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why we do it

No two salespeople are exactly the same – and they shouldn’t be trained in the same way.

Companies can no longer afford to take their salespeople out of the market for sales training.

Sustainable behavior change does not happen in a classroom.

Tracking ROI is critical because it’s ultimately about the bottom line.

No two salespeople are exactly the same – and they shouldn’t be trained in the same way.

Traditional classroom sales training typically focuses on a generalized application of consultative sales skills. It’s a “spray and pray” approach (exactly what we tell salespeople not to do when selling to their clients). They learn about questioning, listening and handling objections – all good stuff (we know, we’ve been teaching it for years), but it typically does not consider the individual strengths, weaknesses and styles of the individuals in the room.

What’s more, consultative skills training is only part of the equation that leads to sales success. Our experience shows that salespeople tend to be strong in some areas and weak in others. Many salespeople are actually quite effective with their clients (which is why they were hired in the first place). While they might benefit from a quick review of the sales skills, they will get the greatest lift in sales if the majority of the training investment is focused on addressing a weakness in an area such as time management, self-starting, call reluctance, negotiation skills or strategic client management.

Companies can no longer afford to take their salespeople out of the market for sales training.

Keep your salespeople in the market. Save the cost of conference space, travel, and meals. Customize the training to each salesperson’s needs. Don’t have the salesperson go to the training, have the training go to the salesperson.

Years ago, it was acceptable to conduct training as two- or three-day classroom seminars. Not any more. Times have changed and the pressure is on to do more with less. Companies can no longer afford to have their sales people out of the market. Most sales training companies have responded to this need by squeezing the three-day program into one.

We think there is a better way. Progress in technology and in corporate training means progress in the way salespeople can be developed.

Sustainable behavior change does not happen in a classroom.

We’ve all been there. We go to a great training program. We laugh, we learn, we get some great ideas. We leave with every intention of applying what we have learned. Then we go back to the real world.

We know that sustainable behavior change does not occur after a day or two in the classroom. In fact, it does not occur with training alone. That’s why we have designed a three-month individualized coaching and training process that integrates the best of assessment, targeted training activities, real-world application and one-on-one coaching.

This means that each salesperson’s development is customized to his or her unique needs, with a design that ensures long-term behavior change and a higher probability of bottom-line ROI. For example, for those sales representatives who need help with cross-selling, we not only deliver the theory and tools on cross-selling, we apply them real-time to real clients. We analyze share of wallet. We review relationships in the organization. We discuss available resources and how to use them. We develop a relationship plan designed to further penetrate the client company. And together we track progress.

The Precision Approach holds the salesperson accountable for completing learning activities, for applying new strategies and skills and for getting results. It substantially increases the odds for sustainable behavior change and for achieving sales objectives.

Tracking ROI is critical because it’s ultimately about the bottom line.

If you have ever tried to track your return on a sales training investment you know it’s hard. There are evaluation forms, but what does that really tell you? You can track sales, but how do you know it was the training that affected the numbers? You can do the three-, six- and nine-month evaluations, but they tend to be very qualitative.

Still, demonstrating ROI is important. To arrive at this elusive measure we work with sales managers and their people to set quantifiable goals for each individual salesperson. We track progress against the goals and report back to our client. We can do this because we work individually with each salesperson and we work on real client situations. Capturing the data is a more targeted, refined and reliable process, and provides a clearer link between the investment in a salesperson’s development and the results the organization depends on.