Corporate Sales Training Programs Are Too Costly, Too Bloated, & Counterproductive

The first thing you worry about when designing a new sales training program isn’t whether the material will be useful or practical.

If you’ve been a successful seller, you know you’re offering good techniques. Heck, they’ve worked for you, right?

While organizing the material may be a challenge, this isn’t a worry, either. If you simply follow the Anatomy of a Sale, from start to finish, you’ll be in good shape, there.

What you’ll fret about whether you have ENOUGH information to fill the time allotted.

“Gee, what if I finish a few hours or a day, early?” you’ll wonder.

This is especially alarming if you are a hired gun, offering a seminar in a hotel or offsite. Onsite, as a company’s sales trainer, if you finish early with a particular group your attendees can simply begin their jobs or resume them.

After you’ve delivered your new training program once or twice, you’ll see the opposite has happened.

The course will grow LONGER than you anticipated. Your stories and jokes will take on lives of their own, and at every turn you’ll be tempted to overindulge your expertise and the comments and questions of attendees. If you then train another trainer, he’ll add his war stories to yours, and the process of endless elaboration will worsen.

A one-day program will stretch to a business week. A week will require a month. And a month will call for a full third of a year.

As I’m writing this, I’m aware of a company that sells gold coins and bullion. It BOASTS about having a 16-week sales training program. What is there about selling gold that takes this long to learn?

If I asked this firm’s trainers, “Why does your training take several months to deliver?” they’d reply that EVERY MINUTE of it is necessary and filled with essential wisdom.

Moreover, they’d believe it!

I was doing a consulting project at a financial company that offered an eight-week instructional program for it’s sales reps. I asked the trainers of that class to reduce its contents to THREE DAYS and to deliver the radically condensed version to me, which they did, under haughty protest.

Would you believe me if I told you that those three days still contained a substantial amount of BLOAT?

Obviously, wasting time in overly long sales training programs is foolish from a monetary standpoint. But it is especially problematic because it needlessly and foolishly elongates a new hire’s SPEED-TO-THE-FIRST-SALE.

If I can deploy a new rep in a week’s time, she has a chance to prove herself during Week 2. If it takes four weeks to train her, she can’t start to succeed until week 5 or 6.

What difference will a few weeks make? Each day that the training lasts longer than necessary, it is adding needless and senseless complexity and confusion to a new rep’s repertoire.

(This violates the ages-old wisdom of the KISS Method: “Keep It Simple, Salesperson.”)

Your trainee comes to believe that ALL OF YOUR MATERIAL IS ESSENTIAL to becoming a successful seller. So, when she is finally unleashed, if she hasn’t forgotten 80% of what you have covered, she’ll tend to over-talk and to confuse, and to waste too much time with the wrong prospects.

These are terrible habits, inculcated by the bloated sales training program she survived.

Worse, the slower the SPEED-TO-THE-FIRST-SALE, the more insecure reps will feel about their ability to generate business, successfully.

Ironically, as you believe you are investing trainees with more confidence, you’re actually eroding it with each passing hour, week, and month.

How brief can great sales training be?

In a separate article I’ll describe a FOUR-HOUR sales training program that I conducted that enabled a Fortune 500 company to soar.

Tagged with: Bloated • corporate • Costly • Counterproductive • programs • Sales • Training

Filed under: Sales Training Programs

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