Sales Training: A Great Question Reveals More Than a Great Answer
November 18, 2008
How to uncover great sales talent—worth training—with better questions. (Originally published by Training magazine online on Nov. 13, 2008)
By Russell Riendeau, Ph.D.
Good questions reveal more than great answers. Incentive carrots of different colors also reveal who's hungry to make a sale.
Put yourself in this scenario: You've just landed a vice president of sales position with a company that has charged you with turning around a stagnant and seemingly unmotivated national sales team smack dab in the middle of the most challenging economic times in the last half century. Yikes!
You inherited 14 sales professionals stationed all over the country. You have little data on who are your superstars and who is not pulling their weight, other than your boss’ gut impressions and some sales tracking data. One danger is simply looking at the sales numbers to determine the ranking; however, this simplistic approach will not reflect the salespeople's strengths or weaknesses enough to find the top 20 percent.
So how do you begin to identify your top 20 percent? And when/if you do, then what? What do you do with the other 80 percent? Fire them? Retrain them? Try to motivate them? Give them an ultimatum: "Sell X amount or else…"?
One clever way managers joining new organizations discover the top 20 percent is to use an old trick: Ask questions that many sales managers have used when hiring new talent.
If you believe in the premise that "past success is a key predictor to future success," the list at the end of this article will help you prove the theory. These behavior-based questions can easily be injected into a conversation without your salesperson suspecting or feeling like they’re being evaluated for dismissal. The questions, as you’ll see, are conversational, non-threatening, and lend themselves to many different life stories that allow you to better understand the person's drive, life experience, previous sales training, personal status, behavioral patterns, and how he or she organizes his or her life.
Once you've had a dialogue with each of your salespeople privately—phone or in-person—and reviewed your notes (You will take notes, won't you?), you can better assess all the data: sales numbers, tenure, general impressions from your interview, compensation history of the team, who's been promoted/passed over/status quo, etc. Armed with this meta analysis of sorts, you now can better gauge who will best benefit from additional sales training/coaching and who may not be worth investing larger training dollars in at this time.
In addition to potentially adding sales training for the top 20 percent, you can begin to implement additional strategies for the entire sales team to increase sales revenue now before starting sales training. (Note: The following ideas are nearly no cost to implement.)
Four Strategies to Implement this Week
• Ask questions. Meet with your sales team (conference calls work in a pinch) and brainstorm to identify the top three—only three—key activities that lead to the fastest, cleanest, most profitable sale for your company. Once you've defined these three key elements, you will begin to orient all your energies and systems to create more time for these three elements. By getting all your salespeople involved in this process, you build trust and focus and create more accountability because they are the ones giving you the answers as a result of sales data and experience. No more excuses for failure if they don't follow the formula they all agreed is the right one.
• Create more accountability. Implement a weekly or bi-weekly reporting system that shows you all activity—calls, meetings, proposals, quotes, trade shows, letters sent, and so on—to get a handle on where their energy and time is going. You may find some misguided players whose compass simply needs to be reset.
• Install an incentive plan based on activity. Define what a "qualified customer" is, then create a reward system for activity that will lead to sales (i.e., the three keys the team agreed are critical to making more sales). Offer, for example, a $250 check for every proposal, meeting, on-site visit, or personal meeting with a major account. You immediately will see who’s motivated and disciplined enough to attack activity that leads to accomplishment. Yes, you still pay them the commission, as well.
• Homework assignment: Ask all salespeople to write their 30/60/90/120-day sales and marketing plan to grow their sales in their region, and e-mail it to you within three days. This simple request will astound you in revealing who are the thinkers, the doers, the procrastinators, the smoke 'n mirror gamers, and the weak writers. This exercise also gives you keen insights into how to utilize various training and motivating techniques, as well as enhance all written correspondence going out on your company letterhead.
It would take less than one week for you to implement the above four strategies and will cost little if anything. The results and learning you will glean will enhance your knowledge, create more energy in the sales team, and show your new boss that you were worth paying the big bucks to join the team.
Questions to Ask
Here are the questions to inject into your next conversations with your sales team:
• What question do you have for me right away?
• What would really surprise me about you? What else?
• What's your real motivation to change jobs? No, the real reason (test, re-test)
• What's your philosophy on goal setting?
• What reading material would I find on your coffee table, nightstand, kitchen table, car?
• Tell me a story about you placed in an ethical dilemma and what happened?
• How did you earn money while in college?
• How far away from home have you traveled? (Have a map on your desk.)
• Draw me a pie chart showing how you spend an 8-hour day.
• Are you a curious person, and if so, show me an example
• What's your favorite success story and failure story?
• What should I have asked you that I haven't?
• Want to be a millionaire? Why? What are you doing to prepare for it?
• How would your world change if you made $35,000 more next year?
• Are you ready to resign from your job in five days? What will they do when you quit? What will they say about you after you have left the company?
• Share some stories about the four most influential people you know.
• Have you ever created a 30-, 60-, 90-day strategic plan for your job or a future job? Well, today's your lucky day.
Russell Riendeau, Ph.D., is a behavioral scientist and speaker/author on talent acquisition strategies. He is the senior partner of The East Wing Search Group in Barrington, IL, and co-author of a new book, "The CEO's Guide to Talent Acquisition: How to Find Talent Your Competitors Overlook" (Eyecatcher Press 2008). He can be reached at russ@eastwingsearchgroup.com or 847.381.0977.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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