Sales Talent Development
Sales is:
- Fair.
- Great beats good, good beats mediocre, mediocre beats incompetent, and incompentents beat each other. Each of those results is fair.
- Objective.
- Sales keeps score. There are winners and losers, but sales is a profession with no shiny participation medals. You win, you lose. Results are measurable.
- Improvable.
- Development programs must be relevant across all generations. The smartest way to do this is to teach key learning lessons in a life skills context, then apply those lessons into business reality.
- All about influencing behavior. To do that well, people must know:
- How heads work and what causes behavior in the first place.
- How to manage the emotional experience, and
- How Technology is radically changing behavior and happiness.
- Short on true Value creators & Value sustainers. Global demand exceeds supply, especially in business-to-business, differentiated solutions.
- ‘Value’ is a vague, generic word. Salespeople must know exactly what Value is, how to gain customer agreement on definition, and how to explicitly differentiate maximized Value propositions. People who can do this will win. People who cannot will lose.
- Job-hopping, industry morphing, opportunity velocity, and global expansion will keep this demand/supply gap a frustrating, ongoing reality.
Success is predictable, as is failure. People selection, onboarding, alignment (and assignment), are obviously important. But once a person settles in, then what? Do they flourish or twist in the wind?
Talent Development defines cultures. The more you invest in people, the more people invest in you. But who commits first? Much is attitudinal. Where salespeople are considered cannon fodder, relentless turnover results. If salespeople are respected as equity investments, stability and performance will follow.
Success is quite predictable. Every job requires general sets of Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes in order to succeed. Every person has a set, too. Bridge gaps between the two and you’ll see sustained success. Do nothing, and hope the gaps close on their own, and you will witness erratic performance.
- Knowledge is what someone knows, relative to what he or she needs to know, to be effective.
- Skill is the demonstrated ability to deliver desired results over time.
- Attributes are invisible intangibles that make each of us unique.
Smart organizations can gap-close by teaching and testing knowledge, developing skills, and inspiring attributes.
How to Influence Behavior
- Sales is a fluidly changing profession. Behaviors and communication channels of dominant choice are changing, which reshapes what it takes to succeed.
There are four elements of effective communication. The name of each topic is the tip of the iceberg. There are massive amounts below the surface of each that create competitive advantage. Most organizations are startlingly weak in this area — a 2 or 3 on a 10-scale — which means there is a wonderful upside opportunity for those who decide to turn a self-limiting weakness into a true positive strength. The four icebergs are:
- Sender: Knowledge of self and critical success factors for powerful message conveyors.
- Receiver: Styles, political motivations, etc.
- Channel: Our chosen communication vehicle. More than a dozen are used in business. Each has its pluses and minuses.
- and the Message: High impact messaging involves crafting what you say and how you say it. This is an art.
In a competitive scenario between quality opponents, the team with the greatest insight and command of the science of high-impact messaging has a huge advantage.
Other key learning areas to workshop and master include:
- The 3 ½ reasons for non-performance. Dissecting performance problems is easy. This session teaches how root causes are quickly identified and fixes created.
- Time choice decision-making. Great performers make smarter time decisions than mediocre performers. This session teaches how the stars make those better choices.
- Worry Circle management. The Worry Circle is the imaginary bubble in the mind that houses everything we worry about. This revealing workshop teaches how to manage our heads most effectively, and sell more effectively to the worries of others.
- The uncomfortable cognitive journey the mind must travel when dealing with significant change. The success of many sales organizations relies on creating or navigating change. The more you know about the behavioral intricacies involved, the greater your competitive advantage.
- Strategic planning. Every great sales organization builds macro plans for the business, and micro plans for accounts. This workshop teaches how to do it to maximize success with no wasted motion.
Everything mentioned in this article has been proven around the world. To strengthen your sales organization quickly, send us a note or give us a call.
Continued good selling,
Ted Simendinger
“Ocean Palmer”