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From the September/October issue of ISO&Agent.
Do you remember the anticipation of your first day as a salesperson? Did you receive any attention from the sales manager? Was it a positive experience?
How many of us have a positive memory about our first sales position? Too often I hear of salespeople who receive little or no attention when they begin working at an organization. The "boss" sits them in a corner (sometimes literally) and hands them the "book." The book or training manual supposedly prepares salespeople for the challenges they will face in their time with that company.
Such training is not universal among all ISOs, however.
Some have developed in-house training programs that involve more than a training manual, and others use professional organizations to train their agents. Professional-training organizations have a plan and process for how they design, develop and deliver training.
This column outlines some of the elements of a solid training program. The question training ultimately should answer is, what will the trainee do differently tomorrow because of the training received?
TRAINING METHODS
Group or team training is a common form of training among ISOs. Trainers can lead groups of new hires either in person at sales conferences or during in-house training sessions, or via conference calls or Internet conferences.
ISOs also often use one-on-one or direct training. A trainer can educate a new hire using a field-training exercise or through casual interactions with salespeople. In either setting, the training can range from formal, planned sessions that include specific material that each agent must learn to more-interactive methods, such as question-and-answer sessions or role-playing exercises that prepare a new agent to field merchant objections to sales pitches.
ISOs should follow some conventions when a sales manager is working with a salesperson in the field doing one-on-one coaching.
Before a manager can help a salesperson, the salesperson has to trust the manager.
Expressing empathy with the sales rep helps the manager relate to the rep and helps the rep develop a sense of trust with the manager. This will be invaluable during training because salespeople typically are more willing to learn from managers they trust.
During field-sales training, the trainer must remember the salesperson may have a fragile ego. Build up the salesperson's ego before pointing out ways for the salesperson to improve. This is a critical step. The last thing a manager wants to do is undermine a salesperson by criticizing too much. Sales managers typically forget that even their best salespeople need positive reinforcement.
Build up new hires by complimenting their sales actions. Find something positive to remind each salesperson about. This creates the environment to motivate the salesperson and helps the salesperson have an open mind to new ideas.
Equally important is for trainers not to overwhelm trainees with lists of items to focus on. The sales manager may notice many items that he or she needs to address. By trying to fix everything at once, the sales manager may overwhelm the new hire. The impact of hearing everything that is wrong about a new hire's actions can undermine the sales- person's confidence, which can be counterproductive.
TRAINING TECHNIQUES
Role-playing is an essential technique during one-on-one training. The best role-play scenarios are informal.
A trainer can answer almost any salesperson's question with, "What do you think the answer should be?" The beauty of this method is that it can become pervasive. The new hires become so used to answering in their own words they don't realize they are role-playing. This may be the most-effective training style because it forces the salesperson to think of a response instead of repeating a memorized one, potentially producing an answer the sales manager did not foresee.
Secondly, if trainees respond using their own words, then real training has occurred and the trainees will respond that way under pressure. Trainees are more likely to adopt it in a real-life situation.
More often than not, the salesperson's instinct is correct. When it is wrong, the manager should correct it carefully. Instead of saying the salesperson is wrong or that the salesperson made a mistake, the manager might try to say something such as, "That is one way to handle the situation, but what if we tried this instead?" By taking the sting out of being wrong, the salesperson may be less inclined to defend the incorrect method and embrace the newer knowledge the manager explained.
While a sales trainer may repeat key points over and over, those points typically only become memorable to salespeople when they begin to repeat the ideas in their own words. In this regard, I follow a simple rule: If I cannot confirm what an individual rep is saying in response to a specific question or objection, I naturally assume that the agent's answer is not the appropriate response. To some this may sound too pessimistic. To me, it is the only way to be sure the agent performs correctly every time.
In other training scenarios, the same techniques still apply, but more-formalized training or group training requires additional best practices.
It is critical to be topic-driven. Too often ISOs fill sales-training agendas with a seemingly unrelated string of products and ideas that seem out of place. For example, it is difficult to teach a salesperson about cash advances until he has learned something about bankcard basics. This is also why training in a formal setting needs to be timely.
If you have a sales meeting scheduled, it is important to train on topics that are related to the marketplace. By staying in touch with the realities of the market, trainees will see the sales manager as a more-credible trainer. The best managers go out in the field frequently. This not only helps keep them sharp, but it also helps make their training more realistic.
To be successful, managers must be good at developing training topics by analyzing information and by staying close to the sales process.
Knowing which sales reps have trouble getting higher margins can help the sales manager do a better job at targeting the training the reps need to boost their margins. If charging application fees is part of a particular company's strategy, the sale manager needs to know which salespeople are getting the application fees and what the average fees are. The manager then should identify the top performers in these areas and seek out their advice about the best way to charge the fees.
BEST PRACTICES
The best tool a manager has while developing training is to listen to top performers. Incidentally, the best salespeople are not always the ones that have the best ideas on how to sell a specific product or method.
I have been affiliated with a company in the past where the top reps were loath to lease a terminal. Asking them about how to sell more leases surely would have been counterproductive. By seeking out the newer reps with less total sales but with higher percentages of leases, I could identify some things that they were doing that benefited the entire sales organization. Developing training is about amplifying and mirroring the best practices of the sales team.
Once the trainer decides the topics and methods to cover, the next critical skill for a trainer is to design the tools to deliver the training. A trainer can design these tools by taking the information gathered through feedback from the top performers and boiling it down to information trainees easily will understand
All training needs to be as simple as possible and repeated as often as possible. Taking a complex sales strategy and trying to duplicate it across all levels of sales skills and experience may be an exercise in futility. Boiling down a complex sales strategy allows more salespeople to readily grasp the method, ideally prompting them to adopt the strategy and improve their sales skills.
Another important aspect of sales training is delivering superior training, regardless of whether the trainer uses telephone conference calls, in-person meetings, group training or Internet meetings with visual displays.
One critical element of delivering training is that the trainer must have high energy. This is not the place to come if you have had no sleep the night before.
A sales manager has to have enthusiasm all the time. He has to make the training light and fun. The more entertaining the training is, the more the trainees will feel encouraged to be involved. The more trainee involvement a sale manager can generate, the more effective the training will be.
Trainers should consider showing video clips of funny movies or having tasteful jokes prepared to keep training light and entertaining. A trainer that talks more than 60 seconds without letting the trainee participate probably is talking too long.
CHANGING BEHAVIOR
Asking rhetorical questions is a good method to get salespeople involved. A trainer could tell trainees that the purpose of an opening benefit statement, designed to immediately give the merchant a reason to listen further on a cold call, is to gain the merchant's attention.
Or he could ask the class, "What do you all think the purpose of the opening benefit statement is?" Invariably one of the salespeople will have the right answer.
Remember that all sales training is "selling ideas" at its core. The cost to trainees of buying these ideas is that they need to change their behavior.
I believe effective sales trainers are the best salespeople in the world. One thing is for certain, it does not take long for a casual observer to distinguish a sales organization with a strong culture of training from one that sticks the new hire in the corner with the book.
Which do you think is more effective? Which one describes your company? What will you do differently now that you have read this column?
Matt Clyne is a sales consultant in the merchant-services industry. His e-mail is clynematt@gmail.com
