Article contributed by Brett Burgess.
Last time we began to look at the need for salespeople to become more professional in their approach to selling.
Gone are the days when, as one famous commentator put it “all you had to do was show up to make a sale”.
If you do this in today’s selling environment you are not in the sales profession you are in the gambling profession and as we all know not too many of these people survive. Hence the need to up skill regularly.
I used to be a seminar junkie – anything to do with personal or business development I’d be there in the front row. The one thing I found was that these people including Michael Gerber – author of The E Myth, Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Ries, Brian Tracey etc. all seemed to be very good at increasing your motivation temporarily and giving you concepts without actually giving you the “how to”.
Zig Ziglar has a very good quote regarding motivation.
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last, well neither does bathing,that’s why we recommend it daily”
Coming back to my point – most sales seminars are of the motivational type and are usually entertaining. The down side is that you’ve forgotten most of what you heard by the time you get back to work.
Motivation comes from confidence which comes from knowledge which in turn comes from training. For those of us involved with sales, the two types of training we need to focus on are – 1. Product Knowledge 2. Selling Skills
It has been found that lack of training is one of the biggest inhibitors to increasing sales and margins
Still on the subject of motivation the salespeople themselves need to want to improve their skills. Some believe that they are already so good at what they do that it would be a waste of their time to undergo sales training. They probably worked their way up from retail sales or landed the job by chance and view their work as a job to be done rather than a profession to develop in or they are happy for their companies to organize training as long as they aren’t required to change what they are doing now.
A study done on millionaires in the states some years ago revealed some very interesting statistics. Movie Stars, Entertainers, and Sports Stars only accounted for 1% of all the millionaires in America. More importantly over 70% of the millionaires had made it through sales careers. It would be interesting to see the results of a similar study conducted here.
I will continue with this subject and how to gain the most from developing yourself and your team through training in my next article.
Quote of the Week.
There’s no magic to it, and you don’t need a lot of natural talent. What you need is a disciplined, organized approach to selling. If you have that, you’ll understand the process every time. Selling can definitely be learned.
Steve Bostic
Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group Limited
