The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [16]
On the other hand, banks like Wells Fargo, Banker’s Trust, and Citibank—all former clients of mine—have classroom-style training programs with policies and procedures for every thing. At one of these companies, Sam goes through extensive classroom training before he ever sits to observe another teller. When he finally sits down to do so, he can actually spot when she’s doing something wrong. Sam has learned his job, but the training shouldn’t stop there. Improving and advancing the skills and professionalism of every person in your company is an ongoing process, and formal training sessions should be regular and nonnegotiable.
Your industry and competitors might be advancing, but, without mandatory continuing education, your team isn’t. In this chapter you’ll learn how to set the standards of achievement in your company or department. You’ll learn how to implement mandatory training programs and how to make them fun, interesting, and stimulating so your staff loves them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person army or a Fortune 500 firm; you need to be working on your skills.
I had an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) client who was trying to penetrate the 100 biggest manufacturers in her market using a method you will learn in Chapter Six. A key element to this process was that her sales staff had to toughen up. The grim reality is that without great training, the majority of salespeople will never call a prospect back who rejects them even once. Few salespeople will call back even twice after a prospect has said no. This was definitely the case with this OEM company. Its salespeople would have given up after the first rejection from those manufacturers. But we were implementing a corporate initiative and it was absolutely mandatory that they learn how to persevere.
We knew that it would take a coordinated and highly monitored effort to solve this problem. We had call reports that the salespeople were required to fill out that showed what their activity was, and then every week, I personally selected salespeople for what I call “the hot seat.” I drilled them with specific questions about the prospects they had contacted—what their efforts were, what they said, and what the prospect said. Because they knew we were going to be doing this every week, it slowly raised the bar of performance in the whole company.
This was not easy or immediate. Every salesperson started off not really doing the required activities. But when they were put on the hot seat by me, with all 50 of the other salespeople as well as the president of the company, the vice president of sales, and their sales manager all listening, they quickly realized they had better respect what we were going to inspect.
For the first three months there was barely any progress and, on their own, this company and its sales team probably would have given up. But after three months of steady marketing to the executives at these manufacturers and more or less forcing the sales staff to keep calling the same prospects who kept saying no, we started to make nice progress. Every week we would go over what the salespeople were saying and what the prospects were saying. In each case, I’d tune up their skills. Within six months the sales crew had gotten in to see 54 percent of those they targeted.
With consistent, relentless, and organized training on just this specific concept, we raised the standard dramatically and then policed it throughout the organization. These salespeople learned that consistency in their approach