How Sales Training Keeps You From Sales Success - Sales Coaching

How much time, energy, and money have you invested in sales training programs, seminars, workshops, and books? If you’re serious about becoming a top sales professional the total is a large number…perhaps so large you could buy a car or at least make a couple house payments with that money. Congratulations on your commitment to yourself and your success.

However, I must ask you how much has your sales grown as a direct result of any of those things? Now some of you will be able to answer with exact dollar amounts that are respectable returns on your investment while others really don’t have a result they can attribute to that investment. So, what’s the deal here?

It’s not your fault if you haven’t dramatically increased sales or entered the elite group of Top Producers as a result in the investments you’ve made in sales training programs etc. There is an inherent flaw with all these things that no one talks about yet everyone has experienced. And this flaw is really two-fold.

First, throughout all the years of formal education you have, how did you learn things? Well, you were taught to learn the things that are really important, things you’d use for the rest of your life like the multiplication tables through spaced repetition. You don’t learn things from a one-time exposure unless those things are so dramatic or traumatic they’re indelibly etched in your mind. The reason sales training programs, seminars, workshops, book, etc. don’t really produce results is because they’re a one-time or short-term exposures. Consequently you have an awareness without a deeply ingrained learned skill to back that awareness up and produce results.

Second, you can’t see your own mistakes. Psychologists know that divorced people tend to marry the same person over and over again with the same outcome, in terms of their personality traits. Obviously the people in these flawed relationships do not realize or acknowledge repetition of the mistake, and are shocked by the repeated experience. Sound familiar to your sales experiences? None of those one-time short-term tools provide the one-on-one follow-up attention you need to first discover the habits that are preventing your success, and develop a plan to form new habits that support your success. Individual sales coaching does the very things these one-time short-term approaches don’t. Individual sales coaching provides the spaced repetition required to develop and learn new skills with the on-going support to implement them and shorten the learning curve. Thus you get a much higher return on your investment in terms of the results you get.