Strictly Sales: Sales train for the next hard market

With all signs pointing to a hard market around the corner, we’re about to enter one of the most significant commonly repeated mistakes of our industry: ignoring the need for sales training. When the market is soft and producers are scrambling to open doors, qualify accounts and close deals with revenue we do not have, we scream for training help. It usually goes something like this: “We needed you yesterday to help us fix our production problem!” In a hardening market, we look in the mirror and feel good about our increasing revenue, brag about how good we are and put a few extra dollars in our pockets to enhance the lifestyle we feel shorted on during the brutal times. Throwing our basic discipline and principals out the window, it sounds like this: “We don’t need sales training. Look at our numbers!” In the world of sales training, the system of failure which traps many companies and agencies seems to have a common and recurring link. Management is frustrated with the results and the sales team isn’t producing new revenue to meet the sales goals or owner demands. The company/agency becomes frustrated and decides to hire sales training assistance. Management conducts a brief search and chooses a linear “step-by-step” sales process training event. Outsiders with no relationship to the sales team come in and introduce this one-time, supposedly life-changing event that is supposed to be the cure-all for the agency’s sales problems. More than half of the sales team, while open to change, lack the focus, discipline and skills to retain and change behavior over the long term. Another quarter of the team wouldn’t change their behavior if their lives depended on it. They think they have it mastered and have a low comfort threshold. Their egos get in their way to destroy progress. This leaves only a quarter of your people who will actually learn and change something to improve their daily sales systems. After it’s over and the training company goes home, within three months the sales team is back to its old habits. Management, with no reinforcement and truly doing the best with the skills they have, attempt to manage change. They mean well, but they have never had the training on how to manage a system, and the odds are they were too busy to sit through and learn what the sales team was going through. Isn’t it strange to have so much invested in an event, only to have management ignore the training and the follow-up? Why on earth would management expect anything to change with this poor commitment level? Over the next few months, a dark cloud of frustration builds over the team, and you either have the same training company return, or you hire a different company for another linear three-day training event–and the process starts over. You spend a fortune on training and end up with a 75 percent failure rate. We have seen this over and over, with no option for resolve. It’s a great revenue stream for the training company, but it does little for your bottom line. To make things worse, if the company is large enough, the 50 percent of sales employees who had no real intention to change hide among the other staffers. I spent the first 12 years of my career trying to make this system work and it simply does not. However, using a defined system with personal accountability, our firm ended 2008 with a 30 percent increase to $2.3 million. Why? The two most important elements of sales training and culture development that are missing from most training programs, agencies and companies are: