First a
definition. By “development” I mean this: “Continuous improvement in the knowledge, processes, skills and tools necessary to be ever more effective and efficient.” I don’t mean that once a month you have a sales meeting when you talk about problems, new company policies and procedures or discuss a new product. Those kinds of meetings are necessary, but hardly sufficient.
Nor does it mean that you expect your sales people to learn on the job by trial and error. At best, that is a very time consuming and costly approach. At worst, it leads to mediocre performance, confusion and frustration on the part of the sales person as well as his boss. Most
companies who claim to do on the job training are really making an excuse for their lack of ability to do anything better.
I don’t know of any other sophisticated area of human labor where it is expected
that every practitioner will figure out how to do the job well on his/her own. I, for one, would not want to settle into my seat on an airplane and have the pilot announce that he’s figured out how to fly this plane on his own. Nor do I want to put my life in the hands of surgeon who learned a surgical procedure by trial and error.
The list can go on and on. It includes almost any profession you can think of: lawyers, teachers, social workers, ministers, engineers, repair technicians, etc.
In every one of these sophisticated jobs, there is a body of knowledge, of principles and procedures, that the practitioners are expected to master. While all of these professions expect people to practice, none of them expect them to learn the basic principles on their own by trial and error.
Are field sales people somehow different? Are their jobs so simple that it’s easy
to learn how to do it well? Or, are they somehow super-intelligent and able to figure it all out on their own? Clearly the answer to both questions is NO.
Sales is an incredibly
formidable profession that offers its practitioners a lifetime of challenge. No sales person is ever as good as he/she could be. And sales people are no more nor less intelligent than their counterparts among teachers, social workers, ministers, and the like.
Not only that, but every other profession expects its members to continually improve themselves. Show me a doctor, lawyer, CPA, teacher, social worker, minister, etc who has not gone back for additional training and development in the last two years and I’ll show you one who is either retired or dead.
Show me a sales person that hasn’t invested in improving themselves in the last two years and I’ll show you 80% of the sales people in this country.
Why is that? One major reason is that most of the companies for whom they work don’t require continuous improvement. One of the main reasons they don’t require it is that they don’t know how to pull it off. So they busy themselves with “product-oriented” sales meetings and complain often about unmotivated sales
people.
Being systematic about development is far more extensive than that...[Click Here To Read The Entire Article Online]