SALES TRAINING IDEAS
At the Risk of Dating Myself (and With Apologies to The Lovin’ Spoonful)
“Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind, To Pick Up One Woman and Leave The Other One Ride? It’s Not Often Easy and Not Often Kind. Did You Ever Have To Finally Decide To Say Yes To One And Let The Other One Ride?”
What does this have to do with sales training? Glad you asked – Because here is the deal.
There are over 800 sales trainers in the US. (I personally know about 150 of them) Most of them independent operators teaching their own individual brand of sales training. 20% are excellent. 20% are lousy. 60% are mediocre.
If you are like many sales people, you have had a little of this and a little of that from several different trainers. God bless you because at least you have had some sales training, which is more than I can say about most in your profession or industry.
Recently, one of my clients came to me because he was having a hard time executing the New School Selling Process. When we analyzed what he was doing, it became obvious that he was trying to use the New School Process in conjunction with three or four other sales processes he had been taught. The result was a mishmash of various other trainers’ approaches, and it wasn’t congruent or fluid.
We backed up and fixed it. And I told him as my Marine Corps Drill Instructor once told me: “Do not deviate from my instructions. Do exactly as I tell you and trust my approach. If I am wrong, which I won’t be, we’ll come up with something else.”
When you’re an accomplished expert, you can be creative and invent all sorts of different approaches and assemble them in your own special way, however you like. It’s like jazz improvisation and it can be a beautiful thing. But if you’re a 5th grader just learning the saxophone, you can’t even begin to do jazz improvisation. When you’re furiously trying to achieve early success improvisation doesn’t work.
If you insist on doing improvisation before you have paid the price and become a Master, all you do is end up spinning your wheels and failing. Eventually, it starts to seem like the whole sales world is a big giant conspiracy to vacuum out your wallet, yank the needle out of your arm, and shove your hospital bed out into the parking lot as soon as your insurance runs out.
If you relate to any of this, here’s my advice to you:
UNSUBSCRIBE from two thirds or three fourths of the emails you currently receive. Right now. De-clutter your life and your brain. Now!
The WORST way you can learn selling is to subscribe to 25 different emails and skim as much free stuff from as many sales websites as possible.
The BEST way to master selling is to pick one trainer or system whose approaches are proven, and to whom you can relate. Then invest in their best materials and training. NARROW your focus, make yourself a student and devote yourself to ONE path.
If that offends you or you think I’m being self-serving by saying that. . . . feel free to unsubscribe. There’s no law in the universe that says Steve Clark has to be your Man.
But this is exactly how I did it and still do it. My mentors are few. You’d be amazed at how FEW people I pay any attention to at all. And regardless of what you think of me, you can write this in blood:
You cannot master selling or anything else by treating it like a giant pick-and-choose buffet!
You need to learn to think like ONE person who you can relate to, to the point where that person becomes your alter-ego. You burn their moves into your neural grooves. Eventually you know *exactly* how they would handle almost any situation. That’s how true mentoring works.
That, by the way, never happens when you take the cheap route and just skim the free stuff. You only achieve mastery when you pick a single path and GO DEEP.