FAQ – The Sales Transformation Process

The goal of sales training is to implement a common, systematic approach to sales throughout your organization… so that your people are pulling together and not pulling apart… so that your customers hear a consistent message and have a smooth and seamless experience throughout the selling process… so that your success is by design, and not by chance.

The top few salespeople on your team may be highly successful, intuitive salespeople (who may resist the idea of a selling system).  However, more than 90% of your team, regardless of your ability to recruit top sales talent, will consist of people who will need a system to be comfortable, effective and successful when selling.  Of course, where team selling is required, any team will execute better if everyone is operating out of the same playbook. Successful implementation of a common sales process requires the following steps:

Step #1 – Buy-in by the Management Team: No selling system will succeed unless your front-line managers are 100% committed to supporting and reinforcing its implementation.  The key to successful sales force transformation is a conceptual shift on the part of first level managers from reactive – “what are we going to close this quarter?” to proactive –  debriefing sales calls, strategizing deals, coaching all phases of the sales process, and making good decisions on what opportunities to pursue.

Step #2 – Buy-in by the Sales Team: Most sales training fails because it’s the corporate flavor of the month, and because there is insufficient buy-in at all levels. We typically start by engaging the best people on your sales team in our training even though they need it the least.  Top performers tend to recognize the value of additional training sooner than your average performers and they have the innate talent implement these new practices immediately.  Not only does this bring about improvements to the bottom line sooner, it builds credibility for the program so that rest of the team becomes  more willing to embrace and apply it.

Step#3 – Support and Reinforcement: Even the best selling system, delivered by the most entertaining and persuasive trainer, will be a distant memory within a few weeks if the effort is not ongoing.  It’s fine that your salespeople know what to do – but to do it under pressure, in buyer/seller situations requires that your salespeople graduate from knowledge to mastery.  Having achieved initial buy-in at all levels, we will design, a comprehensive follow up series of programs and tools to hardwire our system into the nervous system of your organization.  Your managers will play a key role in delivering the program – as coaches throughout all phases of the sales cycle and as role-play evaluators in training sessions.  Support and reinforcement for our training program are typically annual agreements and include the following:

  • Sales management training and train the trainer sessions for managers, internal coaches and mentors.
  • Ongoing sales training for the sales team to reinforce the core concepts, and to provide additional focus on key performance indicators.
  • New hire training to onboard new hires into the selling system.
  • Sales tools and job aids – Training alone, without the tools to support it, has a very short impact.  We can help you maximize your investment in training and sales support software by ensuring that they work together, so the core concepts of the selling system are reinforced on a daily basis.
  • Long Distance Learning – Your team doesn’t have to be together in one location to continue building momentum.  We’ll help you collect and document successes and best practices and deliver them to your sales team, build a repository of examples and other sales resource documents, and conduct sales mastermind sessions.

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