While companies spend millions of dollars every year on what’s commonly known as sales training, what sales managers are really purchasing is the potential to drive better results. They have decided that sales training has the potential to help the sales team achieve those results. Because sales training is all about results, we asked six top sales trainers (see sidebar Our Panel of Experts) how companies can most effectively select, measure and improve results. Here’s what they had to say.

Selling Power: What sales skill set is the most neglected or most needed among today’s average sales teams? And why?

Neil Rackham: The central skill of selling is creating value for the customer, and that starts with planning. When I’m reviewing the plan for a key sales call, I’ll often ask a simple question, “Why would the customer write you a check for the call you are about to make?” That’s how you know if you’re creating value – if the customer thinks the call was so good that he or she would pay for it. I’m amazed at how badly most people answer this simple question. On a broader level, selling today is about business creativity. When I’m recruiting, that’s what I look for, and – believe me – it’s hard to find.

Robert Cialdini: What’s generally neglected in sales training is a systematic and scientific approach whereby we rely upon evidence that comes from soundly conducted scientific research rather than speculation and guesswork. Anecdotes can be helpful, but sometimes they miss the mark by a large margin. The key is to recognize that we can build and detect actual indicators of how we should address a particular sales situation and issue.

Joanne Black: There are two parts to the sales process: part one, which is getting in front of the right people, and part two, which is everything that happens after. Historically, the focus on building sales skills has been on part two – listening, questioning, presenting and closing. Little attention has been paid to part one, which is shortsighted, because unless we get in front of the right people, part two doesn’t matter. Prospecting, in short, is extremely neglected. Many sales teams rely on their marketing departments for leads – from the Internet, trade shows, mailings, etc., but in most firms, it is not a priority to prepare salespeople to create their own opportunities. If a sales team wants to be more than average, it should adopt a referral-selling methodology. Referrals result in a new client more than 50 percent of the time. No other marketing strategy can come close to achieving these results. And, a referred customer spends more, is more loyal and will refer you to other clients.

Ron Willingham: The art and science of selling is only going through a perceived change – because what people have been taught for years was wrong. People think that teaching such sales skills as closing, negotiation, overcoming stalls and objections, “nail-downs,” “tie-downs” and all of these other gimmicks, help people sell. These techniques actually keep people from selling. Most salespeople try to sell products or services or try to close a transaction. By contrast, great salespeople are always solutions focused, which is the same thing as being customer focused. Remember, people don’t buy products and services; they buy solutions and end-result benefits.

Linda Richardson: Salespeople should develop the skill sets needed to expand relationships. Too often they miss the chance to leverage their full platform of products and services, because they don’t create a relationship strategy, probe for additional needs and leverage their team members. This results in leaving business on the table and increases their vulnerability to competitors who are more proactive. Another skill set we find lacking is the ability to position a story so that what the sales reps say is persuasive and tailored to a client’s needs. The skill we find most lacking, however, is questioning and the ability to probe and drill down to uncover customer needs.

Sam Reese: The most neglected skill set among the average salesperson is the ability to understand what clients are really trying to fix, accomplish or avoid in their business. Most salespeople believe that selling is simply asking clients what they are looking for and then mapping their company capabilities in a way that aligns perfectly with what the client has described. They spend hours on RFPs and preparing presentations, so that they can describe this perfect fit. Top salespeople understand that they must first figure out the catalyst that kicked off this initiative and learn how it ties to the company’s strategy. It truly is all about clients and their concepts.

Selling Power: How can sales managers best estimate, achieve and measure a positive ROI on their sale training?

Black: Management needs to determine the key success measures before training ever begins. Is it more customers, more services sold to existing customers, additional revenue, increased profitability, penetration of new markets and so forth? ROI for sales training is fairly easy to measure. The systems need to be in place to collect data, and the metrics should be simple. The best scenario is for salespeople to be involved in determining the metrics.

Richardson: Set clear, measurable objectives before the training and assess results against those objectives. The clearer and more quantifiable the objectives (e.g., cross-selling, referrals, closed sales, etc.), the easier it is to show the impact of training. Another strategy is to use a short survey, asking participants three months after the training to quantify the sales they attribute to what they learned in the training. We have found the data to be specific, inspiring and attention grabbing.

Rackham: Real ROI measurement is difficult and expensive, and even the best measurement isn’t always conclusive. The father of performance measurement, Ed Stufflebeam, once said that the purpose of measurement is not to prove but to improve. That’s great wisdom. If you start out not to prove ROI but to improve performance, you’ll get much further. Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago, British Airways asked me to help measure the skills of their salespeople. Working with their sales managers, we went out and watched their people during sales calls. We found, unsurprisingly, that in successful calls salespeople offered more benefits than in unsuccessful calls. We met with top management of the airline and asked them if they would be satisfied if we could double the number of benefits in the average call. By a combination of training and coaching, we worked on increasing the number of benefits, using managers to go out on calls to monitor how we were doing. We hit the target, benefits doubled and everyone was happy. The training was perceived by top management to have excellent ROI. But notice that we didn’t set out to measure outcomes or ROI. We didn’t prove, we improved. We picked out a key behavior associated with success, and we got top management to agree on a bold target to double its frequency. That’s the practical kind of measurement I like – measurement that earns its keep.

Willingham: Most so-called sales training doesn’t work, because it doesn’t cause behavior change. Much of today’s sales training even causes salespeople to sell less, because the skills that are taught conflict with the personal values of the salespeople. In any case, sales managers should demand proof from training organizations of the efficacy of their training. We commonly do pilot programs for companies to show them results we can achieve.

Reese: I rarely run into sales managers who have a defined way of thinking about and measuring ROI. At the end of the day, they most likely look at their quotas and targets as the measure of success. Although I understand how this makes sense, there are ways to create tighter measurements that will help the entire organization understand the value of a sales-training initiative. A good way to do this is to use a dashboard tool as the vehicle for communicating progress. Common metrics to put in the dashboard are productivity per rep, average account billing, new-business growth, unplanned client churn and new-product sales. If senior management understands that there will be clear accountability that is easy to manage and understand (versus looking at total sales numbers), then they will feel as if they can take the fluffiness out of the training and translate it into real results and real ROI.

Selling Power: What was your most memorable win for the year – the occasion during which you felt your training had the most positive impact?

Cialdini: I was working with a company where the marketing team believed that emphasizing technical sophistication was the best selling strategy. Their marketing campaign for a new product emphasized what was new: performance, features, simplicity, etc. However, research shows that people are more motivated by losing something than by gaining something. At my suggestion, they changed their approach to “here’s what you’ve been missing.” They attribute a 45 percent increase in sales to that simple change in wording.

Richardson: A number leader in its industry recently selected Richardson to train all of its sales managers globally. However, the true win for us came when, because of the positive impact and response to the sales-management training, the client asked us to provide multiple sessions of one-on-one phone coaching over a three-month period to 500 of its managers. This represented an enormous commitment to and confidence in Richardson. The client realized that the investment in the smallest element in the sales training universe would have a disproportionately large impact on results – and after two months, performance results showed they were right!

Willingham: On average, we help organizations increase sales from 15 percent to 25 percent. We help large and small companies, and we had courses in 80 nations this last year. We’ve just finished training 11,000 salespeople in a large international organization with our Integrity Selling process, a one-year curriculum that involves training the trainers.

Reese: A manufacturing company that was pinning its first-quarter results on one big deal used our opportunity-management methodology and tools to replace an incumbent. They then went on to win a multimillion dollar deal. The keys were gaining a true understanding of the type of relationship that their client was trying to develop and navigating through the key buying influences in order to gain this understanding.

Rackham: I was waiting for a plane at Washington Dulles airport when a man came up to me and introduced himself. He told me how he’d read my book, SPIN Selling, almost 20 years ago. It had a profound influence on his selling, and he gave it credit for helping him build a hugely successful business that he had recently sold for several hundred million dollars. Turns out that he had given away almost all of his fortune to charities that helped the environment. “You may not have realized this,” he told me, “but you have contributed to saving 500,000 acres of rainforest.” It made my month.

– Geoffrey James

Our Panel of Experts

Joanne Black is a sales consultant, trainer and professional speaker who specializes in selling by referral, and is the author of the forthcoming book No More Cold Calling (Warner, 2006). Phone: 415/461-8763. Web: www.nomorecoldcalling.com.

Dr. Robert B. Cialdini is an internationally known expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance and negotiation, whose books have sold three-quarters of a million copies in 18 languages. Phone: 480/967-6070. Web: www.influenceatwork.com.

Neil Rackham is a highly sought-after conference speaker whose books, including the classic Spin Selling (McGraw-Hill, 1988), regularly rank high in the business best-seller lists. E-mail: Nrackham@aol.com

Sam Reese is the CEO of Miller Heiman and was previously corporate vice president for Sales and Marketing at Corporate Express, as well as head of Commercial Sales at Kinko’s, Inc. Phone: 1-877-678-3380. Web: www.millerheiman.com

Linda Richardson is president and CEO of Richardson, a seminar and e-learning sales-training firm, and the author of nine books, including The Sales Success Handbook (McGraw Hill, 2003). Phone: 215/940-9255. Web: www.richardson.com

Ron Willingham is the author of eight books, including Integrity Selling for the 21st Century (Doubleday, 2003), and is the founder of Integrity Systems, Inc. Phone: 1-800-896-9090. Web: www.integritysystems.com