Bridging the Training Gap

When American Express and Texas Instruments wanted to revamp their sales training programs, they chose two very different companies to help. While it may seem as if any training company could teach basic sales skills, these two corporate stories show why training is more than just imparting standard sales lines and turning salespeople loose to cope on their own. They also shed light on the wealth of training programs now available and outline what goes into developing a training program that really fits the customer’s needs.

The Amex Solution

With the help of Forum Corporation, an international sales training company headquartered in Boston, American Express created the Center for Learning Effectiveness, a company-wide program that trains sales executives around the world to sell all of Amex’s products, from credit cards to travel services to travelers checks.

“We wanted to set up a center of excellence so that different businesses, each with a sales function, could develop the same skills that are necessary to sell with success,” says Robert Vulpis, director of sales education for American Express. Among the skills Forum’s program teaches Amex, and adapts to its particular businesses, are direct selling, negotiating, preparing presentations, building sales strategies, approaching senior level management – “and knowing what to say to them when you get there,” Vulpis says.

Amex salespeople begin training after undergoing competency-based assessment tests. They participate in one or more of the 10 programs Forum developed for Amex and are then sent out into the field. Later, they return for follow-up training, which involves small group meetings with managers who use additional Forum materials to “bring people up to speed on skills,” Vulpis says.

Amex went to Forum in 1994 because its own training programs were disjointed. “We had more than 100 different programs,” Vulpis says, “and it was very confusing because different salespeople would sell in different ways. So we scrapped everything and built a new curriculum from the ground up.”

American Express chose Forum because it is renowned for its high-level training programs. The company offers a variety of sales and managerial programs, including Face-to-Face Selling, Dynamic Selling and Managing Sales Productivity, that offer “customized solutions to produce results as quickly as possible,” according to Sarene Byrne, Forum’s executive vice president.

Forum and Amex worked together to develop the Center for Learning Effectiveness. AMNET, a group of instructors trained by Forum and certified by Amex, teaches the program at locations around the world. Most of the programs are taught in English, but some have been taught in French, Spanish and Portuguese to accommodate Amex’s international sales force.

The TI Solution

Dallas-based Texas Instruments uses Customer-Oriented Selling, a program designed by Vital Learning, an Omaha firm, to train its sales force. The challenge for Texas Instruments was different from that facing American Express. After hiring engineers to sell its high-tech products, including semiconductors, microchips and microprocessors, TI found its new sales force scored high on product knowledge but low on basic selling skills. “Our salespeople need to be very technical to understand the products, but they need to have character to get people to want to do business with them,” says Robert Fullerton, western regional sales manager, who once took Vital Learning’s course and now teaches it to his sales force.

Fullerton says the engineers need “an anchor, or some method they can follow to makes sales calls and keep the process going,” and that’s just what Vital Learning provides. The company offers one- and three-day programs that “concentrate on situation factors, what the customer wants to achieve and why,” says Karl Gnau, Vital Learning president. The programs “help you qualify the customer, what their environment is, what plans they have and what resources are involved, including money, time, people and facilities,” he says.

The program, which has been used to train about 100 West Coast salespeople, “provides a very good model salespeople can follow,” Fullerton says. But he also says the program’s methodology “is awkward at first,” because it offers so many new techniques. By referring back to books and notes, taking refresher courses and engaging in role play exercises, salespeople learn the system “so it becomes a skill,” he says.

The skill has enabled Fullerton’s team to increase sales, prompting him to require all new salespeople to take the course. But he believes salespeople should spend about nine months in the field before they begin training so they have experience to draw on. “You shouldn’t deliver it to a blank slate, because they won’t relate,” he says.

More Solutions

The American Express and Texas Instrument programs are two of the latest being offered by companies that provide salespeople with the skills needed to sell to the customer of the ’90s – a customer who has become more sophisticated. According to Kevin Daley, president of Communispond, a New York-based training company, “Today, the customer has more knowledge than ever before because of computers and access to data, so the big pitch from left field isn’t the way to do business anymore.” Instead, Daley suggests salespeople should take a lesson from Socrates and engage customers in a dialogue in an effort to win a sale.

His Socratic Selling methodology is both the title of his new book and the name of Communispond’s popular two-day training program. The program teaches salespeople to begin sales calls by asking specific questions geared toward eliciting client information that enables salespeople to tailor their offers. “The salesperson can serve a buyer at a higher level than when he pitched his wares,” Daley says.

When Daley teaches this skill to salespeople during the first day of the program, they often become exasperated “because they want to pitch,” he says. But “70 percent of sales take place when you reach agreement about what the situation really is and the buyer agrees,” Daley says. And how do you determine what the situation really is? By asking clients relevant questions, not bombarding them with an overzealous pitch.

Gloria Richards, a product director at the Wilson Learning Corp., Eden Prairie, Minnesota, agrees with Daley that “selling is more complex today due to customer requirements, as well as changes in technology and the globalization of markets.” As a result, she says, “the role of sales has become information manager as well as relationship manager.” Salespeople must become experts on their clients’ industries, which is what Creating Competitive Business Solutions, Wilson Learning’s newest program, emphasizes. Richards likens the intensive program, which has 11 modules, to “a mini M.B.A. course” that helps salespeople understand their clients’ industries, goals, business priorities and processes so they can make them more competitive.

The course begins by challenging students to answer the question How does my customer buy? It helps them answer it by separating their customers into two basic groups: transaction and relationship buyers. By identifying which group the customers fall into, salespeople can better target their selling approach.

The program includes an interactive CD-ROM that students use to practice conducting sales calls. Besides being innovative, the CD-ROM is practical because students can use it at home during their spare time. “Students need to have self-paced learning that doesn’t take them out of the field and the CD-ROM meets that need,” Richards says.

Richards calls Wilson Learning’s programs a customer interface curriculum, and indeed most training programs today are customer focused. Sales Advantage, the newest program from Dale Carnegie Training, Garden City, New York, is an interactive motivational program that stresses building lasting relationships, according to a company vice president of national accounts. “The old style of selling was that you spent half the time gathering information and half the time with clients,” he says. “Now we spend 80 percent of the time building rapport and presenting value-added solutions and 20 percent of the time closing. The old method destroyed rapport. We want to maintain it to get repeat business and not just a sale today.”

The Dale Carnegie program teaches consultative, networking, prospecting and time management skills that help salespeople build relationships with clients. The courses are offered at Dale Carnegie centers in most major cities and are available in a variety of formats, including three full days and weekly sessions taught over a 12-week period.

Another customer-oriented program comes from Xerox, which initially developed training programs for its own sales force but now offers them to other companies through Xerox Document University, a training center in Leesburg, Virginia. Xerox’s sales curriculum emphasizes Buyer-Focused Selling, a strategy that focuses away from the salesperson’s product in an effort to understand why customers buy. The program breaks down the sales process into seven stages, each of which follows the mind-set of buyers. Salespeople learn to match their actions to the buyer’s needs before moving on to the next stage. For instance, the first stage begins with the buyer being unaware, so salespeople are taught to acquire information about the buyer’s situation before moving to the second stage. Ultimately, the salesperson learns enough about the buyer’s needs to make specific product suggestions.

Many of the training companies offer programs for sales managers as well as salespeople. Carew International, in Cincinnati, offers Results Producing Management, which company president Sean Carew calls a dedicated sales management program. “We teach them how to acquire salespeople, enhance their performance and measure it,” Carew says. The program also teaches managers how to hold sales meetings, set sales objectives and “model” sales skills for their force. Modeling is “the most important component,” Carew says. “Managers must be able to walk the talk, show by doing and define the sweet spot. You can’t rely on sales to know what it is.” Since today’s manager controls a larger sales force, which makes it more difficult to keep track of performance, Carew’s course provides managers with Strategic Development Tracker, a software program that tracks sales and plans sales calls and presentations.

Carew laments that of today’s salespeople, “fewer and fewer are doing it right,” but he also says “there are enormous opportunities for doing it right.” His programs and those of the other sales training companies profiled here can help salespeople do it right so they can take advantage of those opportunities.