Last week, I went on a bit of a rant on the odd width between U.S. rail tracks—as a metaphor for the “that’s-how-it’s-always-been-done” approach to sales training. This week, I’ll offer a modest proposal. Instead of repeating a dry litany of sales goals and metrics, what if we “flooded the zone” with truly great sales […]
Category Archives: Sales Training
4 Resources For Improving Your Professional Communications Skills
This is the season to be thankful. As a salesman, I appreciate all the resources I have that help me polish my professional communication skills. Here are my top four: Without good communication skills, I’d be washed up as a salesman. Fortunately, through the years, I’ve discovered lots of great resources to improve these. It […]
The Key to Making Money in Sales
Like most of America, I woke up last week to the surprise of Donald Trump as our next President. (ANNOUNCEMENT: To spare you any more election fatigue, there will be no more political mentions in this blog!) However, the event made me curious to check out some past episodes of the TV show, The Apprentice. […]
Reinventing the Wheel for Sales Training (Part 1)
In the U.S., the width between train tracks is always four feet, eight & one-half inches. This odd standard was chosen by an early 19th Century British engineer and is used in 55% of all rail systems today. Sales training today is loaded with this kind of “that’s the way it’s always been done” inertia. […]
5 Ways Online Sales Training Can Fail (And What You Can Do About It)
Since the birth of the Web, proponents have dreamed of the perfect “virtual classroom,” where geographic and financial barriers to learning are no more. Sadly, online training in general—and online sales training in particular—too often fall short. Here are five danger signs, and some good ways to avert them. The phrase “online training,” like its […]
Real Coaches Train Us To Do!
In sports and other types of performance coaching, team members are shown—repeatedly—how to DO things, and eventually how to do them well. Too often, that’s what’s missing in sales coaching. Imagine for a moment you wanted to learn a new sport like tennis or golf. Or perhaps you wanted to learn to play guitar or […]
Sales Training Lessons From an Uncivil Society
In a democracy, we participate in elections where each side tries to sell us on their candidate. Throughout American history, we’ve seen passionate, but mostly civil elections. This year has been a shouting match of incivility, unrest, and unwillingness to listen. Both sides are failing at salesmanship. As annoying as political rhetoric is, politicians and […]
Understanding Sales Coaching
Virtually every sales organization of any size has some kind of sales coaching program or initiative in place. There’s not a sales executive on the planet that doesn’t agree: sales coaching is essential. They approach it different ways—with online sales training, remote coaching and various technology-based coaching tools. And yet… I recently completed 150 interviews […]
Trick or Treat (How Halloween’s Catchphrase Can Offer Insight Into Best Practices for Sales Training)
Halloween is around the corner. In the U.S., Britain, Mexico, Ireland, and elsewhere, children are preparing to go door-to-door. They will knock and shout “trick-or-treat” in the hope of scoring a sweet haul. It’s fun—but it’s also a metaphor to learn from. In the U.S., traditions of trick-or-treating for candy date back to the 1920s—roughly […]
Video Practice is the Best Way to Learn
As a young Bullfrog at Bret Harte High, to win scholarships for college, I entered speech competitions. I’d stand in my bedroom, practicing gestures, making eye contact with pictures on the wall, and giving my speech out loud. Repeating the live motions, as close to the actual event environment as possible, was the best way […]