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friends when you plan and rehearse sales calls. Without feedback, how will you know whether your sales behaviors are as good as they can be?

4 Focus on one behavior at a time. Beginners should focus on one or two behaviors and master those before moving on (see Sales Trap 8, Beginners Should Start With Comprehensive Training ).

4 Support coaching. Behavioral change requires coaching. Companies should do more to support coaching. A good coach is just as important in sales as in sports.

SALES TRUTH 19: Sales training doesnt work without reinforcement.

sales trap 20:

If You Generate Sales Activity, Youll Close More Sales

The following sales management scenario is all too common. A sales force is not achieving its performance targets, and neither is the company. What is the quickest fix? To monitor, inspect, and increase the sales activity levels of the salespeople. From senior management down to first-line management, the mistaken consensus is often that if sales activity levels are increased, an increase in performance will follow. This belief is a fallacy. The conventional wisdom may say that the way to succeed is to increase your sales activity, but salespeople get themselves into a heap of trouble when they dont distinguish between transactional sales (single visit, low dollar value, low risk) and consultative sales (multiple visits, high dollar value). In transactional sales, salespeople can increase their sales activity by scheduling a sufficient number of appointments, making the required number of sales calls, presenting as many proposals as possible, and performing as many demonstrations as possible.

Salespeople in consultative sales tend to follow the decision process phases of their customers. In a typical decision process, a customer normally passes through three phases. In phase 1, the customer is trying to determine if it wants to solve the problem. In phase 2, after the customer deciding to solve the problem, the customer sets about evaluating the alternative solutions. In phase 3, the customer assesses the risk of the alternative selected in phase 2.

In consultative sales, it is what you learn from customers about their needs that advances the sale, and that comes from quality, not quantity. (Of course, you do need to make sales calls to sustain life. However, it is a strong emphasis upon sales activity in the consultative sale that we are addressing in this sales trap.)

Increasing sales activity works only in transactional sales. In consultative sales, what matters is not how many customers the

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salespeople see (quantity), but what they say to customers once theyre there (quality).

Heres the familiar scenario.

Ralph, a sales manager for a leading telecommunications company, was reviewing the third-quarter performance of one of his major account reps. Meredith, it seems that the last ninety days has been particularly tough. You were only at 62 percent of plan, and youre only at 78 percent of plan year-to-date. We need to decide what to do to help your performance improve. Since we only have ninety days left in the year, we need to do something that will get us immediate results. We need you to work harder, Meredith. In other words, we need you to make more sales calls, deliver more demonstrations, and write more proposals. These particular activities will have to generate business somewhere. With increased sales activity levels, Meredith, somebody will stick orders into your pocket. Therefore, lets increase your sales activity levels by 33 percent, and we will review your progress against these activity standards at 7:30 a.m. each Friday morning for the rest of the year. Meredith, you can be sure of one thing. Things will start to happen.

CONSEQUENCES OF THIS SALES TRAP

Things will start to happen, all right. Merediths performance will probably go down. How can someone work harder and have sales decrease? Because in increasing her activity, shes only skimming the surface of her accounts. Shes not learning what her customers need. In the smaller, simpler sale, performance is driven by how many customers the sales rep visits, but in the consultative sale, performance is driven by how effective a salesperson is at learning and listening