First, let me tell you about my first sales job.
I was twenty-two, fresh out of University when I started my first sales job with a computer hardware distributor in Western Canada. I had zero experience in selling and apparently I didn’t have enough computer hardware knowledge according to the Sales Manager who interviewed me.
But I was persistent, somehow I got myself to the second interview and in between the first interview and second, I brushed up on the knowledge and found the answers to the questions I couldn’t answer the first time. I guess that hustle impressed the Sales Manager.
I still remember that day, when it came to deciding whether he was going to hire me, he had this frown on his face and had both hands massaging his head thinking as if he’s making the biggest mistake of his career in hiring me.
But he did…
I was floored! I was so happy! My first foray into the corporate world! (I was washing toilets on airplanes on the graveyard shift up until then…)
When I started, I realised I was one of three new sales guys they had hired. I was the youngest AND the least experienced.
But I was determined to learn and do my best.
The “training” started off with me sitting with another sales guy on my team. He was really nice, told me all about his customers and how to use our inventory system.
We also got a lot of product training from the manufacturers of the products we carried. Brands like IBM (when they still sold hardware), Asus, Samsung and more.
During my time there, I managed to keep my head above water with my sales performance. Keep in mind, I never got any big client accounts – I was given small accounts and even some who had been dormant for some time. But somehow, I managed to stay in the top half of the sales team.
I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time but I often looked back to distill what I did that helped me get sales despite not having anything handed to me.
And now twenty years later, I clearly see a BIG problem that persists to this day with companies and businesses with sales teams…
…remember I mentioned all the product training and how to use the internal software training?
Do you notice anything missing from that training? Something absolutely crucial…
…there was NO SALES TRAINING.
What I mean is, there was no training for HOW to sell our products. We had to be resourceful and fend for ourselves.
At the time, there was about twenty of us in sales. All of us had our own way of selling and handling clients.
Now, I don’t want to pick on my old company about this. After all, that period was a great period in my life and an important turning point too. Also, the next company I worked for had the SAME issue.
No sales training whatsoever.
Just pick up the phone and sell, we’re told.
But HOW do you sell effectively?
Nobody can answer that if you ask them. They answer, “You just do it.”
“It’s a numbers game. Call like a machine.”
“Make 100 calls a day.”
None of this made sense to me. How can we blindly just call without knowing if we’re calling the right people, we didn’t know how to handle objections. It just didn’t make sense to me.
Sales isn’t about spraying bullets and hope you hit your target. Sales is where you have a limited number of ammunition and you take great aim before taking a shot.
Sales is the MOST IMPORTANT element of a business. It’s what DRIVES business.
Yet, these two companies I worked for had NO formal and PROVEN process or system that showed each and every one of the sales team HOW to sell our products & services effectively.
The companies I worked for did send us to a couple of sales training seminars, mostly seminars on how to cold call. But nothing impactful ever came out of those seminars. We all ended up leaving the seminar and going back to our regular habits. (Pretty useful right?)
In a recent research survey I conducted, I found that 61.54% of the respondents said the company they worked for DIDN’T have a proven sales system they provided their sales team.
Everyone is supposed to “figure it out” on their own. And this process repeats itself with each and every new sales member.
So, one of the best things you can do for your company and business is to start implementing a proven sales system that ALL your sales staff follow.
And if you don’t have one or need help with developing a proven system, I’ve already done the hard work for you.
You can check it out here, it’s called The Ultimate Sales Alchemy System™.
