Self development for jobs in sales

Whether you are using jobs in sales as a foundation for some other business career, or indeed as a career itself, structured self development can be the key to a prosperous and thriving sales career.

If you are lucky enough to begin your sales career in a large blue chip industry such as the pharmaceutical industry or FMCG sales (fats moving consumer goods such as Cadburys) then you will likely receive initial and ongoing training in formal sales techniques. However, for many sales people in smaller organisations, training will be whatever the sales manager can tell them, after his 5 years in the business. For very small organisations, you may be hired as ‘the sales person’ by a people with no background in sales and they are expecting you to tell them how you will deliver results.

Having interviewed 1000s of people in jobs in sales, it amazes me not only how many are not formally trained, but also the number who feel it’s simply about having the ‘gift of the gab’ and that more formal skills are simply a lot of text book nonsense! After a life long career in sales and sales management, I am in no doubt that knowledge of, and the use of formal sales skills can make a vast difference in an individuals ability to consistently deliver results.

If you’ve read any other articles I’ve written, you’ll know that success in jobs in sales is not about persuading somebody to buy something that they don’t really need or want, but about finding people who have made a decision to buy and persuading them to buy your particular choice of product or service. Within this comes the additional skills of how to find enough people who have made that decision to buy and getting in front of them at the right time in order to meet volume quotas.

To give a simple example of what I am talking about, just today I interviewed somebody for a sales job in our company. I asked him to give an example of an initiative he had taken which contributed to an increase in company profit. He outlined a program of cold calling he initiated to try an expand the customer base, indeed a sensible suggestion. I then asked how they had approached the cold calls. In the absence of any formal skills, they resorted to asking “ are you happy with the current service?”

Before we look at the correct structure for making such a call, a few simple questions will reveal the problems with this approach.

Who chose their current service? Well the chances are, they did, and they’re not about to admit to you that they made a bad choice even if it’s true.

They may answer yes! Of course any service could be better, but that wasn’t the question!

You’re opening gambit hasn’t given them any reason to listen to you, and most peoples attention span on a cold call dries up very quickly

Put yourself in their shoes…when you’re in the shoe shop and someone asks you ‘are you okay?’ you answer ‘yes thank you’ leaping on the opportunity to dispatch them at the first hurdle.

Of course there’s no technique that’s 100% for a cold call, but a caller who starts with an open question that invites conversation is a first step ahead of someone using a closed question, which may invite a speedy yes or no to end your call. So for example, in the case above, a better question would have been “ if you could, what would you improve about your current service?” Note that here these is no insinuation that there current choice of service is bad, but simply an exploration which will likely bring back the perceived strengths and weaknesses you are up against.

This is just one small example of a juncture in a sales call, where the introduction and consistent use of a specific approach will significantly change the success and failure rate of your calls. The cumulative effects of formal skills throughout the sales process can be dramatic.

So what’s the point of this article. A sportsman who just turns up to compete will usually loose to one who pursues practice at every opportunity to master his art. Similarly, a salesman who invests time and effort in their own understanding of jobs in sales and sales processes is far more likely to deliver success on a daily basis. Sales is an exceptionally well documented art with a plethora of books on sales skills and autobiographies written by successful businessmen and women from around the globe. If you invest time in studying the art of sales as well as performing it, you will undoubtedly see the results in your sales.

Good luck