Sales Training in Action: The Question as Art Form

Selling is both science and art, of course, but where does one end and the other begin? Here’s why the answer matters: While it is crucial to practice the science of selling, it’s only when you master the artistic, creative part that your performance takes a quantum leap.

Sales training ought to be based on solid science and research into the way that customers make buying decisions. But sales training also should build sales skills that can be performed on the level of art. That’s when you begin to see salespeople making life-changing transformations in performance and earning power.

Nowhere does the creative part of selling come so strongly into play as in the art of the question.

Great sales training has dramatically raised the performance and the confidence level of salespeople at W.A. Roosevelt Co., an electrical and plumbing-products wholesaler in La Crosse, Wis. The reason, says company president Todd Eber, has to do with better sales skills—and especially with vastly improved questioning skills.

After getting sales training based on the Action Selling ® system, Eber says, even veteran sales reps with decades of experience began to question their clients in a whole new way.

‘Nobody ever asked me that before’

“We have a lot of long-standing customers, people we’ve been talking to for many years,” Eber says. After receiving sales training, one Roosevelt sales rep with 25 years of selling experience applied some of what he learned in a sales call on one of those long-time customers. As Eber tells it, “The customer said, ‘You know, nobody has ever asked me these questions, and I’ve never thought about these things before.’”

The rep got chills, because he understood that the significance went far beyond using a successful new technique or applying a new sales skill. He knew that as a salesperson, he had begun operating on a whole new level—a level of artistry. “That was when I realized that I’ve become different,” the rep told Eber.

“And that’s when I got chills, too,” Eber says.

For information about how to improve sales skills and make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.