How Sales Should Be Taught

The Secret Is in the Teaching Method

"You can't learn sales!"... "Either you've got it or you don't!"... "You're born with it!"... I hear statements like these almost every day, and every time they amaze me all over again.

These claims are exactly as true as saying you have to be born a carpenter or a rocket scientist. Granted, to achieve real results in sales you need a very particular personality structure. It's a combination, by the way, of empathy and ego drive in an uncommon "dose." But succeeding at carpentry also takes technical aptitude (my brother, for example, who has a PhD in linguistics, will never make it as a carpenter...), and the same goes for plenty of other professions.

Zig Ziglar, one of the veterans of sales training, put it this way: "In my long life I've never met a woman who gave birth to a salesman, but I've known quite a few salesmen who died... Clearly something happened between the day they were born and the day they died that turned them into salespeople"... Someone with good technical skills will be able to build a decent cabinet or table, but it'll take him a long time, the result won't be professional enough, and he probably won't be able to make a living at it... He'll remain an amateur. Becoming a professional always takes a proper learning process.

Someone who's been blessed with a God-given gift, that special combination of empathy and ego drive, will probably do pretty well at persuading people. But the distance between him and a professional salesperson who makes a living at it is enormous!

Most people don't realize that sales has been researched, analyzed and studied intensively for more than 30 years. Today there are clear, unambiguous explanations for most situations involving the interaction between seller and buyer, between the persuader and the persuaded. The solutions are known and well defined too.

Someone who really knows the theory of selling knows exactly what to do to lead a reasonable customer from hesitation to decision. In most cases, the core process he'll use doesn't come from the product or service being sold, but from the very nature of the interaction between people, when one is trying to influence and bring about change in the other. A sales professional knows exactly what to do when a customer says he's in a hurry (the boomerang technique), and he doesn't panic when the customer says he'll "think about it"... (the "simple Nelson") and so on. An "advisor" tagging along with the real customer doesn't surprise a sales professional in the least, and he knows how to handle that awkward situation. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, and they show the huge gap between an amateur and a professional.

So yes, there's an enormous amount of material to learn if you want to succeed in this field. But we're not talking about traditional learning based on lectures and memorizing "tips." One of the conditions for getting people personally, emotionally and cognitively involved with the material, and for making it stick, is to involve the learners in the process.

What we need, then, is an interactive workshop, where learners develop a clear, structured approach along with essential professional solutions, both in general and for their own specific line of work. Learners take an active part in analyzing a variety of real-life situations and in a range of exercises, including heavy use of closed-circuit TV.

But that's not enough. Moving from an intuitive approach to systematic, professional selling requires, as a basic condition for success, tackling three main challenges:

1. Moving from a purely declarative approach (statements, speeches, presentations and explanations) to one of listening, really getting to know the other person and adapting to him in every respect.
2. Cultivating the drive, the instinct, to close, or to achieve a concrete result defined in advance (keep in mind that avoiding the close is the most common failing among salespeople).
3. A complete change in normal behavior patterns in situations of conflict or objection. (The normal, everyday reactions are the exact opposite of how professional salespeople respond.)

It's safe to say, flat out, that if these goals haven't been met, the workshop has failed.

The Peled Method tackles these challenges in a unique, original way that has no equal anywhere in the sales world.

The first element, shifting the focus from "me" to the customer, is achieved by learning and practicing the "Theory of Matching" (an original development of the Peled Method). The "instinct to close" is developed through a combination of moves, and even manipulations, usually carried out at the start of the second day of the workshop. And "changing behavior patterns in conflict situations" is done by analyzing, learning, internalizing and practicing TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS, the advanced theory of Dr. Eric Berne.

Leading a workshop like this takes a trainer who combines:

1. Very deep and broad knowledge of the sales profession.
2. Many years of hands-on experience.
3. An educational background in the behavioral sciences (psychology and sociology).
4. A structured, didactic approach.

For the process to be an experience that's enjoyable and remembered for a long time, the trainer also needs a fifth quality: a flair for drama and a very sharp sense of humor.

That combination of all five elements is extremely rare.

A workshop like this is without a doubt the first requirement and the ticket into the field, but it is by no means enough.

Since sales is about skill and not knowledge for its own sake, the workshop has to include, especially toward the end, hands-on exercises of all kinds: role plays, group activities and, above all, simulations of real-life situations using closed-circuit TV.

Participants are handed scripts prepared for them in advance, and they "play" seller and buyer (in their own specific field) opposite each other. These scenes are videotaped and then analyzed by the whole group.

In most cases, it's best to start with simulations of relatively simple situations and work up to more and more complex ones.

Experience shows that the road to sales professionalism is still long and grueling. Many participants understand the material, most of them identify with the ideas and techniques they've picked up, some have "erased" mistakes and misconceptions they absorbed over the years, and a few can even give virtuoso dry-run demonstrations of selling under tough conditions. But they still need help translating what they learned in the workshop into everyday practice. Some need a "personal translation," and they'll tell you: "Only now do I really get it"...

That translation usually takes the form of personal coaching in the field (Coaching), sometimes called O.J.T, short for "On The Job Training."

This vital step proves its power time after time, so much so that some people try to skip the workshop altogether and rely on coaching alone...

Obviously, doing O.J.T on its own would mean running a "private workshop" for every employee... Without a common language between coach and trainee, you won't get results. If the coach needs to comment on or correct something about "closing technique," the trainee obviously has to know that technique. You can't expect a trainee who never learned the profession to know how to create "deliberate closing signals," or to use tools from NLP, "guided imagery" or "suggestive selling," if he's hearing about them for the first time during coaching...

So personal coaching shouldn't be relied on as the only learning tool.

The way the coaching is done also matters enormously. I've known "coaches" who put most of their energy into trying to "impress" the trainee... They jump into his sales process and show off virtuoso moves in front of him, but that's fundamentally wrong. A big success by the coach can shake the trainee's self-confidence, while a failure (entirely possible even for the most veteran and experienced among us) can weaken the coach's standing in the trainee's eyes, and with it the weight of his recommendations and instructions.

Of the three common coaching methods, passive observation is recommended in most cases, with the trainee himself analyzing what happened once the interaction is over. It's also very important to prepare the trainee for the process itself. Easing his fears is a condition for getting his cooperation and for the process to succeed.

Putting the comments and corrections to work in another meeting right afterward is the right and natural next step.

Within the coaching method, how you get the trainee to recognize his mistakes also matters. This is usually done by asking questions and talking it through, not by lecturing or preaching.

But this far-from-simple job still isn't done. Alongside the coaching, it's worth setting up a professional feedback process that gives a true, realistic picture of how well the material has sunk in, how skillfully the salespeople perform, how closely they stick to the rules they learned, and what faulty perceptions and bad habits they've picked up over the years. The way to do it: "mystery shoppers."

The mystery shoppers prepare realistic "cover stories," show up at points of sale and document precisely (on special forms and in detailed written descriptions) every move the salespeople make, from the opening right through to their attempts to close.

Of course, whoever carries this out has to understand the field well. For all the importance of the forms and questionnaires the shoppers fill out, a shopper clearly has to pick up on nuances and often take an active part in the process itself, by giving closing signals, asking leading questions, raising specific objections and so on. Using young students without the right background as mystery shoppers can be useless at best, or badly misleading at worst.

"Closing the loop" is done through refresher sessions held every quarter or every six months. In these sessions the salespeople see the mystery shopper findings, recurring weak spots get focused attention, the key rules they learned are reviewed, real situations from the field (problems, successes and failures) are analyzed, more exercises are done, and sometimes various additions and extensions are needed in response to participants' questions and requests.

Reality (based on many hundreds of training programs like this) teaches us that building or upgrading a high-quality sales team takes a very sophisticated mix of learning methods. Only the right combination of all of the above will deliver the results every sales organization wants so badly to achieve!