I know a corporate training manager who calls Action Selling ® the “secret sauce for sales success.”
David Winkler, training manager for Fortune 100 Company CHS Inc. of Inver Grove Heights, Minn., reasons like this: Just as a secret sauce in cooking brings out the best in food, sometimes with extraordinary results, Action Selling ® can awaken unexpected gifts in salespeople.
The caveat is that you have to add the sauce to the right food to begin with. You put Béarnaise sauce on a steak; you don’t pour it on ice cream.
Action Selling ® awakens unexpected gifts — if some raw ability is there to begin with.
Like me, Winkler believes that roughly 10 or 15 percent of salespeople are gifted, natural high-performers. At the bottom of the heap, another 10 or 15 percent are missing the raw talent required to be sales professionals. Whatever it is they lack—motivation, intelligence, communication skills, or willingness to learn—they just aren’t going to get much better, no matter what you do.
That leaves maybe 80 percent who are not top performers but are willing and able to improve, given the right conditions—and especially the right training. Obviously, that big group contains the greatest potential to boost the performance of any sales organization. Action Selling ® offers the best chance to tap into that hidden potential, Winkler says.
“Some salespeople seem to have been born with an innate ability to read people or size up situations or do something that allows them to proceed in the best manner in a sales call,” he says. “Call it intuition or call it what you like, but what I see in the exercises and situations posed in Action Selling ®’s training materials is a successful way to teach that sales skill.”
Salespeople in the middle 80 percent have never tapped into it, Winkler says. For many of them, the secret sauce of Action Selling ® brings on a remarkable awakening. They are able to quickly leap into the ranks of top performers.
For others, the secret sauce enables performance gains that range from significant to dramatic, even if they don’t rise to the level of the true stars at the top of the pyramid.
If you can significantly boost the performance of 80 percent of your sales force, what impact would you expect to see on your company’s results? That’s the real beauty of a secret sauce.
To learn how to unlock the hidden potential in your sales force, read my book Action Selling ®: How to Sell Like a Professional (Even If You Think You Are One).
Action Selling ® in Action
David Winkler, sales manager for agribusiness giant CHS Inc., headquartered in Inver Grove Heights, Minn., calls Action Selling ® the “secret sauce” for better sales performance. As a Certified Trainer of Action Selling ®, he has done a lot of thinking about the subject.
“What can we do to bring the 80 percent of our salespeople who are mid-level performers up to the highly-effective category?” he asks. “I think that most importantly, we need to teach a single system of selling, something with a standard methodology and a common language that everyone in sales speaks.”
“What’s the best sales training process? I can tell you from my experience with a lot of different training programs, it’s Action Selling ®. Consistent, sustainable, and proven effective, it’s the process we have used for more than 15 years. I don’t know where we’d be without it.”
For information about how to make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.
Discover the difference that the best sales-training process can make. Action Selling ®: How to Sell Like a Professional (Even If You Think You Are One).
Duane Sparks is founder and chairman of The Sales Board, the authoritative source of practical and leading-edge information about the art and science of selling. He has created Action Selling ® sales training products and learning systems that transform sales organizations. Duane is author of these best-selling books: Action Selling ®, Selling Your Price, Questions (the Answer to Sales), Masters of Loyalty (How to turn your sales force into a loyalty force), and Sales Strategy from the Inside Out (How complex selling really works).
Discover how the best sales training process can make spectacular improvements in sales skills. Action Selling ®: How to Sell Like a Professional (Even If You Think You are One).