The Training Myth

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.