Empower Sales Success: With Effective Sales Training

By Carol L. Cohen

These days buyers will only engage with salespeople who provide value as a consultative partner. This means those sellers must up their game in both knowledge and skill. That places the challenge squarely on the back of sales enablement and sales training professionals. While this has always been a unique challenge in the world, it is especially urgent now. There was a time when it was believed that salespeople were actually born and could not be trained. Now we all know better, but we struggle to build that perfect program. This book offers an approach to sales training that should address that challenge. The training and enablement need of sales teams has evolved over the years, but the pandemic accelerated the change required. This book will provide a guide for those of you in the sales enablement and sales training world to help you develop effective sales training and sales enablement programs. Salespeople are a unique breed with an extremely tough job, and effective programs can enable their success and return business results for the company. This book will make you the hero of that story. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977267689

Carol L. Cohen

For more than 20 years Carol has worked in corporate sales training and has observed what works and what doesn’t. Her programs have won awards and she is considered a thought leader in the industry. Carol is the Vice President of Strategy & Sales Enablement at Infopro learning and a fourth generation educator whose passion for teaching led to a career in corporate sales training. She considers it her mission to enable the success of others through creative and engaging learning. 

Book preview

Empower sales success

With Effective Sales Training

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2023 Carol L. Cohen

v2.0

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Why Sales Training?

Chapter One: The Unique Challenge

Why is it all so hard?

The Sea Change

How do you measure performance?

Build a Success Plan

Funding for Sales Training

Chapter Two: The Myth and Mystery of Sales

Context not Content

Myth-Busting

Current state of selling

The Response to Mystery and Myth

Chapter Three: Learner Centricity

Learner-centric vs Content-centric

A Simple and Elegant Approach

Key Considerations

Chapter Four: What Salespeople Bring to the Table

A Patchwork Quilt of Methodologies

What Success-Driven Means

Understanding the Sales Daily Challenge

So, Let’s Get REAL

Focus on More than What They Know

Chapter Five: The Success Plan

Kirkpatrick was Right

An Example Success Plan

The Construct

The Bottom Line

Metrics Represent Change Targets

Chapter Six: Learning Strategy

Lay the Foundation

Why Performance Transformation?

Who’s Who in a Strategy Project

Measuring the Impact

Implementing the strategy

The Blue Sky Approach

Chapter Seven: Creating Stellar Sales Training

Build a Learning Strategy

The Context and Content Lifecycles

Learning Objectives

Activities

Tests and Assessments

ChatGPT

Chapter Eight: Empowering Sales Success

Thing One: Begin with the End in Mind

Thing Two: Make It Personal

Thing Three: Make It Simple & Elegant

Thing Four: Wrestle That Tech to the Mat

Thing Five: Do the Least to Get the Most

Parting Words

Don’t Say Moving Target

Love Sales

Be Learner-Centric

Set Your Intent

Acknowledgments

Special Thanks

Books for further reading

Introduction

WHY SALES TRAINING?

Sales training is a process that empowers sales success by providing key concepts, methodology, and practice so sellers can become a competitive advantage. That is no small task, and it requires learner-centric instructional design. Even though there are many instructional design methodologies, they all begin with analysis. Sales training is no different. When I think about sales training, I always begin by exploring why sellers need it. That’s usually my starting point because salespeople, including their managers, really don’t want training at all. They want to grow and adapt and respond correctly, and, of course, sell; but, if you ask them to choose between taking a class and maybe walking across hot coals, they probably will pick the hot coals. So, when I get into situations like I’ve been in in the past, where high-priced consultants come into a company, and I am quoting now, to solve all the selling problems, I ask myself: what is it that the sellers need to learn? By that I mean, what do they have to change in terms of what to say, do, and show to the customer?

I remember one particular incident where we had a very high-priced team of consultants onsite at our company to work with our sales team and leadership to build our product value story. The goal of the program supported by the effort of the consultants was actually very good, very high quality, no complaints there. However, consultants like that are never really educators or trainers or experienced learning architects or instructional designers. So, they aren’t focused on the learner the way we in the learning and development profession are. Rather than simply fixing the sellers, we examine the need for change. What is the delta between what the sellers are doing now and where we want them to be? How do we get them there through learning and practice?

That is our collective challenge as sales training designers and developers. I hope this book will help you accomplish success easily and effectively. My multi-decade career in sales training and enablement is powered by my mission to enable the success of salespeople. My first book, REAL Selling, was targeted at sellers, but this book is for you, the sales training professional. Sales training is a bundle of special and unique challenges. It is not for the light-hearted and hopefully this book will help you ease the burden.

Like most corporate instructional designers, I stumbled into sales training somewhat by accident. As a result, I often discounted my value as an expert contributor. Many in learning and development do that. We forget that our knowledge of the learner and adult learning gives us an important seat at the table. I am never a docile participant in any group setting. I am always the squeaky wheel, questioning and pushing back, and testing theories, and I tend to drive people mad because of that. Here is an example of what I am talking about. At one of my previous companies where I led the sales training and enablement team, we were working on a value message framework for our SaaS (software as a service) management solution. It was really a very inventive and creative piece of software. Because it was ahead of its time for the industry, for a long time the software kind of sold itself. It was so unique. Sellers could just show it, drop the mic, and their customer would buy it. Too soon, though, along came competition, advancements in software, and changes in the processes of the customers. And in the case of a SaaS product, the seller must continuously sell to ensure the customer continues the annual license. The seller must partner with that company for as long as they are licensed consumers of the product.

What does that mean to the behavior of the salesperson? That was the question that was going through my head the whole time as we worked on a shared document during the workshop. You can easily visualize this. The slide showed the sales cycle in a table with a row for the buying cycle and then we worked on listing the activities of the various people and handshakes across our team in alignment with those rows. It was an excellent exercise, but we got to a point where the consultant asked the group what happens if the prospect asks you to see the product. I blurted out that you should just show them the product. Everyone in the room turned on me like a pack of hellhounds screaming NO. Why would they say no? They said no because as they push the sales approach to be more consultative, they have interpreted that to mean holding back in showing the product. At that time, I was just so shocked by their reaction that I didn’t stand up for myself and explain the reason I said that. Sometimes you must process things for a couple of decades until you can articulate what should have been said.

I had fallen into the trap many of us in training fall into. Rather than recognizing our value as an expert in adult learning with particular expertise in sales training, we tend to hang back and let the content experts call the shots. We defer to them when they should be looking to us. It is not easy for salespeople to transition from transactional selling to consultative selling. That is a job for those of us who understand performance development and adult learning.

I should have stepped up onto my soapbox and shared this: Look hellhounds, a few years ago, I was the champion within a huge global company bringing in a software program that had an annual license fee of around a million dollars. That meant I had to advocate for the product and basically sell it internally within my company in something like a dozen meetings to dozens of stakeholders who had to sign off on the deal and I had to do it without my sales rep being there. That meant that once I was sold on the value I got to a point where I needed to galvanize confidence in what I was promoting within that company. That meant I needed to see the product. How could I speak confidently about it if I had never actually seen it? In the meantime, the seller’s company itself kept firing their representatives. I had three different account managers during this process. Why? Because their sales managers were very transactional. That meant they were pressuring the account managers to close the deal quickly. And it came down to if they didn’t close the deal this quarter, sorry they were done. The reality is to get a deal like that may take some time and, most certainly, it takes a lot of information, and it takes a lot of trust. I should have realized that my experience as a customer along with my experience in sales training qualified me to make that contribution to our workshop.

Clearly, the question do you show them the product is not a binary yes or no, black or white question. The real questions should be when do you show the product and why do you show the product. If sellers lead to the solution, rather than with the solution, then they will find a natural point when showing the product to the customer makes sense. You can begin to see how complex selling actually is. That complicated effort is powered by the value message and inhibited by being transactional. If sellers lead with the product, showing it to customers right up front, and then dropping the mic, they are expecting the product to sell itself. Well, that wasn’t what I was suggesting in that meeting, but I knew from my own experience as a customer that I could not have gone in front of the CFO and everybody else I needed to convince without having seen the product. The answer is not about the sales process, but rather about what the seller should be doing to support their customer. The seller must support their champion by encouraging confidence and effectiveness in communicating the value of the solution enabling them to sell internally when the seller is not there. That requires training and lots of practice.

Now that I’m over my shock of the pushback I got about this, I can safely say that training the salespeople to understand when and how to present their solution is one of the most essential elements of sales training. No value framework is going to do that by itself any more than a super sexy product is going to sell itself. As I say almost every day, it must be about the learner. It is about the way a person acts, presents themselves, and as I have said in the past and I will say again more than one thousand times: it is about what you want sellers to do, to say, to show, to find, to remember differently than they do now. And that’s the basis of sales training. That is also your opportunity.

So many sales trainers and sales programs out there are based on a sage-on-the-stage strutting around talking about all his great wins, but they are merely providing entertainment. Don’t get me wrong,