Of all the salespeople you know, how many are gifted stars? How many are simply in the wrong line of work? How many fall somewhere between those extremes?
Years of observation suggest to me that roughly 10 percent of salespeople are gifted, natural high-performers. At the bottom of the heap, another 10 percent are missing the raw talent required to be sales professionals. Whatever it is they lack—motivation, intelligence, communication skills, or willingness to learn new sales skills—they just aren’t going to get much better, no matter what you do.
Here is the great news: That leaves maybe 80 percent who are not top performers but are willing and able to improve their sales skills, given the right conditions—and especially the right sales training.
Obviously, that big group contains the greatest potential to boost the performance of any sales organization. Action Selling ® sales training has been called a “secret sauce” to unlock that enormous hidden potential, just as a great secret ingredient can unlock the flavors in food.
The caveat is that you have to add the sauce to the right food to begin with. You put Bearnaise sauce on a steak; you don’t pour it on ice cream. If a salesperson is simply in the wrong profession, no amount of sales training is likely to make enough difference in their sales skills to justify the time and expense.
Awaken unexpected gifts
Ah, but wonderful things happen when you apply the secret sauce of great sales training to the middle 80 percent. Some salespeople in the middle group have the innate ability to perform like true stars, but for various reasons have never tapped into it. For them, sales training can bring on a remarkable awakening. They quickly leap into the ranks of top performers.
For others, great sales training enables performance gains that range from significant to dramatic, even if their sales skills don’t rise to the level of the true stars at the top of the pyramid.
If sales training 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.
The rest of the story…Care to see a real-life example of sales skills training in action? I know several sales managers who use the secret sauce of Action Selling ® to unlock hidden potential. I’ll share a great story in my next blog.
For information about how to improve sales skills and make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.