One of the most debilitating myths about the sales profession is this: Sales people can learn on their own, on the job, and eventually become good at their jobs. They’ll eventually develop their own style, this myth implies, and that will bring them the maximum results.
That myth is true for about 5% of the sales people in the world. For the other 95%, nothing could be further from the truth. The overwhelming majority of field sales people perform at a fraction of their potential because they have never been systematically exposed to the best practices of their profession. Instead, they have been expected to ‘learn on their own.’
I like to paint. I don’t mean pictures.
I mean walls and bedrooms and hallways. I enjoy the physical nature of it, and the resulting change in the feeling of the room. I’ve always liked to paint, and have done so for over 30 years. Once, for about two months, I actually made a living doing it. I think I’m pretty good at it.
Until a little while ago, when I was watching one of those reality home improvement shows. On it, a professional painter demonstrated the best way to apply masking tape, hold a brush and apply the paint. Yikes! I was doing it all wrong.
All this time I thought I was pretty good, in my own self-taught, learn-on-my-own sort of way. I guess I really didn’t have any standard. But I almost always painted by myself, and had only my own opinion. I thought I was pretty good compared to what I thought was good.
Then, when I discovered the best practices of a true professional, I saw that my own ideas were not up to the standard. I wasn’t nearly as good as
I thought I was. If I’m going to become really good, objectively, verifiably good, I have to change my routines and incorporate the best practices. So it is with sales as well.
Limited exposure to best practice makes for average sales professionals
The world is full of sales people who have learned on the job, pretty much on their own, and have never been exposed to the best practices of the profession.
They delude themselves, as I did, holding the opinion that they are pretty good. And that delusion keeps them lingering in levels of performance considerably beneath what their potential would allow them.
Sales managers often share that delusion, and occupy themselves with other matters, unable or unsure how to improve the performance of their team. Typically, the sales manager was, in a previous incarnation, a high performing sales person.
They were one of those 5% who learned on their own, studied the best practices, and who incorporated them into their routines. As a result, that sales manager, formerly high performing sales person, expects every other sales person to be like him; to have the same motivation, the same drive, the same ability and propensity to learn. They make little effort to expose the sales team to best practices, because they did it on their own. Shouldn’t they?
Here’s where the theoretical conflicts with reality. Yeah, they should do it on their own. However, few do. Only the five percenters of the world can be counted on to invest in their own development. Most sales people haven’t even spent R300 of their own money on their own improvement in the last year. The sad truth is that few see themselves as professionals and take their own improvement seriously.
That’s too bad. Every profession develops a body of knowledge about the best way to do that job. And every professional is expected to regularly study those best practices, and incorporate them into their routines with a disciplined, methodical effort. That’s why teachers have in-services, doctors go to conferences and nurses have in-service training.
The job of the sales person is no different. There is probably no other profession that is more written about, and to, than field sales. Over the last 50 years, there must have been thousands of books written, tens of thousands of articles published, thousands of audio programmes prepared, and hundreds of newsletters and magazines published – all for the field sales person, and all describing the best practices of the profession in various terms and methods.
Building a ‘best practice’ mentality
Just as there is a set of best ways to paint a room, so there are sets of best ways to ask a question, seek an appointment, build rapport, make a presentation, close the deal, and follow up. Astute sales people understand this, and seek to continually expose themselves to the best practices.
Beyond that, they understand that it is one thing to know what to do, but quite another to develop the habits which regularly and reliably incorporate those behaviours. They continually work on incorporating the best practices into their routines, repeating them until they become habits. Excellent execution becomes a never-ending mantra.
The astute sales manager
The best sales managers continually expose their sales people to best practices, and encourage every sales person to improve by methodically incorporating them into their routines.
Those companies that do this consistently outperform those who don’t. It is the path to improvement that the rest of the professional world understands. It’s time for the sales profession to do likewise.
Let’s not be deceived by the myth that most sales people can learn on their own or that every sales person has his/her own style of selling. Let’s expect, like every other profession in the world, that professional sales people be accountable to incorporating the best practices into their routines, and be measured by the standards of the professional.
