Sales Process Improvement

Sales process improvement is probably the most misunderstood topic in business today. Most companies mistakenly believe that sales training will raise performance. Sadly, in the great majority of cases, sales stay pretty much the same following training.

Each year over one billion dollars is spent on sales training in the United States alone, and most of that money is completely wasted. After all, a sustained increase in sales performance should be the only measure of success when it comes to sales training.

Sales process improvement involves more than just training. Those of you who have worked closely with salespeople for any number of years have had your share of experiences where training just couldn't improve certain salespeople. So what's the answer?

I have spent my 30 years in sales studying the top performers, in order to answer the questions that most owners and managers pull their hair out over each day. Are top salespeople born, or can they be created (through training)? Why does training so often fail? What is the best sales training? How influential is the pay plan? How can I get my best salespeople to prospect more new business? Etc. Etc.

The truth is these (and many other) daily sales frustrations have been answered--and most companies have it quite wrong. For instance, top levels of sales performance cannot be trained in the absence of certain natural born talents. Period. This was well proven by The Gallup Organization's 30-year study of top performers and natural talent and yet every day companies try to raise the productivity of poor performers through training. I'm telling you--save your money. It's futile. (cont'd below)

In addition, even if your trainees do possess the needed talents, performance will only increase if the training curriculum is delivered in a way that respects what we now know about behavior modification. Too many companies believe that their salespeople will improve following training classes, but the fact is there are two additional training criteria needed for training to become your salespeople's new habitual behavior.

We have also found that top performers are "top" only at certain stages of the sale--they're like specialists; the most common example being those great closers who never prospect enough. An understanding of these selling talents is needed so you can not only cast salespeople in the specific roles they excel in, but structure your whole sales process accordingly.

Many companies for example experiment with one group of salespeople making appointments, while another group does the selling. This can in fact work well but again, only when structured with an understanding of selling talents.

As for pay plans, quotas and sales management, all you ever need to understand is behavior analysis. Certain conditions, or stimuli, will produce certain behaviors every time. Once you have the right talents in the right selling role, you need to create the conditions known to stimulate performance.

The harsh reality is that the formula for sales performance improvement is a little more comprehensive than many companies realize. My life's research--and resulting book--uncovered six different practices that the world's top performing sales teams carry out very differently than the rest; six practices that drastically affect performance.