If you want to improve sales and profits, stop your sales training now!

About 5 years ago, sales training was not a hot topic among companies in China. Most foreign corporations simply set up manufacturing bases here and sales were made abroad. Because domestic demand for products and services was so high, sellers could sell almost anything, and the domestic market bought them all.

Fast forward to today’s market. What we see now is very intense competition between vendors. Buyers, on the other hand, have been spoiled by the increasing options of different buyers. It is now a buyer’s market, and sellers would have to do something different to win over buyers.

Hence the current high demand for sales training. Many companies, whether foreign or locally owned, are hiring trainers (external or internal) to train their sales force to deal with increasing competition as well as increasingly sophisticated buyers.

However, few companies can claim that their sales results improved as a result of sales training. In fact, there are some who claim that after spending a lot of time and money (especially if they go with the best sales training brands), they don’t see any significant change in their sales people, and as such, no significant change. improvements in sales and profits either.

So what else can be done to help sellers increase sales (and margins)?

In the 2007 World Class Sales Excellence Research Report by HR Chally Group, the top 3 benchmarks used by world class sales teams are:

1. Create a customer-driven culture;

2. Recruitment and Selection of the Right Sales Talent; Y

3. Training and development for the right set of skills

Create a customer-driven culture

Although there’s another old adage that says, “The business of business is creating a customer,” many companies don’t really behave in the same way. There are companies that:

* Focus on creating new technology applications;

* Will sacrifice anything to drive up stock prices; Prayed

* Simply send what has been produced to customers, regardless of whether there is a need or not.

In other words, these companies are too caught up in their own world and have forgotten who really pays their bills (ie the customer); or that they are more concerned with getting a good “valuation” than fattening their salary packages without providing anything of real value to clients.

If you were to hire a salesperson with the skills and attitudes to understand customer needs and put together a solution that delivers what customers want at any of these companies, that salesperson won’t last long.

Although many of these companies recognize the importance of being customer-centric as a sustainable long-term strategy, they can’t, or won’t, make the switch. Here are some reasons why inertia:

* Unwillingness to risk (one’s career);

* Lack of a customer-focused management team

When a colleague and I were talking with the Chinese joint venture partner of a leading German automaker, we were faced with the following concern. They were looking for consultants to help their sales force improve sales in their showroom, especially when they believe they can do much better with their current market share. At some point in our discussion, the client told us that he needs to work with experienced car sales consultants as they have good knowledge of cars.

Our answer was that we will observe and do research on how your leads and customers want your sales people to behave, and then help your salespeople get the right behaviors that fit the needs of customers. However, the response that followed was that they would want consultants who understand cars (not customers) to do such research. The reason is simply that the client perceived that it would be much easier for him to explain to his bosses if the consultants he hired knew about cars.

I have seen similar cases many times, and in most cases the client canceled the project to improve the performance of the sales team, since they were not willing to risk (their career) to generate positive changes in their companies.

In other cases, foreign companies that are customer-centric in their home countries may find it difficult to implement a customer-centric culture in China, because they may have a management team that is not customer-centric. This could be attributed to the fact that the concept of serving customers is quite new in China. The other possible reason could be that most administrative staff have risen through the ranks when operations in China were highly production oriented and therefore have limited exposure to serving customers.

Regardless, adapting one’s corporate culture to market needs has been a major challenge for most companies, and certainly NOT an area that training can solve. Still, other challenges lie ahead that need to be resolved.

Recruitment and selection of the right sales talent

In the last issue (Getting the Right Horse on the Right Trail), I mentioned about putting a hunter to a hunter’s job, and vice versa for a farmer.

When you’re identifying the right sales talent, whether it’s a Hunter or a Farmer, there’s something even more fundamental than a person’s aptitude, past experiences, or even personality. It has to do with the person’s value system.

In short, anyone wanting to work in a customer service role must want to “proactively help others get from where they are to where they want to be, and be fairly rewarded for it.” That, I think, will be the most fundamental requirement.

Unfortunately, most sellers in China fall into one of two types:

* People who will get money from customers, by hook or by crook; PRAYED

*People who will duck and be a doormat to customers, as long as customers give them business.

Either type is unhealthy and there are likely to be problems in customer retention and generating a reasonable profit margin from each sale.

Worse yet, most salespeople have a sales job largely because they couldn’t get any other job. It’s not that sales is a bad job, but many Chinese perceive serving customers as something that serfs do and don’t hold it in high regard. The lack of a proper sales force development process in most companies makes such a perception a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As part of the whole complicated story, the cost to replace a salesperson (whether or not the departure is voluntary) is at least 6 times what you are paying them each month as you will need to search, mentor and train. new staff before it can be effective. If you were to add the opportunity costs of lost sales due to a bad hire, your losses can be even much higher.

Therefore, while sales skills can be trained, a person’s value system is deeply ingrained and is unlikely to change in a short period of time. The good news is that there are still people with more positive values ​​who make great sales potential. The key is simply how you can identify one and see one. Email [email protected] for some simple but effective interview guides on how you can identify great sales leads working for you.

Training and development for the right set of skills

Finally, about the training of sellers.

Just to set the record straight, sales training by an outside trainer is likely to yield disappointing results, if the training is not supported by sales managers. By supporting the training, I mean that the sales managers work with the external trainer to gather areas for improvement, as well as structure the post-training follow-up and coaching so that the participants practice what was taught.

In fact, in HR Chally’s 2007 World Class Sales Excellence Research Report, it was stated that “salespeople who have at least half a day a week, one-on-one, with their managers are twice as productive as other vendors.”

So, before you start training your sales people in selling skills, ask yourself if you have prepared your sales managers to be one-on-one coaches with your team members and if they are equipped with the attitude and skills. the right skills to lead their sales teams. ?

If you’re not so sure about the answer, perhaps you should stop your sales training now and start looking at developing your sales managers to be good leaders and coaches.