I was speaking with a sales manager of a company recently. He told me that his sales team was getting “lazy” and that they were not being consistent with following the sales process. He was concerned, as he should be, that he was losing sales. I asked if they did any sales training, and he said “oh yeah, they just aren’t following it all of the time.” Which led to him saying how he knew he had to hold them more accountable.
Does this story sound familiar?
What if I told you there was an easier way? Well, there is.
What I’m going to say will sound too simple. It’s a well kept secret that I’ve found that has worked for me personally, for my clients, and for organizations around the world that teach this to their employees.
The secret is this:
Understanding how we operate as human beings is the foundation to all training success. And how we operate as human beings is this: We experience our reality moment to moment through thought. And no matter how badly our brain tries to trick us into believing otherwise, our experience comes from inside us, not from external circumstances.
The way I see it, training programs can be fantastic tools. They teach us the process of what the steps are and how to do those steps within a certain framework. All in order to make improvements, and to do it consistently.
The above example is in regards to sales, so we’ll discuss training in that regard. But we could be talking about any kind of training; Sales, customer service, customer support, and any other organizational training. As well as wellness training, athletic training, and personal development training.
Usually in the world of sales, our sales teams are not consistent. A typical sales team will have a small percentage that crushes it, month in and month out. They’ll have a larger percentage in the middle that hits their numbers some months and miss it in others. And they’ll have a percentage that rarely hits their numbers.
The company will hire a training company to improve sales. During the training, most sales reps will get excited about the idea of learning how to sell more. They’ll start performing better. They’ll sell more. Even the reps who are the lowest performers will improve… but it doesn’t last. It doesn’t “stick.”
The reason that training doesn’t stick is because most people innocently have a belief that their experience comes from “out there.” That their reality is being created from outside of them. For example, “Hitting my sales quota and earning a big bonus will make me happy.” While this is a great achievement, and the extra money is well deserved and fantastic, earning my quota can never make me feel anything, including happy, sad, or excited. Only my thinking about it can make me feel a certain way.
Without the understanding that a sales training (outside experience) is not the long-term answer to consistent sales success, a sales rep will not be able to be consistently successful. Short-term, sure. Sales training will often (but not always) get a sales rep excited about their role, their job, their customers. But in most cases, the training excitement wears off, and the rep goes back to their old habits. Old ways of thinking take over. The stories the rep tells him/herself about the training, the job, the sales team, the product or service, the customers, you name it.
For long-term sales transformation, we need to look deeper and be aware of the stories we are telling ourselves. And understand that sometimes those stories don’t serve us. And that those stories are being 100% internally generated via thought. Once we start becoming aware of our thinking, then we’re on the path to sales transformation.
What I know for sure is that for years I thought that my experience was being created by circumstances and by things outside of my control. But I now know that this is not true. Things happen, but the reality I create is 100% internally generated via my thoughts and the energy I give to those thoughts.
I believe if more people understood how their minds really work, then their performance would skyrocket, with a lot less effort and stress. What do you think?
If what I’m suggesting in this blog post is resonating with you, please reach out to me and let’s talk!
