Career Sales Training
“Career Sales Training Requires More than an Event”
Top Producers Invest in Themselves
All too often sales training amounts to an event, or a weekly gathering conducted by a sales manager. There is value in these events and regularly scheduled meetings, however, top producers recognize that to get and stay at the top requires more. Career sales success requires an on-going investment in your continuous improvement over and above typical “training”.
To get the greatest returns from your best sales efforts you must:
- be able to successfully self-promote to fill your sales funnel
- develop a sales process that smoothly assists the buyer helping them to say “yes”
- properly maintain client relations in a way that deepens and strengthens your relationship leading to repeat business and solid referrals
Typically, the career sales training you’ve had in the past haphazardly addresses some but not all of the three keys to on-going sales success. And training works counter to what we scientifically know about how people learn.
Research has repeatedly demonstrated that there are three ways you learn:
- impact
- discovery
- spaced repetition
You learn through impact when a dramatic or traumatic event changes your understanding of the world around you. Discovery happens when you have those sudden aha moments, and now understand something that wasn’t clear to you before. Both impact and discovery together only represent 6% of how you learn things.
When you were in school you learned a lot of the things you know today through spaced repetition. The multiplication tables are a simple example. You continue to learn that way now even subconsciously. If I were to say, “just do it” you’d think Nike. Even though you didn’t actively work to make that association yourself.
- after one day you forget 50% of what you heard during the training.
- there’s a gap between the level of motivation the training produces, and your ability to implement what you’ve learned in your daily life.
- you, like everyone else, have blind spots preventing you from noticing the behaviors that are keeping you from the success you could have.
Your long-term on-going career sales success is directly tied to:
- your level of commitment.
- your self-leadership.
- your ability to adopt, adapt, and act.
- the effectiveness of your ability to communicate with prospects to produce actions.
- your ability to develop and deepen client relationships.
Rather than training think on-going development, and self-investment. It’s often not the things you haven’t heard before that produce the most dramatic improvement in your sales success. It’s the things you’ve “heard” before, but didn’t really understand.
It isn’t that top producers are so much better than everyone else. It’s that top producers consistently do the little things just a little better than everyone else.