Thursday, April 14, 2016: Conventional sales training is money down the drain, with 80 pence in every £1 wasted, warns Lance Mortimer, chartered occupational psychologist with Level 3 communications.
“Training must die,” Mortimer told the Association of Professional Sales’s seminar on Understanding the Psychological & Behavioural Elements of Resilience in Sales.
An expert with more than 20 years’ experience in the field of sales, Mortimer says that the top-down model – lecturing on sales techniques to a group of bored, negative sales people fidgeting at the back, while the show-offs hog the limelight at the front – is now discredited and obsolete.
It creates a workforce many of whom have passed their peak in enthusiasm and skill. They assume they know it all because of their years in the profession, but may well have stopped listening to their customers or learning new things.
“A lot of people say: ‘I don’t need training, I have been a salesperson for 30 years.’ But have they really got 30 years’ experience, or one year’s experience 30 times?” asks Mortimer.
Yet change is happening all around. The world of sales is in the grip of a revolution that shows no sign of slackening, and to cope with it, sales people need to skill up.
In place of chalk-and-talk-style training, companies should look to people-centred development for their sales force. Employees are shown their strengths and their weaknesses and encouraged to tailor their learning to enhance their career.
Often this means a leap into the dark, thrusting a confident, competent seller into the zone of uncertainty as they grapple with a new skill. The reward is to take their career – and their company’s sales figures – to a new height.
This needs to happen repeatedly. Ground-breaking behavioural research on Xerox’s US sales team by Professor Neil Rackham – this month named as patron of the APS – showed that each new sales recruit improved steadily for the first 18 months in the job. Then, “so predictably you could set your watch by it”, their performance, motivation and competence slumped.
So far, however, most companies have been reluctant to invest heavily in developing their sales force.
“People say to me, ‘Why should I train people? They leave’. What I say is: don’t train people, and they stay. And then what do you end up with?” says Mortimer.
“People want development, and I don’t see enough of it. The shopping list approach doesn’t work. You are talking about individuals here, and individual wants, needs and desires.”
Further information:
Lance Mortimer (CPsychol) is a fellow of the APS, and senior sales talent management consultant at Level 3 communications. Contact him at lance.mortimer@level3.com.
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