Sales training skills aimed at increasing sales

SALES TRAINING SKILLS AIMED AT INCREASING SALES

Sales training skills aimed at increasing sales will never increase sales as much as providing good quality sales leads.

With almost four decades involved in sales, from salesman to sales manager to sales director and CEO, I have always believed that the most important people in any organisation are the sales people. I have never spent a day in a training room that could not have been more profitably spent outside selling.

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I started out as a self-employed, commission only salesman and learned very quickly that the only way to survive was to continuously find prospective clients. As a salesman I have walked out on training courses rather than waste my time. As a sales manager, my sales people were banned from all head office training because they were too disruptive and as sales director I put a stop to the wanton waste of financial resources that went on pointless training.

As a sales manager, I recognised that recruiting the right type of sales person was paramount and providing them with the best possible chance of success by teaching them how to prospect for business was essential. Whilst all the other sales managers were sending their sales people on sales training courses, I was building the largest, most successful life assurance sales office in the industry with the highest retention of sales people and highest commission income per capita ahead. I had to be doing something right and it wasn't wasting money and time sending my sales people on pointless sales training courses.

INCREASING SALES

With the birth of the internet, I got in early because I saw it as a fantastic medium to do business but selling has not changed, just the way we find our clients.

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Working in the life assurance industry, the attrition rate of failed salesman was equal to the battle of the Somme. Sales managers recruited anyone they could persuade to join, taught them how to sell and hoped they would succeed. Most didn't and it was simply because they didn't have the balls for the job. They wanted the high income that successful sales people earned but when it came down to knocking on doors or picking up a telephone to make a cold call, most fell at the first hurdle.

Whilst every other member of the management team and board were banging on about teaching our sales people sales skills, I set about working out ways to generate sales leads because I believed, if my sales people had a continuous flow of potential prospects to sell to, they would make sales and the sales skills would come with experience.

I believe this is still the case today, no matter what line of business you are in. If you can keep your sales people busy with a continuous flow of sales leads, they will make more sales, grow in confidence and eventually, not making a sale will be unusual.

In the old days life assurance was sold by a salesman knocking on doors, telephone cold calling, referral or to existing clients. It was soul destroying, time consuming and not particularly efficient but those with the biggest balls made a lot of money even by today's standards. As a salesman, I saw it destroy many good men and women who may have succeed eventually had they been able to take the flack.

When I moved into management I was able to make the changes I needed to help my sales team make more sales. I bought an exhibition trailer, kitted out with posters and towed it to markets and out door county shows. I also purchased some display boards and rented space in supermarkets, DIY stores and exhibitions. We ran "Win a Bottle of Wine" competitions, inviting people to complete a simple form with their name and contact details with a few simple tick box questions:

Would you like to cut the cost of your mortgage?
Would you like to retire early?
Would you like a tax free income?
Would you like a tax free cash sum if you fell ill

And so on. In the space of a morning or an afternoon, a sales person, with the constant flow of people passing by could generate enough appointments and sales leads to keep them busy for a week.

We never had to knock on doors or cold call over the telephone, we simply worked off sales leads that we had qualified in the space of a couple of minutes. Sales went through the roof and I retained more sales people.

With the advent of the internet, I recognised very early on that it could be used to find potential clients that were actually looking to buy products making the sales leads even more qualified and of a far higher quality.

Handing a sales person a fistful of qualified sales leads is always going to increase sales far more than any sales training course.