Without context, sales training is like your grandmother’s attic

There’s some really great stuff in there, but without context in sales training, it’s likely to take you all day (or much longer) to figure out what to do with it.

"The training that made me a great salesperson isn’t working for my team."

If you’re like most successful sales leaders, you grew up through the ranks of the sales organization by outperforming your peers in previous roles. And unless you’re one of the handful of us who are supernaturally gifted in the area of selling skills, that means you probably also learned how to sell from a combination of coaching, mentoring, training, and trial & error.

So, what do you do to improve sales performance when you find yourself in a leadership role? We do what we know.

We try to recreate the environment that made us successful in the first place. We tell managers to coach; we provide training (often the same training we got earlier in our career); we provide tools and dashboards, bonuses and spiffs; we introduce new solution bundles and convoluted pricing models.

“These things made me what I am today,” you say (those things and healthy dose of effort and tenacity, of course). “What is wrong with this sales team that it isn’t working for them?”

The good news is this – you’re not doing the wrong things. The bad news is, your people are likely lacking the critical element of context.

We’ve all heard it said before: “Context trumps content.” Why is this, though?

It’s because without the WHY being well understood by your people, this myriad of tools, training, and resources they’re being given is akin to your grandmother’s attic. That is to say, there’s some really great stuff in there, but it’s likely to take you all day (or much longer) to figure out where it is or what to do with it.

Without the context of your customer's world, tools become one of these

If this situation sounds familiar, you are very likely lacking the context of your customer’s world in your sales performance ecosystem. Unless your people see how the tools, training, systems, etc., that you are providing them will help improve their customers’ results, and in turn their success in sales, these resources will forever be seen as one or more of the following things in the eyes of your salespeople:

1. A distraction
2. A flavor of the month (this will blow over soon)
3. A nuisance
4. Procedural red tape that only helps management
5. A demonstration by management that they do not understand us

Add context to sales training using the power of simulation.

Some of your most loyal sales reps probably take the resources you give them and make a genuine effort to put them to use. Unfortunately, even these team players will often give up after one or two tries when they don’t see immediate results.

The problem with asking your people to do something differently in the field is that they don’t immediately see the rewards necessary to offset the risk. Pilots, military personnel, surgeons, even long-haul truck drivers all use simulations to learn how to do something risky.

This is not just for rookies either. Every pilot has to log a certain number of hours in the simulator every year to maintain their license. None of these professionals would ever try out a new skill in a live setting before first practicing until they produce a positive outcome in the safe setting of a simulation.

Neither should your sales people.