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By Root 1210 0

send me the information and then I’ll decide.” This went on for a week with hundreds of people throwing up this objection for which the salespeople had no comeback. The minute I heard this, I trained them to use this script: “Well, sir, I’m happy to send you the reports. In fact, they’re already on their way. But let me tell you what happens to people who receive our reports. Either they read the reports and are so impressed with the information they end up signing up for the Web seminar I’m talking to you about now. Or they’re in such a reactive mode, reacting to their business, that they never take the time to read the reports or to improve their business, and they end up doing nothing. My question to you is: Are you the kind of person who would rather take action and learn how to double your business? Or are you too busy reacting to your current business to take the time to learn the skills to improve it?”

Using this script, the salespeople improved their closing ratio. Of the prospects who would usually use that objection, half would sign up for the Web seminar right there on the phone. So performance improved immediately just by adding another piece of training to the process. This situation was not exactly a crisis, but we were losing half our prospects because no one took the time to think about what would be a logical comeback to that particular objection. This shows that a little training goes a long way.

So let’s not have people making up what they’re going to do in a crisis or in any other situation in your company or department. Let’s have them know what to do in every situation because you address it weekly.

Repetition Is Key

When designing your training programs, remember that repetition is the key to preprogramming your company or department to run like a machine. The design of the Ultimate Sales Machine program was conceived with the simple law that no one gets good at anything without repetition. Karate requires tremendous discipline. You’re just repeating moves over and over. This is true of tennis, golf, or any other sport. Practice, practice, practice and then, when you’ve begun to master your moves so that you know what to do automatically, it gets exciting. But pigheaded discipline comes first.

Just how serious are you about your company? Are you playing at business or taking care of business? According to Sun Tzu in The Art of War, one of the five essentials of victory is this: “He will win whose army is animated with the same spirit throughout all its rank.”3 How are you going to animate your whole team with the same spirit? Three words: training, training, and training.

Most of the better training programs come in and blitz an organization with a lot of information and then they leave. The staff has a nice healthy glow for about a week afterward. The perception is that you received a lot of value, because you gained a lot of information. But in reality, without continuous follow-up, very little sticks from a one-shot training. That said, one-shot training is better than no training, but you’re about to learn that there is a better way.

By rotating core material regularly, the same concepts are constantly reinforced and reiterated. Skills are impacted immediately in either training method; yet, over time, skills are impacted permanently with consistent repetition. When you get all of your people speaking the same language and following standardized procedures, internal communication improves dramatically because every one shares a deep and rich pool of the same knowledge base.

Taking the time management skills you learned in Chapter One as an example, here’s what a typical learning curve looks like and why repetition is so essential. In this graph, we see that right after someone does some time management training, there is an immediate increase in skill. What happens after training occurs if there is no follow-through? As you can see here, there is an immediate falloff of the newly learned skill. That’s where most companies and programs stop; hence, some minor skill remains, but it’s