Why Sales Trainings Don’t Always Work – 1

Have you ever attended a sales training that gave you schemes and techniques and tools that din’t work for you in the marketplace? They sounded fine during the training, though. Still, clients don’t behave by that scheme and you feel forced to follow them, not the recommendations of the training programme.

Your first idea might be to get angry: somebody wasted your time for a training that isn’t applicable in your work!

You may also be tempted to think: all this sounds great in theory, but it’s different in real-life.

You may hear people say: the training was great, the trainer was just delicous but our business is very specific and those trainers simply don’t understand it well enough.

And you may well go to another training and hear similar or completely new to you techniques, tools and approaches (maybe an NLP seminar) and again you feel enlightened and impatient to make a cookie out of those clients of yours. And then again you face reality and your clients living in it, and the same thing happens again.

Why is that? How can all those consultants be so wrong? Why reality comes to be different after a training?

Here are some possibilities:

• Your training programme might have been designed to serve more general purposes.
• Your manager might have thought that techniques, tools and psychological approaches are the ones you needed or would be more interesting for you.
• Your manager believes in those approaches and tools and wants you to be good at them as well.
• Somebody has made a research and concluded that there is an algorithn that holds the logic of successful selling. But it is up to you to translate it to the specifics and make it happen.
• The HR department in your company might have chosen a training programme and trainer that fitted the budget or negotiated it at the expense of the customization.

OR:

• You might have failed in converting the schemes and tools into situations.
• You might have been afraid that if you push your clients to talk within the recommended algorithm, they may recognise what you are doing and may dislike you for that.
• You were told during the training that listening is very important in sales. You ask you client “What can I do for you? What do you need?” and you keep getting the same answers: more discounts, promotions, gifts, lyalty campaigns… You already new that! You had asked those questions before!

And that is it – you asked the same questions before! If what you do is not differenet from what you used to do, why would you expect news from your client? You need to change! Always rememeber – ask new questions if you want new answers!