Sweat-based sales training

Shifting responsibility from trainer to trainee can help improve sales training programs

By -- Industrial Distribution, 6/1/2000

We lose too many potentially successful individuals in the sales field. And it often comes down to training.

Good training is not two weeks in the plant. It is not riding "shotgun" with another rep in his or her territory, and it is not memorizing entire lists of product features and benefits. And please stop requiring that laborious week or two in the office watching paper get shuffled. Those are all a waste of time in most cases.

The new standard for developing a sales representative is called "sweat-based training." The system transfers the accountability for developing skills and internalizing data from a trainer to the trainee.

Here's how it works. The development process is divided into 10 phases:

1. Knowledge: The company, its products, the industry, competition, and markets.

2. Discovery: Who buys from us? Why? Who doesn't buy from us? Why?

3. Prospecting: Develop a prospect list based on the above profile.

4. Planning: Generate a "work plan" or itinerary using the above.

5. Contacts: Make on-site sales calls, discuss the company's products.

6. Diagnostic: Identify customer needs from the customer's point of view.

7. Problem Solving: Develop solutions to identified customer needs.

8. Proposals: Create a "customer focused" proposal as a sustaining resource.

9. Presentation: Actually sell the proposal to the prospect.

10. Execution: Work with your client when implementing your recommendations.

The new hire is assigned phase one and directed to seek out, read about, inquire of others and learn all they can about the business, the industry, the company, etc. This process focuses on learning by doing. It is trainee "sweat" based and requires the trainee to put forth the effort to accumulate the required information.

The trainee must prepare an in-depth folio and/or manual on the subject and present their study to the sales manager in a few days or a week. The sales manager makes him or herself available to hear the trainee's presentation, without interruption. The manager questions, asks for elaboration, challenges and often suggests the trainee's presentation is incomplete.

If you've ever been in the military, you'll recall that the first job given the new recruits is to scrub the barracks clean. Never is that initial scrubbing good enough in the eyes of the sergeant. Recruits are ordered to clean it again and to clean it better. Why? To raise the standards, that's why. Most sales managers never accept that first presentation by the trainee. The "recruit" is asked to look deeper, learn more, interview still another person and then try again.

Sweat-based training repeats the process with all 10 phases, featuring labor by the trainee-not a trainer-with increasingly better presentations being made to the sales manager. Eventually, the objective is achieved: the trainee sells something. At that point in the system, the real training takes place. The trainee in phase 10 works in and with the customer's business with a responsibility to apply, utilize and execute the products, programs and systems he or she recommended and sold.

Sweat-based training is grounded on two important criteria. The first is the increased productivity businesses have discovered in introducing more challenges to the job. The second is the understanding that people only learn one way-by doing.

Don Beveridge is president of Don Beveridge Jr. & Associates. He can be reached at (561) 793-4330.