During my sales career, I had the experience of going through many different sales training programs. There were training programs I had to go through as a new hire, as well as many recurring and annual training programs.
Based on my experience, I believe there are five significant gaps in the training that most companies provide to their salespeople.
1. Too Much Fluff
A lot of what is provided by external training companies and motivational speakers can be classified as “Too Much Fluff,” in my opinion. Great stuff, and yes, always very motivational, but there are programs and speeches that lack real substance in terms of telling you what to do to be a better salesperson.
An example of this is when you might sit through a workshop or presentation where someone is talking very eloquently about things you can easily find relevant and interesting. Topics that remind you how you can do better, why you need to do better, and what will happen if you do better.
You feel really good right after the training and look forward to doing better. But when you get back to your desk, you really do not have new knowledge that tells you what you need to do to be better.
2. Too Complex
On the other extreme side of that gap is the gap of sales training programs being too complex. This is where the training program has a lot of really great content and substance, but it is almost too much and too complex to actually implement.
The issue with this is that salespeople can often be creatures of habit and also sometimes have a little ADD (attention deficit disorder). They do not really have ADD, but more so that they want to be out selling and do not want to take their attention away from that. With these two factors, a complex methodology is less likely to be fully adopted and embraced by a sales force.
One example I can think of is an external training program I went through when taking on a new software sales role. The content the sales training company provided was really great, but it was too complex and cumbersome to adopt and incorporate.
In this program, the company taught you to fill out two different forms (sheets) when prospecting. There is one form to fill out for the target area you are selling to, and a separate form for each company you are trying to sell to.
Each form had some really great thought-provoking questions. The answers to the questions would definitely position you better when prospecting. But these forms were so distracting and time-consuming to fill out.
In a perfect world, a salesperson would fill out the forms, then sell, and be the best salesperson they can be. But in the real world, a salesperson will see it as a cumbersome task that gets in the way of selling.
The only time I ever filled out the forms was during the workshop, where the training company taught me how to do so. I never looked at them again, and I am one to geek out a little more on tools like this, so if I didn’t use them, I am sure nobody in the class did either.
The company paid thousands of dollars for my peers and me to attend this sales training program, and I am pretty sure we went back to our old ways right after the sales training program.
3. Too Product Focused
This next gap refers more to internal programs than the programs where a third party comes in to train sales resources, and this is that programs can be too focused on the details of the product being sold.
The issue is that when you are prospecting and trying to generate leads, you are usually not in a good place to talk too much about the product, as you are initially just trying to get your foot in the door and establish a conversation. Not only do you not really have time to get into all the details you have been trained on, but it is also not particularly effective to talk primarily about your product at the beginning of the sales cycle.
My career was spent selling technology products and services, and just about every company that I worked for was guilty of this. They would put you in a room and go through all of the details of how the software worked and what it did. Really cool stuff, quite frankly, and this type of training actually motivated you to want to go out and sell all of this new technology you have been trained on.
For example, my company would train me on all of the features and functionality of a new executive dashboard software product that was introduced, and then they would say to go contact C-level executives to sell the dashboard. But it does not make sense to reach out to an executive and start out by talking about the new dashboard that you now have to offer.
The training should focus on how the dashboard helps from a business standpoint. Once you understand that, you can reach out to the executive to have a business conversation, which can lead to you showing them your new dashboard at some point. When you focus your sales training only on product details, you do not teach the sales resource how to do this and give them the knowledge they need for this first step.
4. It Does Not Teach You What to Say
I feel that you can just about put most sales training programs in this gap category: they do not teach you what to say or ask when you are prospecting. You leave a training program, go back to your desk, look at your phone, and have no new knowledge about what to say or ask when you pick up to call a prospect.
You may have new knowledge about your products; you may have new knowledge about a process to take the prospect through once you are engaged, but you really do not know what to say or ask to get things going.
A good example of this is completing a sales training program that teaches you how important it is to identify your prospect’s problems rather than talking about your products. Great advice and the correct way to go. But once you leave the training, you might not know how to get a conversation going with a prospect to figure out if they have any problems that exist. You might not know what to say or ask.
The training taught you to find problems. But it did not teach you what to say and ask to find problems.
For each feature or product, there is some sort of value offered. For each area of value offered, there is a problem resolved. For each problem that you can resolve, there is a question that you should ask to identify if the problem exists or is a concern.
5. Too Focused on Dealing with Current Prospects
There are many sales training programs that teach you effective processes, including steps and stages to guide a prospect through. How to qualify them. How to negotiate. How to close the deal. All good stuff. But the missing piece here is how to engage the prospect in the first place.
While these methodologies are usually really good stuff and extremely important, they do not really help the salesperson in the area where they need help the most, which is getting engaged with a new prospect.
It is sort of like teaching someone how to best handle a romantic relationship. This is very important, but the majority of single people need help with simply meeting new people and getting a date. This is the same for salespeople: the main reason many are not successful is that they struggle to engage new prospects and generate leads.
