The True Cost of Sales Training

The approach we take to sales training and its benefits are different in the fact that it is designed to address your unique sales situation in a way that is highly customizable.  There is a difference between selling skills and selling systems.  Every top performance sales individual has a combination of both these things.  The reality is that they need to be considered and focused on separately.  Basketball is a great example if you look at many of the great coaches at the college level you hear the announces, the reporters and even the fans talk about how solid their system is.  What many people never stop to consider is that that system is built upon a set of basic skills that have been mastered by all they s involved.   Selling is no different.  Even in today’s world of complex sales and team selling you still need to be a master of basic business and sales skills that will serve you and your customers well during every opportunity.

If you went to one of those same legendary coaches summer camps what would be taught is the basics of dribbling, shooting, and passing.  In sales there are also basic skills required to help individual sales people.   These are things that often get over looked by even the best sales leadership.   If you don’t know how to find a prospect you won’t have any customers.   Once you get in the door you need to know how to uncover their needs, find the best opportunities to help, understand what is driving their needs and tailor your conversations to be about them not you.

No matter who you sell to you need prospects.  Every sales person in the world wishes more and more customers would just show up.  The reality is there needs to be a plan created at the individual level that weeds out what is a waste of time and focuses your efforts on delivering results that lead to not only new prospects but the right kind of new business prospects.

So you’ve gotten in the door but have you come prepared with the right questions?   A sales call is like a first date; on a good one the other person does more of the talking.  Its about learning them and finding those little opening that could be common ground.   Sure you have to offer value to be asked back but that value can be in the form of insight gained from the questions you asked and the answers you provide.

What is a sale worth to you?  By improving your focus and basic selling skills you’ll not only know the answer to that question but most importantly what is the cost of a lost sale.  Not every opportunity can be won but even a nominal increase in closed sales can have a huge impact on the profitability of an individual, the organization, and employee retention.   The following is a real world example from a sales organization we are very familiar with.

If an average initial sale to a new customer is worth $10,000 in revenue, $2,800 in gross profit and $840 in commission to the sales person.  The sales person in question was new and was winning only 15% percent of their opportunities. It was taking them 200 prospecting calls to get 4 new appointments.   By focusing their efforts on looking for the right type of customer for the products and services they were selling they improves the number of appointments per 200 cold calls from 2 to 5 reducing the amount of time spent chasing people for their first appointment and instead shifting their focus to a better balance of new business generation.  Now with more people to cal prospects and suspects they worked on their pre sales call preparation refining over time the questions to ask and background information to gather before going to the meeting.  Then they worked on their presentation skills by learning to deliver a clear concise and value packed message that appealed to the customer needs that had been discovered.  Needs that when followed up on led to more sales. Their close percentage change from 15% to 22.5% which while on the low side of average were in line with many of their other peers.

The impact is clear.  Take a moment Looks at your sales results and determine what and where you or your sales team needs training