T3. Always Be Training
Sales Training Must be Realistic
It’s one thing to get warm bodies in the door. It’s quite another to get them to perform. Comprehensive realistic training must be provided by a trainer that knows all aspects of the product and sales.
Product training is the first step, This is like kindergarten. What the product is. For example, a website directory has listings to help consumers find attorneys.
Features and benefits is like grade school. What the product features mean. Attorneys can select the best categories (family law, criminal law, tax law) so that appropriate clients can find them and inappropriate (say patent client for a real estate lawyer) will not call them.
Business implications and ROI are like high school. You can buy a listing for $100 per month, site has high traffic, if only 1 client per year retains you with an average case value of $5,000 the payback is over 400%.
Next comes a psychologically engineered sales process designed to hit the emotional level – both immediate and projected into the future. This is college to perhaps graduate school. A rep would tell a lawyer that she must meet high standards to be accepted (status, ego). That only a limited number of lawyers can be listed (scarcity). I have my orders to fill your category today and the first listed appears on top of others on the search results page (sense-of-urgency). If you think this is in the best interests of your practice, what should we do now? (close for a decision).
Sales training must be done by someone with extensive successful sales experience to be credible and taken seriously by sales veterans. A theoretician will be scoffed at. Problem here is that most sales reps make lousy trainers. Many succeed based on personal charm and charisma. They would never admit this, stating instead that their “hard work” and “closing skills” makes it happen. They often succeed in spite of their abysmal techniques. You can’t teach someone to be charismatic, so they teach faulty techniques causing more harm than good.
A trainer has to be skilled at both sales and teaching. Who finds out what actually works by careful testing. A systematic approach can take average reps and turn them into above average performers, and high performers into superstars, regardless of personality traits or physical appearance.