5-2-2014
?The Driving Force of Division? is the title of a chapter in Al Ries? book Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends On It. I like the way Ries thinks and writes about business and his specialty, marketing?and especially what he says about division:
Like amoebas dividing in a Petri dish, business can be viewed as an ever-dividing sea of categories. A category starts off as a single entity usually dominated by one company. IBM dominated the computer category, for example, with the mainframe.
But over time, the category divides into two or more categories. Mainframes, minicomputers, supercomputers, fault-tolerant computers, personal computers, workstations, laptops, notebooks, palmtops, file servicers. And more to come.
For example?beer used to be beer. Then the category divided. Today we have domestic beer and imported beer. Regular beer and light beer. Draft beer and dry beer. Expensive beer and inexpensive beer. Red beer and ice beer. Even nonalcoholic. And more to come.
You get the picture.
I have been watching the category of sales training divide over the past several years. I wanted to point out just a few of these divisions, so that you can determine if you need to work specifically on a certain area. Here?s what I have seen.
In the beginning, there were the sales experts: J. Douglass Edwards, Zig Ziglar, and Tom Hopkins, to name a few. They would teach you everything you needed to know about selling in a day or two?sometimes a week. Then you were all trained up and ready to go out into the world and sell.
Then sales training divided fairly early on between business to business and business to consumer sales. Neil Rackham of Spin Selling fame made the distinction between major and minor sales. Major sales were big ticket items requiring multiple meetings to firm up the deal, and usually resulted in a post-sale relationship between buyers and sellers. A minor sale was a relatively small ticket item usually sold in one meeting with limited post-sale contact or connections between buyer and seller.
After that, though, the division really started in earnest.
Executive sales coach Tony Parinello started focusing on selling to the VITO (Very Important Top Officer) and how to get the meeting at the top. Stephan Schiffman took off on Steven Covey?s ?7 Habits? to create the 25 Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople. Advisor Jill Konrath works with small and medium business to get them focused on Selling to Big Companies. And Ari Galper is focused on making Cold Calling fun by finding out the truth instead of getting all salesy on a call.
And if you?re afraid to pick up the phone? Well, there?s a trainer for that, too: George W. Dudley and Shannon L. Goodson?s Pyschology of Call Reluctance: Earning What You?re Worth in Sales.
If you accidentally get the appointment, then more help is waiting; there are plenty of books on persuasion and the psychology of selling.
There are trainers who specialize in selling personal services like accounting and law. Lead generation expert Brian J. Carroll has written Fast Forward Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Boost the Quality and Quantity of Leads to Increase Your ROI?an entire book about quality leads. We used to cover that in 23 minutes of a two-day generic sales seminar.
I have mentioned Sales 2.0: Improving Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. It gets into CRM and selling with webinars among other things. Ann Miller will tell you how to sell using metaphors in Metaphorically Selling, while Richard Maxwell will sharpen your persuasive power by using storytelling to pitch better, sell faster, and win more business. Then there?s Bill Cates, the Referral Coach, whose book, Don?t Keep Me a Secret: Proven Tactics to Get Referrals and Introductions, I like very much. My friend Dave Paradi has written 102 Tips to Communicate More Effectively Using PowerPoint. And to return to the beginning?Tom Hopkins is still at it. He?s written Sales Closing for Dummies.
So there are sales trainers who will show you how to get a lead, or work on your cold call script to get the first meeting. There are others to tell you what to say on your first meeting, others to teach you how to follow up when your customers don?t make the decision on the first meeting, and still others who will teach you exactly how to craft your PowerPoint presentation when it?s time.
If you think you don?t have a prayer of landing that tough account, you could be wrong. There are books that have nothing to do with the sales process, which are merely designed to get you in the right frame of mind. I found one called Time Out for Salespeople: Daily Inspiration for Maximum Sales Impact.
Sales literature and sales trainers can quickly turn somewhat New Age on you, as evidenced by titles like The Law of Attraction for Sales: How to Connect the Dots to Get What You Want.
You can see how the category of sales training has subdivided, and the implications this has for you and your salespeople. So what does all this mean for you?
It means that there will always be more to learn about selling, because gurus?and wannabe gurus?are writing books about the subject faster than you can read them.
It means you may want to have an inside sales department that only focuses on lead generation and getting the first meeting for the outside sales team.
It definitely means you have to stay current and insist that your sales department be a place to learn and grow and not just a place to work.
It means you cannot trust training to one trainer, one off-the-shelf program, or your training department.
And it probably means we should abandon the notion that a salesperson is ever really fully trained. Substitute that idea with one that requires continual learning and improvement to be imbedded in the day-to-day routine of a salesperson.
There is more to learn about selling than anyone can keep in his or her head. For example, a salesperson who has an important negotiation later in the week needs to get just-in-time training on that one subject instead of trying to find the binder from the seminar he attended several years ago. There are as many pieces of advice as there are various situations in which salespeople find themselves. The good news: Someone has probably been there before.
And if they haven?t?well, then it?s that person?s job to offer the next bit of sales wisdom!
And to think, I used to have a six-hour seminar in which I thought I told people everything they needed to know! The increased amount of information and specialization in the marketplace means you will never know it all. But you always have somewhere to look it up when you need to know more.
Chris Lytle is the founder of Sparque, Inc. He?s the best-selling author of The Accidental Salesperson and The Accidental Sales Manager. Reach Chris by e-mail chris.lytle@sparque.biz
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