales team
3. Analyse customer behaviours, sales people’s actions and market trends effectively
4. Train your team members
5. Makes joint calls and then coach the sales person on how to deal with customers better

You may ask why is hiring the right sales person so critical to getting good sales training results. Well, according to research conducted by Huthwaite, 87% of what is learnt in a sales training session will be lost after 1 month upon completion of the training programme. And the key reason behind this is due to ineffective post-training reinforcement, coaching and monitoring by the sales managers. In fact some sales managers hardly, if ever, train or coach or nurture their teams!

Ultimately, it is said that the sales person’s mind works faster and more accurate than a super-computer when it comes to calculating their incentive payments. They know how to reach their targets and optimise their pay by taking the most efficient of all actions. What this means is what gets paid, gets done, and if you don’t provide the incentives for sales people to change their ways (or dis-incentives if they don’t), then your sales training effectiveness will be compromised.

Setting Your Training Objectives

If you were to ask any sales manager, what will be the objective of any sales training, the reply is likely to be “Get more sales (at higher prices)!”

While this is very much the ultimate objective of most, if not all, sales trainings, the question here is what areas need to be improved before you can increase sales?

Since sales revenue generated is an end-result, in order to improve this result, you will have to look into the processes that drive this results in the first place. Hence, instead on focusing on the final objective, look at which are the processes that need to be improved and work on those areas.

E.g. if you find that your sales people have a hard time dealing with customers’ pressure to cut prices, perhaps you can first:

* Identify the sales processes involved in a typical sale;
* Identify which process(es) actually caused our customers to focus so much on price discussions (e.g. did we quote the price too early, or we didn’t understand the customer’s business needs well enough, or we didn’t get the customer to buy-in to the value we provide, etc.)
* Set the training objective to be rectifying these causes of giving too much discounts
* Monitor and measure the improvements on these processes
* Then monitor and measure the improvements of selling at higher prices

Perhaps the biggest headaches faced by many sales trainers (internal or external) is that some companies decide to have sales training only when sales are really doing badly, and then they expect immediate improvements to the bottom line. Ironically, part of the reason that these companies are doing badly in sales is because they hadn’t paid enough attention to the sales processes that drive the eventual results. So it degenerates into a vicious cycle of the company wanting some “magic bullet” to improve sales, while the sales trainer tries in vain to explain it is the process improvements that will improve sales.

Engaging the Right Trainers

Typically, companies can choose between internal and external trainers for their sales training. Whether you are getting internal or external trainers, your selection criteria will have to be based on “what kind of trainer(s) will be a best fit to deliver our sales training objectives now?”, more so than any other criteria.

While it seems like common sense to select the right trainer for most training managers, there some selections that are sometimes bizarre. We know of companies who require trainers to have years of experience in their industry, when what they said they are looking is someone who can train them new ideas to meet future challenges as their industry is changing real fast.

There’s also a Fortune 500 IT hardware company in China that actually raised issues about the trainer’s accent, and then promptly fired the trainer, even though that trainer is a subject-matter expert who is real good in designing new training programmes from scratch. While it is true that the trainer has difficulty pronouncing broadcaster-standard putonghua, participants can understand him well, and have graded him highly in evaluation sheets for previous trainings.

Depending on your current situation, your sales training requirements can be:

* Designing a sales programme from the ground up (i.e. observing sales people in action, break down the sales processes, devise ways to improve each process through training)
* Implement existing training programmes (no changes, just do it)
* Emphasize role-plays and case study discussions in workshops, an then give de-briefings and pointers (sort of like a group-based coaching)
* Conduct train-the-trainer programmes for sales managers, so that they can train their own teams
* Audit current sales training programmes, and identify ways to improve on them , etc.

In fact, one of our key customers are engaging us to help them devel

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