4 Remember that salespeople are made, not born. It takes time for salespeople to get better and to develop. The only way to fail to develop is to give up (see Sales Trap 4, Rejection Is Failure ). Giving up on your personal development may be the only thing worse than failure because it means that you are giving up on yourself, your hopes and dreams. In the movie Flashdance, Nick (Michael Nouri) says to Alex (Jennifer Beals), Alex, without hopes and dreams, we die.

sales truth 6: Salespeople are developed, not born.

PRINCIPLE

train

effectively

LEADING sales companies, such as IBM, Merck, and Motorola, have highly effective sales training programs. Not only do they select programs based on effective methodologies and not just on top performer opinions (see Sales Trap 5, Academic Studies Arent Helpful in Real-World Sales ), but they also use these programs to increase the sales teams efficiency in a variety of other ways.

COMMON LANGUAGE

One key function of a sales training program is to provide salespeople, sales managers, and consultants

with a common language to reinforce the strategies, tactics, and behaviors taught in the training modules (see Sales Trap 7). Top sales companies use sales training programs to develop a lingua franca, or common language, about sales. Thus, companies need to be cautioned against throwing in the proverbial kitchen sink. If they try to cover everything under the sun, the deluge of new words thrown at the salespeople in a data dump will confuse them. The lingua franca facilitates sales coordination, customer service efficiency, and employee transfers. People can transfer from department to department or division to division within the company more efficiently, because they dont have to learn an entirely new language and culture. This common language also helps salespeople from different departments to plan and implement cross-selling opportunities more effectively.

Perhaps one of the best examples is the banking industry. Many banks have retail people (branch banking personnel who work with consumers) who are involved in smaller transactional selling (checking accounts, savings accounts, credit card services, credit lines, ATM cards, etc.). Yet they also have commercial lending officers who are involved in consultative selling (premium business loans and cash management services) to medium and large businesses. The sales models used on the branch side (to sell small, simple products and services) are different from those on the commercial banking side (to sell large, complex products and services). In order to accommodate this difference, banks with strong selling cultures use sales training programs in which the same language is adapted for both uses. With the same sales language, people from the branch banking side can more easily communicate with people on the commercial banking side. As Gerald Rush, senior vice president of Bank One, says, It is easier for us to cross-sell our services to our customers, thus solving more of their problems and creating delivered value to them, when our people talk the same language.