The 5 Essential Irons to improve sales training for recruits.

Golfer

The performance of a new sales recruit should be obvious after 3 months, if business leaders would engage in pre-employment planning. The 5 essential irons to improve sales training for recruits are best used before employment.

The truth is that in many cases new sales recruits are sent out with only one iron, to use a golfing analogy. They would never be expected to play a golf day without a full set, why send them out to customers with one club. The onboarding for a new sales recruit is very brief, and their success is often left to chance. They are apparently supposed to come with all the knowledge and experience to make revenues soar, right?

Yes, but in what time frame and how much damage do they do first, and what do they actually need to achieve success?

If you employ an accountant, you can reasonably expect a new recruit to arrive with the skills to perform after a short induction, but for a sales role that often demands developing and implementing a leading strategy, it’s a big ask. Every business leader understands the value in differentiating their business, but a new sales recruit is supposed to guess what that is and how best to communicate it.

To be clear about this, it might be useful to debunk some myths.

Myths Debunked

Do you recognise some of these statements?

Myth 1.

New sales recruits know the right sales strategy for their new employer.

The best sales strategy is known by someone in the organisation because the business is successful enough to afford a new sales recruit. It is however, naïve to expect a new recruit to know this after a brief factory tour. If the sales strategy is not defined and shared with the new recruit, it seems improbable they will be successful anytime soon. A Sales Strategy is how you get customers to buy and is not merely as many sales calls as possible.

Myth 2.

Our new sales recruit will learn from our best customers

New recruits have nothing to offer existing top customers except free labour sorting out problems that don’t generate any new business. Top customers resent having to train supplier recruits. Surely there are better targets for the recruits’ efforts, that will win business faster, something that could have been thought about before the engagement of new recruit is started.

Myth 3.

A week of product training and factory tour is all the new recruit needs to know.

Can someone with one weeks training run a business? No. How can you learn how a business model works, how the cash flows around a business, from a factory tour? If the new sales recruit does not understand the business model it is likely non-core products will be sold.

Myth 4.

Gift of the gab is the only skill that a sales recruit need

There are two reasons why this myth does not hold water

1. It is impossible to listen and talk at the same time, gift of the gabbers just talk, but fail to solve customers’ problems

2. Every problem is more complex than it appears. It was not the visible part of the iceberg that sank the titanic

So, this myth is closely coupled with a failed sales process that has been regurgitated by many over the years. Present, Overcome objections and Close. The issue here is the lack of a problem-solving mind set. A sales call should be about quickly determining whether the solutions available to the salesperson will solve the prospects problem, if it does not, time should not be wasted. Objections do not arise if both parties have been building a business case together.

A useful skill would be curiosity, but more important is a successful sales process for the recruit to follow. Please don’t confuse sales funnel management, done effectively by CRM software, with a Sales Process which should detail the questions and meeting flow.

Myth 5.

There’s only one KPI that matters, Invoiced Sales.

Why does it take 12 months to tell if a new sales recruit is performing? Because the result is not known until the end. Yes, it can be divided by 12, but that misses the point. If you know what the successful activities and conversations are, and you measure the recruits’ performance based on their ability to implement the strategy and follow process, you’ll be confident in 3 months. The invoiced sales result at the end of the year is entirely dependent on it.

Just measuring sales over a 6- or 12-month period is unhelpful and counter-productive. Why wait that long to discover the recruit is not doing the right thing? If you know what strategy and process is successful, then you just measure the recruits’ activity. Why apply pressure without the training to be successful?

Five Essential Irons

1. Sales Strategy – what activities, conversations, demo’s, audits, events or analysis regularly result in a sale. What are the problems customers regularly have? Which ones can be solved and how?

2. Fastest Potential Customers - Do your homework, determine who are the customers or targets with the biggest or fastest potential and direct your recruit to them, where they can learn to be useful.

3. Business Model – Explain the business model to the new sales recruit. They need to understand which products or services are core and make money and which are lead in or tag on products.

4. Sales Process – A well-defined and written sales process will enable anyone with a bit of aptitude and the right attitude to be successful. Allowing your new recruit to copy and paste your competitors process might give you short term gain but is ultimately a way to stay second best.

5. Measure Activity not Sales – Someone in the business knows which activities are successful in bringing in new business or there would not be a new sales recruit. Ensure you measure the recruit’s performance on those activities that lead to success, not just a number that got dreamed up.

Success comes from doing five successful activities 1000 times, why not be sure those 5 activities matter, and implement a process to ensure they are repeated 1000 times. It’s easier than golf.

By Mark Thomas

EMPAT Consulting

©2019 All rights reserved