Developing Highly Effective Sales Teams

Who's responsible for developing your team's sales capabilities? It's a fair question, but one that doesn't seem to have a very consistent answer.

There's one school of thought that the key to having effective salespeople is to simply hire the top performers in your respective industry. That is easier said than done. Successful salespeople are probably already making a hefty living as is, and oftentimes, they feel very comfortable and secure with their current job. Why give up a good thing?

Even if you are able to snag a perennial top performer from another company, there's a catch. Performance, when measured by numbers alone, can be very misleading. For example, a salesperson who achieved their goals because they happened to be the rep on one giant account, or because they inherited a ripe territory, doesn't mean they know how to build a book of business from scratch. 

If 'ready-made' top performance isn't available, the other option organizations have is to bring solid people aboard with a commitment to then develop those people into quality sales professionals. 

Actually developing top performance then becomes the challenge.

When I was asked to speak to a group of seniors at Clemson University earlier this year, I asked them this question: "How many of you (who are about to graduate) have ever taken a sales course?" Not surprisingly, zero hands went up as sales continues to be the least taught profession in the world.

Sure, there are lots of sales trainers and speakers who would love to have a shot at motivating your people to achieve their true potential. Ironically, many of the sales training content that's available contradicts the course you brought in in previous years, in which case, salespeople are usually left to their own devices to figure out how best to proceed.

I can relate to contradictions in content because Question Based Selling is often brought in to "un-teach" approaches that no longer yield positive results. 

Whether you saddle up with QBS or choose someone else's methodology, I encourage clients to enable a full implementation. The assumption that sellers are already capable of being highly successful has led to a 'one-&-done' mentality (that's what we call it in the training business) where companies looking for an instant results end up diluting their sales team's effectiveness by changing to a new trainer at each subsequent sales meeting, whose only link to the previous model can be seen in the use of common buzzwords.

The questions for developing productive salespeople are pretty simple:

Q: "What are you doing to leverage curiosity in the sales process?"

Q: "How are you differentiating yourself from your toughest competitors?"

Q: "What are you doing to earn credibility rather than just trying to claim it?"

Q: "What's your strategy for causing prospective customers to 'want to' share information with a salesperson they don't yet know or trust?"

Q: "How can you lessen the effects of increased customer skepticism toward vendors to actually close more deals faster?"

Putting the answer to these questions into practice and becoming a student of the sales process may require a little effort mixed with some honest introspection.

The only question now is… When would you like to get started?