Hardly ever. Unless the team is really small, i.e. less than 5 reps, the program is designed around the large group of middle performers. You will always have a number of reps that are simply not going to achieve the desired results. This occurs for many reasons. Behavior change is hard, and some reps will just not be motivated to put in the effort to do it, even with the promise of more income. Likely, you have some reps that really shouldn’t have been hired into the role in the first place, and either they don’t understand the training lessons, or they don’t have the required skill set to make the changes.
How you deal with these individuals is entirely up to you and your organization’s policies and culture. World class companies are constantly weeding out the bottom 10%-15% of their performers. There are lots of options besides letting them go however, and we will discuss these with you up front.
Well, 20% is actually meant to scratch the surface. We’ve seen enough sales calls in our time to realize that just by implementing and applying solid consultative selling techniques alone (not to mention the other improvements we’d recommend) there’s easily 20% more sales to grab right off the bat.
And remember, that’s a minimum of 20% for the vast majority of your sales team. For solid sales performers, who are selling near their maximum already, 20% can be quite a challenge, but even just 20% more from them (remember, that’s 20% of already strong numbers) should clearly be welcomed. For those in the middle, who are eager to learn and adapt new techniques, the sky’s the limit really.
A ton. In fact, our goal is to remove ourselves from this program, and keep your costs down, and to do that, we need to transition the training implementation to your sales managers as soon as possible. So they need to be prepared and motivated, as well as trained, to make changes to their behaviors as well.
And in order for your company to truly realize a great ROI on training, your managers will be expected to keep the new techniques alive long after our departure.
It varies, depending on a number of elements like your sales cycle and your Readiness Score, but we would be expect to be involved for a minimum of three months and a maximum of six months in most cases.
Well, then we have some work to do before training starts. But this is not a bad thing, because we can spend time getting your organization ready for great training, and ensuring that you get the maximum ROI from your training dollar. Yes, you’ll need to make an investment in getting ready, but it will be money well spent. Certainly better than engaging in training immediately, and ultimately throwing money away.
It is not an insignificant investment, so if budgets are limited, then the advice we always give is don't spend it on sales training.
Instead, invest in one of two things. An audit of your sales organization to see which items need attention prior to training, (we can be retained for just Steps 1, 2 and 3 of the Approach and leave you with a comprehensive report on our findings). Or train your sales managers instead. Our Advanced Sales Management training workshop can show your management team better techniques for Hiring, Coaching and Managing Accountability, which will put you much further ahead than sales training for the sales reps.
That’s right. We think that a great sales training company should have skin in the game and be as invested in your team’s results as the sales team themselves. Our compensation should be based on the results we can deliver. Quite simply, we command a higher fee for achieving greater results, as measured by each individual.
That’s also why we’re upfront with you about which reps we don’t think will achieve 20% growth. There is a base fee for each rep we work with, and we’d prefer to be upfront with you before you make any further investment in them. Our goal is to work with those reps that will give us the best chance to make our commissionable income, so it’s in both our interests to select the right reps for this assignment at the outset.
Of course, if you want us to work with everyone, and are fine with growth less than 20%, then we’re OK with that too. But our objective will always remain 20% minimum.
No, we can’t do that, and the reason is that ultimately, unless we run your entire sales organization with complete autonomy to hire and fire who we want, it would be foolish to guarantee results. Our mandate is to understand the best sales and sales management practices for your organization, help you to implement them to the best of all of our abilities, show your team how to perform, and eventually turn it over for you to run. Getting better results is all about people changing the way they do things, and that is hard, and ultimately, we cannot control whether people will follow through on the required behavior changes to be made.
But we’ll be absolutely frank with you up front about who we think is worth investing in, and who isn’t. If we don’t think we can change someone’s behavior, we’ll tell you in advance.
Yes, we’ve seen them too. Guarantee is a word that marketers love. And no doubt, there are some credible training organizations that understand the theory of adult learning techniques and transfer of training methodologies just as we do, and will leverage that to ensure your team reaches higher levels of performance. By all means, check them out.
But be very wary of two types of training companies. Those that guarantee that their workshops guarantee, or deliver better results (this is an amateurish claim from someone who truly does not understand the dynamics of human learning and behavior), and those that respond to an RFP for training without ever asking questions and learning more about your organization in advance. In fact, never select a training vendor with an RFP. That’s just wrong!
