It’s the leadership team, stupid!
I admit it. Like most business travelers, when I fly, I operate under a guideline of "How indifferent can I act toward my seatmate without violating the norms of civility?"
But it was different with Al, a seatmate on a recent cross-country flight. As it happened, this total-stranger-turned-confidant was a salesperson for a large, California-based technology company.
Al told me that in the last nine months his employer had spent nearly $2 million on sales training. "Did it do any good?" I asked.
His reply was blunt. "No, it was a waste of money. The content was good, the instructors were entertaining, and the materials were professional," Al said. "There were separate programs to teach managers and executives how to reinforce the training for the troops. And we bought the implementation software, too. But it wasn’t long before everyone fell back into old habits, while senior management was under the illusion that the program was being implemented because they were getting their reports."
Rhetorically, I asked why no one said anything. "Are you kidding?" he replied. "Our vice president of sales had just spent a few million dollars on this program. Who’s going to stand up and say it was a wasted investment?"
‘Senior management’s new clothes’
Al’s right. Many people aren’t willing to stand up and proclaim that the emperor is naked – especially when it comes to sales training. But that’s not the only problem. At most companies, virtually everyone who receives training that’s intended to transform the salesforce is either unaware of the training’s lack of impact or is in denial about it. Half don’t even realize that they’re not implementing the training, and the other half won’t admit they’re not, lest it appear that they "didn’t get it."
There’s yet another dimension to this problem, an insidious dimension: Traditional sales training doesn’t require sales reps to change.
I maintain that this is the very reason so many salespeople embrace such training. And it seems everyone in the chain, from the reps to the execs, has a personal incentive to believe the training is working.
The naked truth
According to most studies, upwards of 90% of learning from training is lost in one month. That’s the bad news. The good news is that most of today’s sales training is grounded in selling’s old model, and that model has changed.
Let’s face it: Selling has operated under the same basic set of rules for as long as any of us can remember. For that matter, so has sales training, with its seminar format. Sure, in recent years, implementation software has been added to the mix; but still, the model has been essentially the same since sales training companies came into existence. Each has a program for this and a program for that. But do "this" and "that" work?
Transformation starts at home … or the office (the corner office); in this case "classroom learning doesn’t work," says Rick Justice, senior vice president, worldwide field operations for Cisco Systems, in the July 2000 issue of Sales and Marketing Management.
Echoes Tom Kelly, Cisco’s vice president for worldwide training, in the October 2000 Fast Company, "We were pulling thousands of people out of their jobs, out of contact with their customers, flying them to different locations and shutting them in classrooms for days at a time. It made no sense."
A study conducted at North Carolina State University and reported in Fortune concluded that, "people can learn just as well with their PCs as they can by spending hours in the classroom."
And a headline in the October 7, 1998, USA Today read, "Big lesson, billions wasted on job skills training. New studies show most learning happens outside a classroom.
News bulletin:
Change initiatives in the salesforce don’t work! It’s an empirical, practically indisputable reality. Why do they fail? Because senior management is told that they need to "promote" the change and sales management is told they need to "reinforce" it with the troops. Reality is, salesforce change initiatives will work only if senior management leads the change and sales management mentors the troops.
There IS a difference. We’ll talk more about that difference and the role of the leadership team in sales force change initiatives in upcoming columns.
Jerry Stapleton is president of Mequon-based Stapleton Resources, LLC and author of, From Vendor to Business Resource: Transforming the Sales Force for the New Era of Selling. For more than 10 years, he has been showing companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 500, how to sell to large accounts. E-mail: jstapleton@stapletonresources.com ; web site: www.stapletonresources.com
June 7, 2002 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
