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But the author now acknowledges that the original edition of the book is out of date.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

In this post, we discussed how to identify the different types of buyers in a complex sale, and how to use the questions they ask to pinpoint what their buying concerns are.  Understanding each type of buyer’s decision criteria is key to winning the business.  

This can be challenging, even if everyone involved is a relatively easy-going person.  But sometimes, there are personality factors that can make this process a bit more complicated.  That’s what happens when one of your buyers is a power broker or an antagonist. 

In my last post, I discussed the communication problems that arise when a person who thinks one way speaks to a listener who thinks in a completely different way.  The person doing the talking is presenting the kind of information that is important to him, but he doesn’t get his message across because what’s important to his listener is something entirely different.

I also talked about how incorporating Whole Brain^® Thinking into your sales process helps you identify how your prospects think so you can present the information your prospects need to hear to say, “I’ll buy!”  Now, I’d like to share some examples of how people and companies I know have used this information to increase sales, repair dysfunctional teams, and improve (or even save) personal relationships.

Have you ever been discussing an idea or explaining something to someone, and – no matter how eloquent you were – had the feeling that you weren’t being understood? 

Complex sales where there are numerous decision-makers can be difficult to navigate.  Closing such a deal requires an understanding of the different types of buyers, what their concerns are, and what influences their desires.  It also requires the ability to anticipate, identify, and address the factors each individual cares about.

There are three players in a complex sale: influencer/user, technical, and financial buyer.  In smaller companies, one person can serve in all three roles, but with larger organizations, there are typically two or three people fulfilling them.  

After you’ve completed your sales presentation or product demo, the buyer enters the evaluation phase of the buying process, and a scary monster frequently rears its ugly head: risk.  Risk can kill a deal, and its threat can increase as your prospect evaluates your offering.

What is the opportunity cost of going with this solution or vendor?
What will happen if I commit and spend this money?
Will I truly get the value I need?
What if I’m missing something?

You’ve just made a great sales presentation for a great prospect.  The whole sales process has gone smoothly from the beginning.  You like your buyers, and they like you and your offering.  They definitely want to do business with you!  If only you can agree on a price.

It’s easy and natural to get a little discouraged when a buyer asks you to lower your fee.  But don’t assume they’ve applied the brakes just yet.  Price is only 18% of the buying decision.  The competence of the sales rep, however, is 39% of the buying decision.  You may feel uncomfortable, but your customer has just offered you an excellent opportunity to demonstrate a high degree of competence by handling his request correctly.