Not enough companies have learned how to employ sales training as a strategic tool. Those that have are leaders in their industries, offering their shareholders maximum return on investment, are able to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, are respected by their customers, and provide consistent sales performance. The sales people that work for those companies are motivated and stay in their jobs longer.

Quite often sales managers and executives don’t have the time and experience to do this correctly. Companies with internal training departments often provide guidance, but sales training is quite different from designing and delivering training to other constituencies within an organisation, such as customer care, engineering, or human resources.

The first step for any company deciding to make a change in their sales approach is always an assessment of the situation. What processes and methods are currently being employed by the company? What has their sales performance been? What percentage of sales people are delivering against plan? What are the biggest obstacles to success? How dynamic or stable is the company’s environment? What are the practices and expectations of the buyers? These are only a few considerations.

Designing or adopting a sales methodology is critical. Without that methodology in place, training is a tactical attempt to fix a larger problem. The selling methodology must be developed based upon the company’s unique situationtheir market, their customers, how those customers buy, the complexity and price levels of the products and services the company offers, competitive pressures, reporting requirements, the participation of partners, the skill level of their current sales people, etc.
The primary objective of creating an individually tailored Organisational Development Programme has to be: To achieve consistently superior results through the performance of every key individual, after all, our people are our most important and indeed expensive resource, it therefore makes sense for us to want to see a full and proper return on that investment.

Specifically, we should seek to achieve optimum performance levels via a process and an all encompassing framework for defining performance standards. This involves assessing, appraising, developing, implementing, reviewing and providing continual feedback on performance.

Emphasis is placed on creating an environment in which the ‘can do - will do’ mentality thrives and becomes the norm - success and achievement are expected and as a consequence are much more likely to happen.

This total approach enables forward thinking organisations who are committed to looking ‘outside the square’ and who are not afraid to mentally cross bridges that that their competitors have not even identified, to enter the land of “me - first” rather than the land of “me - too”. It also offers the opportunity to develop excellence in the performance of the company’s teams and build the capabilities necessary to consistently over-achieve short, medium and long term objectives.

In my view, we should never lose sight of the following premise.

Premise 1: Whatever got you where you are to-day will not be sufficient to keep you there.

Premise 2: You can only succeed in business to-day if you understand what you are doing, how you are doing it and why you are doing it.

Premise 3: It is difficult to control external events if you do not have control internally.

Premise 4: Being competitive is an ongoing process not a single event.

I believe it is essential to bring together a number of key factors when aiming for optimum performance levels and the simplified formula would be:

Attitude + Skills + Process (A.S.P.) = Success.

Attitude is fundamental to any achievement because individuals with the right Attitude are far more likely to embrace the essential skills and at the same time recognise the control that Process brings.

Skills are the ‘tools of the trade’ and have to be developed on an ongoing basis. They also need to be specific, because too much time can be wasted over-burdening employees with inappropriate and irrelevant skills without any identifiable plan for their future requirements.

The implementation of any skills development programme has to be well thought out and logical in it’s approach if a proper return on that often considerable investment is to be achieved.

Process brings organisation, efficiency and control, both for the individual and for management. Effective process provides objective analysis and indicators which can be benchmarked and accurately measured.

Many of the largest corporations around the world have created a V.P. Process role to oversee the implementation of process systems including Information Management and Customer Relationship Management.

There is of course a need to build in Knowledge and that can include knowledge of products, industry, market sectors, competitors, business, etc but generally this education is provided extremely competently internally.

However, recognition of the A.S.P formula is only the beginning and in truth, most organisations merely pay lip service to it, preferring to regard any form of ongoing training as a cost rather than an investment, whether that be short, medium or long term. And yet there is substantial evidence to indicate a direct correlation between continuing education and consistently high achievement, increased job satisfaction, enhanced levels of motivation and loyalty.

Our commercial functions, including the sales team, represent our forward line, if they are not scoring regularly we cannot possibly achieve our overall commercial objectives - i.e. nothing happens until somebody sells something and all of that investment in costly accounting systems, new office equipment, expensive I.T systems etc. will count for nothing.

As Sir John Harvey-Jones famously said: “Most companies fail not in their attempts to be innovative or creative. In this country most of them fail because they undervalue the importance of professional selling”

A rapidly changing environment is the regular background against which organisations must develop. Change is continuous and will become more rapid as we move forward over time. Senior management must be capable of reacting to those changes and be prepared to take advantage of them and yet stay within the overall framework and agreed strategy.

The role of strategy is fundamental if the people within the organisation are to be enabled to make the level of contribution of which they are capable. Strategy, based on a good grasp of the core competencies of a business, is an essential precursor to achieving optimal shareholder value.

In Summary:

Dependence on people is key to delivering the latent capability of a business. Our people are the greatest source of competitive advantage we have and that is precisely why we should continue to invest in them and fully develop them. This is particularly true now that in most market sectors competitive advantage is continually being eroded - i.e. International barriers are coming down, selling time is becoming limited, competitors are getting smarter, fewer and fewer names are appearing on companies’ databases, and product uniqueness is rare. Conversely, undeveloped personnel can bring down a company through inadequate performance, leaving the competition to harvest the marketplace.

The moral right of the author, Jonathan Farrington, has been asserted.All rights reserved. This publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system or otherwise, unless this notification of copyright is retained.

Share This

What comes to people’s mind when they say your name? You probably haven’t given it a lot of thought; few of us have. When we don’t develop and manage our professional image, we invite others to do this for us, and we lose control of how we are perceived.
In business, creating and managing our image is called personal branding. A brand is the relationship or position an object or person holds in the mind of the consumer. For example, when you think of Volvo, what comes to mind? Most of us would answer “safety.”

When your name is spoken, what do people think? Whatever bubbles up is your personal brand. Personal brands summarize those key attributes that describe us and an unique selling proposition that differentiates us. When I work with clients to create personal brands, we develop three products.

Brand Summary: A brand summarizes our unique selling proposition, or what separates us from our competition. My brand is “The Career Engineer.” Other examples include a therapist whose brand is “the Wizard of Ahhs” and a high level manager and motivator who uses “the Pied Piper.” I once worked with a college president who decided her brand was “the Energizer Bunny” because she was known for her ability to energize conservative institutions.

Positioning Statement: Once we identify our “sweet spot,” or those attributes where desired image, others’ perceptions of us, and our own opinion of ourselves meet, we can isolate three to six attributes that define our image. From these attributes, we can write a positioning statement. This document is for our eyes only and is used as a focusing device.

My positioning statement is: “Elegant but approachable, most people feel an instant connection with him. They sense that he is totally devoted to their, and his, personal and professional growth. By sharing his self and search, he encourages others to become the full expression of who they are.”

I use this statement to ensure that everything I do from the car I drive to the organizations in which I belong support my positioning.

Elevator Statement: An elevator speech distills our personal sales pitch into a few succinct sentences. It’s called an elevator statement because in the time it takes for an elevator to travel from one floor to another, we should be able to build a compelling case for ourselves.

An elevator speech is intended to open doors, not close sales. Most of us begin by telling people what we do, specifically their services, forgetting to tune into that all important station WIFT (What’s In It For Them?).

A far more effective way to introduce ourselves is to talk about the clients we serve and the challenges we help solve. In mere minutes, we should be able to cover the following: target market(s); what pains or pleasures them; an example; a case study; the result; and an open-ended question.

For example, here is the elevator speech I use for presentation training:

Target Market: “I work with businesspeople…”

Their Pleasure/Pain: “…who are ready to take their careers to the next level.” (Or, “…who feel their communications skills are holding them back.”)

Example: “They may have their eye on a big promotion or want to make the best possible impression during an important presentation.” (Or, “They may have received a less than stellar review.”)

Case Study: “Just this week, I worked with a CEO who had been asked to make a presentation to a prestigious professional association. She had always gotten positive feedback from past presentations, but she knew she could be better. Something felt like it was missing.”

Result: “I showed her how to energize her speech. Her public relations officer told her it was her most powerful presentation to date, and she told me that she has never experienced such a sense of personal power.”

Open-Ended Question: “What kind of presentations do you make?”

Remember, an elevator pitch is intended to pique interest, not tell the whole story. When you develop a pitch that has them asking for more, you know you’ve on the right track.

Try this simple formula to create your own elevator pitch, and use as many words as you need. Then, start removing sentences and words that are unnecessary. Imagine that you’re being billed $1,000 a word and keep only the most cost-effective language.

One final note: your first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It takes time to get our elevator speech down pat, but once you do you’ll be on your way to promoting a stronger image.

Share This

In recent years in the business-world there has been a lot written and said about team development. Unfortunately, most of the people doing the majority of talking lack the psychological background to accurately describe the conditions under which people choose to become a true team.

In a large retail store it can be a challenge to build an environment where all or most of the employees feel they are part of a store team. It’s more common to find individual departments that act as a team, rather than the entire store. That’s because as a general rule it’s easier to build a relatively small team of up to a dozen team members than it is a team with a hundred or more members.

The developmental process of a group of people evolving into a cohesive interdependent team that can direct itself to solve organizational problems rarely happens spontaneously. A true team does not happen by chance or accident, but requires planning, an understanding of group dynamics, and most of all effective team leadership. Most people in business today confuse ineffective groups, committees and other adverse groupings as a true team. An adverse grouping is a situation where people come together, either by accident or on purpose, but function in some way other than a true team. Once a person has been a member of a true interdependent team, that experience isn’t soon forgotten. And that experience can sour the person in the future to serve on ineffective groups, and committees, because the person now know what it feels like to be a member of a real team. An interdependent team is a highly unusual and unique interpersonal experience; there is probably no other parallel in all of human experience.

The process of team development is neither complicated, nor impossible. Many new and previously inexperienced team leaders are able to build a team with proper training and coaching. Being successful as a team leader requires only a minimal knowledge of the process, but it does demand a willingness to try new techniques and methods. For most new team leaders it means stretching beyond what may feel natural or even comfortable. Whether you are experienced or inexperienced, old or young, it is possible for you to become an effective team leader.

Before we learn what an interdependent team is, let’s first understand what it isn’t. There are four typical negative or adverse reactions to the grouping of people in interpersonal relationships. This is true in both personal and professional relationships. These adverse reactions are observable in behavioral terms and for simple clarification are called: mob, gang, committee and group.

Mob. Individualistic or selfish thinking can identify mob behavior. People displaying mob behavior are tactical in that they think only for the moment and have virtually no strategic or long-term planning. In mob behavior there is no leadership, which creates mob disorganization. When we think of street mobs, the first thing that comes to mind is violence, but actually violence is the product or outgrowth of disorganization, which happens because there is no effective leadership.

Gang. Although gang behavior sounds similar to mob behavior, it differs in almost every aspect. Strong autocratic leadership along with a hierarchical system of management characterizes gang behavior. Gang members are highly territorial and defensive, thus creating aggression in defending their perceived territory. In business, gang behavior frequently includes empire building where gang members attempt to exclude “outside” resources by becoming totally self-reliant or self-sufficient.

Committee (Task Force). In business, committees are usually thought of in positive terms. Actually, compared to interdependent teams, committees are inefficient and ineffective. Due to the lack of team cohesion and identity, traditional committees frequently have problems focusing on their purpose until they satisfy a strong need for organization, defining procedures, establishing policies, and having a controlled leadership. Some committees invest most of their available time in these areas. This results in a lengthy process that is cumbersome and oftentimes fails to achieve superior results.

Group. A “group” consists of people in a setting that lacks purpose, leadership, communication, and obviously results. The best examples of groups are the people in an elevator or doctor’s office. They are there, but have superficial communication at best. In fact, if someone breaks the rules of groups by attempting to lead or force communication, other members of the group become uncomfortable and unwilling to cooperate. If you doubt this, try asking someone in an elevator to join you in singing a song. The person will likely repel at your comment, because it’s not acceptable group behavior.

If you are a student of human behavior you can probably see examples of these four types of adverse reactions to human interaction in almost every aspect of life. When one department in a store demonstrates gang behavior toward another department, it can result in a very unhealthy situation. There may be a sign placed on a backroom door that says, “Research and Development Personnel Only.” This would be characteristic of people defining their territory demonstrating gang behavior. Obviously, any of the four adverse reactions can be counter-productive to smooth store operations.

Next month we’ll look at the process a leader takes to build a group of people into an interdependent team. We’ll see, for example, the benefits of team cohesion and team identity. Until then, keep your eyes on the teams in your workplace and see how many of them might be mobs, gangs, committees, or groups.

If you would like more information on Team Development, please contact one of our team members at (888)262-2499. You can also visit our website to learn more about our products, services, and the multinational organizations we have served over the past three decades. Reference this article to receive a 50% discount on any of our books or 15% off your first scheduled training event.

Dr. Richard L. Williams is a retail consultant specializing in team development, performance coaching, leadership development and organizational development.

Due to outstanding scholarship while a doctoral candidate at Oxford University, Dr. Williams was honored with Knighthood. His formal title is, therefore, “Sir Doctor Williams.”

Share This