Originally published in: Boston Business Journal
So, you think your employees are a challenge? Try managing a bunch of
teenagers. That's what McDonald's does, and with astonishing success.
Each year the fast-food giant trains roughly 400,000 15-19 year-olds in everything from how to mop the floor to when to change the grease for the French fries. McDonald's founder Ray Kroc realized that the true product of a business is not what it sells, buy how it sells it - and that with a documented process, even a staff of high schoolers can sell.
You don't need a Ray Kroc to teach your sales staff to produce. You do need to apply his philosophy to your business. What this means, above all else, is to establish predictable, easy-to-replicate selling steps.
Goodness knows, there are plenty of books, seminars and motivational speakers, all vowing to pump new life into tired salespeople. Some actually deliver on their promise, but how long before your sales staff's initial rush of enthusiasm fades and their numbers drop back to their previous level? You're better off foregoing these short-term approaches until you give your sales force what it really needs: a better sales process. You should have in place a set of guidelines so clear, so thoroughly thought-out, that your people will be able to follow them and deliver, regardless of who they are.
A documented process provides your salespeople with the structure they need and with a written account of how to get the job done efficiently and effectively. It allows you to be systems dependent rather than people dependent.
Unless you can replicate your unique way of doing business every single time, you can't produce consistent results. Ray Kroc didn't have to personally oversee his troops each day to ensure his company's success. You shouldn't have to, either.
Learning is a continuous process. Training can be done informally, as well as formally. Methods include reviewing sales calls daily to determine what worked, what didn't and why.
An example of a more formal training process is role-playing. One applications software vendor does this quarterly, with each sales rep sharing a real-life situation. The group works on the solution as a team, and in the process, gains knowledge, insight and confidence. The outcome is a motivated sales force with improved capabilities for closing more sales.
One-shot training programs may boost sales in the short term, but without constant reinforcement in the form of ongoing training, salespeople will revert to old habits and profits will slip.
You can't expect what you don't inspect. Therefore, it's important to have management constantly review sale skills through testing and observation. When I was at a high tech firm in Massachusetts, there was a sales rep who made his quota every year.
Management was delighted with the rep's performance, but had they taken a closer look at how he was making his numbers they would have been horrified. The rep was bending over backward for customers who wanted special orders, but in so doing, was completely neglecting his base business.
So while the rep was writing up sales for oddly-configured computer systems, which cost his company time and money, his steady (and easier-to-please) customers were defecting to the competition.
The moral here is that managers need to define a process that counts not only the dollars a sales rep produces, but which also monitors sales activities, such as the number of calls on new prospects and exiting customers. It's called accountability.
Traditionally, sales training programs focus almost entirely on increasing salespeople's product knowledge. However, our research of over 3,000 sales forces has found that the most effective salespeople are generally not those with the greatest product knowledge, they're the ones with the best selling skills. So, once your sales process has been defined, documented and quantified, you can work on enhancing your salespeople's skills.
Skills training should follow six primary steps:
- Identify the specific benchmarks in your selling process. These may include the number of calls made to new customers, number of prospects to reach and number of appointments scheduled.
- Script the words that will get you to each benchmark successfully.
- Create the various materials to be used with each script.
- Memorize each benchmark's script.
- Deliver each script in a consistent fashion.
- Empower salespeople through coaching to communicate more effectively to each prospect by fully engaging the prospect.
This series of steps serves as a foundation from which your salespeople will springboard to higher sales executed more confidently.
By going through this basic structured exercise, salespeople come away with a repertoire of knowledge and a high degree of confidence.
This solid base of knowledge, coupled with your salesperson's own selling style, is a powerful combination for moving smoothly from objections all the way through to a successful close.
Without a comprehensive game plan, a company is likely to get crushed by a competitor who is smarter, quicker and better prepared.
The solution lies in the process. The process runs the business; the people run the process. A well-defined sales process will become the foundation for all of your sales efforts. Just ask Ray.
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