The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [21]
Group Discussions
As in the group questions format, you are facilitating discussion around a given topic or issue and want specific feedback from your group. This keeps every one engaged, but here the substance of their answers is crucial to the training session. For example, if I’m teaching a seminar and ask, “Who here has done workshops at their company?” I might get a show of hands. But then I ask, “How’s it going?” At this point, I am going to get specific feedback from which I can extract common themes that need addressing in the training session.
Demonstration Training
With this training technique, the supervisor demonstrates how the employee should perform the task. Perhaps you are working on making appointments. The supervisor sets the scenario—she’s calling a prospect for the first time and her goal is to get an appointment with the CEO. The imaginary receptionist answers the phone. The supervisor delivers the script of what every one on the sales team will say to get past the receptionist and through to the CEO. After demonstrating, the supervisor will then solicit questions and probe to determine the level of understanding from the employees. The supervisor will then ask the employees to demonstrate back to the supervisor, which leads to role playing.
Role Playing
Role playing is an extremely effective way to train. Let’s take customer ser vice as an example. A company that is looking to be at the top of its game will already have outlined “the seven most common customer ser vice issues.” Even though you may have a manual that lays out what to do in various situations, role playing can really drive it home. Role playing helps each person automatically do what he’s supposed to do even if he’s rushed, challenged, or surrounded by distractions.
The other day I was calling my cell phone company because my phone magically started receiving about six text messages per second—every thing from the news to the weather to horoscope predictions. I was calling to get this feature shut off and, I’ll admit, I was impatient because the customer ser vice person didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, even though I thought I was explaining it clearly. My wife was sitting next to me when the customer ser vice person hung up on me. My wife’s thought was that I deserved to be hung up on because I was impatient with the customer ser vice rep. Except now I was furious. If a customer is unhappy, have you trained your staff to hang up on them or to console them?
In reality, this scenario was disastrous but as a role play between a supervisor and a customer ser vice rep it would be a fabulous tool. With the supervisor acting more and more obnoxious, the exercise would serve the dual function of preparing employees for the worst and providing comic relief for the training session. So yes, you can have fun and joke about irate customers (like me), but it sets the tone of how those people are to be treated. Not hung up on, but nurtured. You can tell when you encounter an organization where this training has been done and when you get one where it has not been done.
Hot Seats (Going Deeper)
Hot seats are a highly effective method of improving skills. I use these constantly with my clients. As we work to implement a new program or procedure, I hot seat sales reps. I drill down again and again on minute details until they get everything practically perfect.
For example, we had a client who sold office equipment. If sales reps went to the office manager in a prospect company, they would get nowhere. The typical office manager did not have the authority to approve the budget for replacing the major equipment like copiers and computer systems, even if they were 15-year-old antiques. The attitude was always this: as long as it’s working, don’t fix it! Office managers might know the long-term advantages of upgrading their office equipment, but often they were ineffective at persuading senior management to spend the money. My client wanted to get to the CFO instead. But reps found that most CFOs