Sales training rarely increases sales

SALES TRAINING RARELY INCREASES SALES

Sales training rarely increases sales from high calibre sales people and has a short term motivational affect on lower quality personnel.

One Friday night, I was sitting at my desk taking care of a few essential matters when an enquiry came in from a sales training company needing help to increase sales through their website. As all the sales staff had gone home, rather than leave it until after the weekend, I decided to follow the sales lead up myself.

Start of article about sales training

There were four things that rang small alarm bells about the sales enquiry. The client hadn't provided his website address, hadn't given any specific criteria about how they wanted us to help and it was a sales training company that supposedly helped companies train their staff to make more sales that was asking for our help. The fourth point was the fact that they had an extremely low budget; and as there are close to 20 million + web pages indexed on Google for the search term - sales training - their budget was totally unrealistic in terms of the work involved. It was what we would consider to be a C minus sales lead.

However, I decided to call the client and see if we could help and determine if it was the sort of project we would want to take on. What followed was a fairly unpleasant conversation with the principal of the company who turned out to be arrogant, ignorant and an idiot and just confirmed all my opinions about sales trainers and sales training companies.

Bearing in mind that it was an early Friday evening when we received the enquiry and I was responding within minutes when most sales people would have left it until Monday is testament to the service we provide to all potential clients. I also make a point of being polite to any sales person who contacts me and treat them with the respect I believe they deserve.

I was neither treated with politeness nor respect and this was from someone who is supposedly dealing with and training sales people all the time and should know better. It just reminded me of the old saying: "Those that can sell - sell; those that can't sell - teach and those that can't teach - teach."

KNOWING WHEN TO WALK AWAY FROM A POTENTIAL CLIENT

I was dealing with a pompous arse who, having initiated the enquiry, proceeded to lecture me about selling and how I could close more sales. The fact that I close virtually every deal I ever want was irrelevant. The fact that I was sounding out whether I wanted to work with him was not the point, he simply had to have his say without listening which is the mistake all failed sales people make.

There you had it; a failed salesman, with a failing business that was supposed to help companies improve sales through their sales training methods, trying to find ways of getting more clients and making the same mistakes over and over again. One thing I have learned is that the biggest idiots are the ones who think they are more clever than everyone else.

I am not going to bore you with the content of the conversation but it prompted me to realise that this sales training company were in fact competitors of our in an indirect way; in as much that they were trying to get companies or sales people to part with money that could be better invested in areas where they would get far higher profitable and tangible results - with my company.

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The MD of the sales training company in question had made an initial enquiry about getting his website more traffic and higher up the search engines. Something, we could have undoubtedly helped him with, which is why you found this website at the top of Google. No doubt, had the conversation progressed, he would have discovered that we could help him increase sales enormously in a variety of ways; had we decided to take the project on.

Instead, all he succeeded in doing is alienating me as an ally and got me thinking - something no sales trainer can do. I realised that if there were companies surfing the internet looking for sales training companies they were actually really looking for ways to increase sales. If they were looking for ways to increase sales, we were best placed to show them how.

Furthermore, as the Internet's leading internet advertising and marketing company who work solely from sales leads, without the need to ever cold call, we were also in a strong position to snatch their business from under their noses.

So why do I believe that sales training is a waste of time and money and why should you work with us as opposed to a sales training company.