Winning teams are always looking for ways to improve.  For sales organizations, that means investing in sales training and sales coaching programs.

Many such companies who have made the switch to training in Customer Aligned Selling and have seen improvements in their results; though some haven’t seen as dramatic an increase in sales as they had hoped.  These “good, but I was hoping for better” results can generally be attributed to a handful of missed opportunities in how the training is executed and how what it teaches is implemented afterward.

Here are four of the most common sales training pitfalls, and what you can do to avoid them:

Everyone knows we live in a post-trust era.  The days when people trusted others until they gave them a reason not to are gone.  These days, trust has to be earned.

But trust is what advances the sales opportunity.  So how does today’s sales rep build the trust needed to succeed with customers?

Value = Trust:  the 21^st century sales equation

Today’s customers demand value at every step of the relationship.  No value = no trust.  No trust = no sale.  The 21^st century sales rep, who demonstrates value from the beginning of the relationship, builds trust. 

What your reps do after the first meeting with a customer has the power to advance the sales opportunity or cause the customer to slam on the brakes.  What they do here can either build trust or break it.

A rep’s behavior following sales meetings will either:

Renowned sales expert Neil Rackham wrote what many still consider to be the definitive guide to sales, SPIN Selling.  First published in 1988, this book was the "sales bible" for two decades.

But the author now acknowledges that the original edition of the book is out of date.  Many of the techniques it taught no longer work today!  Instead, Rackham now says that sales people must become value creators.

What is value?  Value is the information, insights, and actions a sales rep brings to the customer/prospect that they can’t find or achieve on their own.  The 21st century customer demands value at every step of the relationship. 

All sales strategies and processes should be targeted to this fundamental change.

Between 2010 and 2013, the greatest emphasis of sales force change was in the area of compensation and quota setting.  That’s according to Mark Donnolo, founder of The SalesGlobe, a sales consulting group in Atlanta.  During those two years, in over 100 large companies that participated in his research, almost every vice president of sales was focused on addressing the issues of compensation and quota setting for the next year.

Quotas and compensation plans are great drivers of change.  A good compensation plan can change the behavior of an entire sales force.  But in most cases, compensation plans and the quotas on which they are based are designed with one purpose in mind - to make the supplier/vendor more profitable. 

As I wrote in my last post, Zig Ziglar famously said that if you help enough other people get what they want, you will get what you want.  If you help the customer meet his or her needs, you have a much better chance of having your own needs met.  Therefore, making your customer’s bottom line your goal is the key to closing sales.

That leads us to the problem with many sales quotas:  they’re set for the wrong reasons by the wrong people

We’ve all heard the Golden Rule of Business: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”  That’s especially true in sales!  Your customers have the gold you’re after, so you must play by their rules.

To do so, you must also apply the Platinum Rule: “Do unto others as they would have you do to them, not as you would have them do unto you.”  There are lots of rules for successful selling, but they all boil down to this one rule.

The Platinum Rule of Sales

 Translated into the world of sales, The Rule means:

Many sales managers have become frustrated with sales training programs and have largely given up on pursuing training for their reps.  They have paid thousands of dollars for training in the past and received little or no return on that investment.

Unfortunately, instead of trying to find the root causes behind why the training didn’t work, they sometimes default to assuming the trainer they hired didn’t do a good job.  They may even conclude that sales trainers are all hype.  Or they may decide that their people just don’t have what it takes to be really stellar sales reps.

The reality is that most sales managers in this situation are unaware of the ways in which their own decisions and actions set them up for failure from the beginning. 

Many organizations unwittingly suffer from a bad habit that greatly diminishes sales performance:  sales managers who spend too much of their time trying to manage a sales rep's outcomes.  You may ask, "Well, isn't that a sales manager's job?"

As a business owner or VP of Sales, have you been frustrated with your CRM utilization or forecast accuracy?  You are not alone.  Let's talk about one reason you may not be getting the results you wanted.

Do you sales reps have written goals? Do your employees have written goals?

Goal setting is one of the most powerful tools and methodologies to improve engagement - engagement of sales people and engagement of employees. Billy Cox writes in the All Star Sales Book: Get in the Game, Boost Your Number and Earn the Big Bucks  “Why do such a small percentage of people reach the elite performer status? Why do these top few make most of the money? And, how can you become one of them? Winning in sales is no different than winning in sports, business, and life. The next generation of salespeople may know how to close a sale, but most don't know how to effectively develop their mental aspects of the game. As a result they never make it to the top and they sit around wondering why others with less talent keep passing them by. In the game of sales, business, and life there are no time-outs, no overtimes. You only get one chance to play. The question you have to ask yourself is, ‘Do I want to wait on the sidelines or do I want to win?'" 

Revenue, Expenses and Risk

In all business purchases, there are 3 main business drivers that business owners and managers have as their core. The last 2 blogs I dealt with revenue and expenses. This one is on risk. There are two types of risk - general business risk and risk in the buying decision. General business decision risk is related to running the business. Buying decision risk is related to "Am I making the right decision and what will it cost me if I am wrong?" Both relate to business, but the buying decision risk has a lot more emotional factors involved, such as fear and ego.

Managing or reducing risk is huge factor in a buying decision. A business leader deals with risk in many areas. Risk to: data, people, buildings, general liability, financial, and business continuity to name a few. There are many ways managers try to reduce risk from insurance policies, data backups and cloud computing, physical security using ID badges, to having multiple people engage in the buying process. A buying committee is used to reduce risk, not necessarily get the best option with the most features.

I have a client who sells data services to banks. He reports that over the last seven years the focus has shifted from what revenue new software can deliver then to expenses reduction and now, the biggest concern is risk. The banks are evaluating contract terms, reputation of company, costs to get out of a contract and even data center uptime.  To reduce vendor risk, flexibility  in contracts is becoming a big issue.