The Training Myth

Mark is a colleague of mine. He sells software. Actually, he sells a lot of software. Since I first met him six years ago he has been the top salesman at his company.

Mark is 45 years old and has never had any sales training whatsoever—don’t even mention it to him; he’ll go on a rant. Until his accidental segue into the sales world in 2001, Mark had been a teacher in the public school system for some 15 years. Within six months at his software sales job Mark was consistently selling four to six times more than the salespeople around him.

I can sit and tell stories of the Marks I’ve met in most every industry you can name, and I can tell you what the common denominator of every one of these ultra top producers is, but I do that all day. Today let me tell you what it is not. It is not a sales “process”.

I’m not trying to be a naysayer, but to do my job properly I have to list not only what does work in sales force productivity—I have to comment on the “fads” when they begin to influence a critical mass, and process has officially reached fad status. Process is the new oat bran. Ten years ago oat bran was the cure-all of the day; you couldn’t buy anything that didn’t boast, “Now with more oat bran!” on its label. Where’s oat bran today?

Let me be blunt. Adopting a company-wide sales process will not raise your team’s performance to stellar levels (here is a randomly selected example of what I mean; this is one of so many companies that claim their sales process is the performance enhancer you need) and it is the Marks of the sales world who, every day in every sale type, blatantly make the point for us all to see. No training, no process—six times more sales. And if you try to teach Mark a selling process—of just about any kind—his performance will not only not go up, it usually goes down.

Understand that processes only come into being when there is lagging performance. No one ever created a process for doing a thing, after all, when that thing is already being done at consistently high levels by all of its practitioners. A process is conceived only when the “all” part of that last sentence disappears, and when the process creator believes that this is the way to address the issue—by teaching everyone a “proven” series of steps. But here’s the whole kicker. When you study top sales performers you will quickly see that they all reach those top levels via very different selling styles! So how do you know who to base your sales process on? Process-izing only makes sense if it chronicles the one proven best way of doing something, which you will never find in sales. This is the fundamental flaw of sales process.

Today’s top sales teams have returned to a more human mindset of hiring talented people and then allowing them—actually encouraging them—to exploit each of their own styles; to do things their own way rather than overriding those natural talents with a rigid common process that must be used by everyone. This first requires a very clear definition of which natural talents are needed for their specific sale type, but at least that can be identified.

A process-driven sales forces make me think of a professional football team spending great time and resources to hire the five best quarterbacks in the world—who all have their own unique style that they have honed over many years and that works for them—only to then retrain all five to do things one common way. We know that in such a case, overall productivity will drop.

Process has its place, but where human performance is concerned there is rarely one best way to do something. Every time you think there is—every single time—someone will come along and shatter all previous records by doing things his own way, thus rendering that superior process of yours moot.

Stop entrusting your salespeople’s performance to a process that someone else says is best. Return instead to what sales has always been about; different people’s unique and natural born ability to influence and lead others to decision, each in their own way.

Talent-based hiring is a far superior way to recruit salespeople. The talent interview more accurately reveals the presence—or absence—of the talents you need to hire, and we know that talent is the only reliable predictor of future performance. Your candidate’s learned skills are not reliable predictors; nor is past sales experience, industry experience, education or training! Only natural born talent—and talent cannot be taught; it must be hired.

This last paragraph should be quite disturbing to most of you. Most companies after all cite industry experience, sales experience, a certain level of education, etc. as minimum requirements for their sales job postings. But The Gallup Organization’s 30 year study of top performers proved beyond any doubt that natural-born talent is the only reliable predictor of future performance.

Okay. Easy enough. So what talents should I look for in my sales candidates then?

Throughout the nineties, I asked that very question to a great many recruiting consultants and sales experts and every one would list for me the “qualities of a good salesperson”—without any acknowledgement of the many different types of sales there are! This means I was being told to find the same talents whether hiring a salesperson to sell private jets to oil sheiks or ink cartridges to small businesses. I began to understand why I so often seemed to hire salespeople that I knew were solid or even outstanding performers at their last job, only to watch as they completely flopped at the new sale.

Better talent-casting for sales begins by acknowledging how completely different one sales job can be from the next in terms of the talents needed. Some are more customer service than selling. Some require a lot of prospecting while others require none at all. Some sales cycles are one day, others can be years. Some products or services require deep, complicated explanations where others come with straightforward, unchanging features and benefits. Some salespeople have to impact C-level executives while others deal with maintenance managers. Or consumers.

On top of that, top producing salespeople are “specialists”; they excel not only at certain sale types that perfectly match their talent sets, but also at particular stages of those sale types. For instance, the talents that make someone great at selling actually have nothing whatsoever to do with the talents that make someone great at prospecting. And the talents that make a dynamite prospector have little to do with ongoing customer service. From a perspective of the talent sets needed, these are actually very different jobs.

The first step to hiring better salespeople is to acknowledge that:

• Talent cannot be taught; it must be hired.
• The talents must be specific to your exact sale type, and there are many sale types.
• Wherever possible, assign different sales stages to different people (different talents), instead of asking the same salespeople to sell multiple stages.

Isolating talent in this way is the first step I observed when studying what the world’s best sales teams do so differently. They have learned that it is easier and more realistic to learn to hire more accurately, that to try to teach (train) top sales performance.

Sales training doesn’t work. There. I said it.

The world of corporate sales has been good to me—as has sales consulting—so I’m always reluctant to make such a negative sounding declaration. The fact is I’m not a negative guy at all.

But too many well-meaning businesspeople are shelling out their hard earned money hoping that sales training will raise their salespeople’s performance levels and in the vast majority of cases, this will not happen. This blog will be discussing exactly why that is and, I suppose more importantly, what alterative practices do raise sales.

The formula for top human performance has actually never changed—nor will it—but as our daily worlds continue to get more high tech and more automated, a very detrimental side effect is that execs and managers are losing track of this performance formula. They are losing track of the human side of the sales team.

Sales is about people, not process. If you want to get the most out of a group of salespeople, you are subject to the laws of human performance, and the formula for top performance has always been:

Natural born talent operating under specific performance conditions.

This blog will discuss natural sales talents; those abilities that simply cannot be taught to another person. I will also be talking about many different sale types, because the natural talents needed to sell million dollar software to top executives are not the same as the talents needed to sell forklifts to warehouse managers. Ever hear someone say, “He could sell anything to anyone”? Well I’m afraid it’s not true. Top salespeople are only “top” at certain types of sales.

I will also be discussing the “specific performance conditions” half of the formula—a topic that is even more misunderstood than talent hiring.

I am excited about my new blog. I’m excited to see what can be accomplished here. I’ll begin tomorrow with a closer look at sales talents. See you then.