Miller Heiman has the ever popular “blue sheet” sales training, and there are many others like it. Teaching sales people how to sell isn’t necessarily the type of training that’s going to bring you higher revenues though. Years about Nabisco did a study on their non-sales skills sales training. They found that for ever $1000 they put into sales training, the salesperson could generate an additional $122K per year and $21K additional profit. What were the magic ingredients?
Sales training should seldom be about selling. Most salespeople already know how to sell. Instead, what’s often left out is a detailed understanding of product knowledge and the benefits customers can get. Competitive landscape is seldom ignored, but it’s presented in biased and skewed ways. I’ve often heard salespeople being told about all the competitor’s faults, half of those being faults that they could have applied to themselves. Competitive comparisons that truly differentiate, positive or negative, and knowing how to exploit or defend are critical for allowing the salesperson to succeed. Lastly, most salespeople have a fairly specific audience. The profile of the target market should not be ignored. Often, specific preferences can be catered to if known.
Training salespeople is highly specific to each company and even within each division/region you may have. If you hired well, spend more time preparing your salespeople for the content of their conversations, not the process of their conversations.
5 responses to “Training Salespeople”
Training Salespeople Miller Heiman has the ever popular “blue sheet” sales training, and there are many others like it. Teaching sales people how to sell isn’t necessarily the type of training that’s going to bring you higher revenues though. … [
Another area of “training” I think is not being utilized is teaching salespeople (or anyone) about understanding themselves and the human condition in general. If we can get that, we can get anything!
Not all sales training is going to increase revenue. However sales training programs such as Miller Heiman’s Strategic Selling as an example do lead to greater sales revenue. The main reason is that Strategic Selling teaches the sales person a structured repeatable sales process, and how to manage a complex sales process.
Natural ability is fine for a simple sales process, usually found in small purchases, and commodity sales. Complex sales processes where there are multiple stakeholders tend to require knowledge and various skills to navigate.
Sales is very similar to playing a sport. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you aren’t taught how to play the game, you will not be any good.
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Miller Heiman has been around since the 80’s and they are unequivocally the best. They take teams of people from one company and have them understand the horizontal nature of sales and how a sales rep ultimately is responsible for representing the company and how the sales rep is key to learning and defining what the customer needs and aligning all that.
This program is relevant to companies entrenched in vertical channel sales methodology who do not understand that the sales force is the ears, eyes and touch. Numerous companies, who understood this have often had to create “field organizations” where the sales force is unable to move beyond lead generation and driving the sale of a product.