I’ve been in the sales training business for just over 23 years now, and before that, I was a certified internal trainer for another company’s sales methodology. During that time, I’ve grown in my profession and have also had the opportunity to observe many other trainers in action, so I’ve learned a bit about what it takes to be a successful sales trainer.
Having also done a fair bit of training to non-sales audiences, I can confidently state that while much of this article applies to training in general, salespeople present their own special challenges. Being quota-driven, they are looking for immediate practical application; they are high-energy and find it hard to sit still for very long; above all, they place a high premium on the personal credibility of the trainer.
To succeed with them, a complete sales trainer has to master several roles to deal with the diversity and complexity of the situations he or she will encounter along the way.
Presenter: Just presenting the material is the first step. I began my career working for a firm that taught its own proprietary sales process for the complex sale. My first time in front of a live audience was in Toronto in front of 60 computer systems salespeople. I was terrified before going out, because I knew they had much more experience in complex B2B sales than I did, but my boss reassured me that I knew the content cold, and as long as I stuck just to that, I would be alright. That’s what I did, and fortunately for the client, we had other trainers in the room who could go beyond that in the workshops.
A presenter is like a stealth bomber, happy just to get the payload delivered without taking any hits. Actual learning is just a nice byproduct; the test of a presenter is whether the audience heard and saw all the necessary material.
Teacher: Although competently delivering the material is essential, a teacher goes beyond getting the content out; she makes sure the students actually learn the material, by questioning and assessing performance. The teacher pays attention to students to see if they’re getting it, and explains differently or backtracks if they’re not. Teachers tailor their language and their examples to the students’ circumstances. They provide content and meaning.
Teachers succeed when their students retain the key points. To quote…”You haven’t taught until they’ve learned.”
Coach: If teachers are wholesale, coaches are retail. They can work with each individual student and bring out their best learning and performance. Coaches know what it’s like not to know what they know, what it’s like to struggle with applying new concepts to familiar situations. They can realistically play the part of a customer during a role play and dial the difficulty up or down as needed. This is especially important because sales skills are squishy—no formula survives for long when applied to diverse, often unpredictable and uncooperative customers.
Coaches succeed when their students can retain and transfer their new knowledge and skills outside the classroom, in the real world.
Salesperson: Salespeople can be either the worst or the best students a trainer can have. They can be the worst because they know they are investing expensive time out of the field to be sitting in a class, so if they don’t see value, they will tune you out or fight you. You have to sell them early if you want to survive. But if you can sell them on the need for the concepts and skills you’re teaching, they will be the most engaged of all possible students.
A sales trainer who is a good salesperson can also be a great role model. Sales trainers who sell their own materialhave an advantage; they have to practice the same techniques in order to earn the right to be in front of the class. For experienced sales teams, this is especially important. It’s even more powerful when you can show them your own skill: you might take a stab at wording someone’s value proposition, or at answering a specific objection. When you can do this well, there is no greater compliment than having someone ask you if you can go on the call with them!
Success as a salesperson comes when students want to emulate you.
Student: You need to begin as a student to become a sales trainer in the first place, but through it all, you must continue to be a student. It’s a way to keep getting better, to keep up with changes and the latest research in selling, and to stay fresh. Most importantly, you must strive to learn something from the students who come through your classes.
Students succeed when they pick something up which they can apply and pass on to future students.
Deliverer, teacher, coach, salesperson, student: these are not separate roles. They are steps on the ladder to effective sales training, and different layers of skill that unfold with experience and also come out as needed in the classroom. Without some competence in each of these roles, sales training will not and cannot be as effective as it could be.
I gave a speech yesterday in Aspen about the four major lessons I have accidentally learned about selling during my career: thinking outside-in, delivering value through knowledge, the critical importance of preparation, and being real.
As I worked on my remarks, however, I discovered a fifth lesson: it occurred to me that somewhere along my journey, I have found a passion for selling—for the practice, study, and teaching of the craft—that I never would have anticipated when I was younger.
In fact, I did everything I could early in my career to avoid selling. I thought it was beneath me, and I was also a little afraid of it because I thought I had no talent for it.
But life makes unexpected demands on us, ampoule and selling became a part of my job description despite my wishes. I flailed around in it for a bit (because the bank that said I had to do it didn’t provide any training), but gradually worked my way up to at least mediocrity just through trial and error and trying to use common sense.
As I’ve written before, I stumbled on the idea of outside-in thinking during a sales call on a prospect when I had to admit that I didn’t know why he should do business with me; to recover, I was forced to quickly think up some good questions and he opened right up. I soon learned that asking questions, while a good start, is not enough. At some point you need to take what you’ve learned about your customer and combine it with your own specialized knowledge to teach them something new that improves their situation.
I think it’s the first two lessons that seeded my passion for selling. By taking a genuine interest in my client’s success and studying hard to learn new ways to add value, I’ve gained the satisfaction of knowing I’m helping others; I’ve grown from the constant challenge; I’ve met thousands of interesting people.
Psychologists tell us that intrinsic motivation comes from autonomy, purpose and mastery. Selling has given me the first two and the chance daily to pursue the third. Incidentally, I’ve also made a decent living doing it.
At this point, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else, which would be quite a surprise to my younger self.
That’s one reason that I think the well-intentioned advice we give to young people today—to follow their passions—may be misguided. At their age, most don’t know what their passions are. Maybe it’s better to do the best job you can where you can, and find your passion in that.
Think you can sell? Try this!
When one of America’s greatest salesmen and entrepreneurs launched his career, it was announced in the press by the Boston newspaper in 1806, under the following story: “No Joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.”
A young man named Frederic Tudor was testing an idea that was suggested to him at a party the previous summer, when he was enjoying a drink cooled by ice stored in an icehouse during the winter before.
Tudor came from a well-to-do Boston family, and was the first of his brothers not to attend Harvard College. Instead, he went to work at age 13, but he was not destined to work for a salary. At the age of 21 he got the crazy idea that he could cut blocks of ice from ponds surrounding Boston and ship it to the Caribbean.
His first stop was Martinique, then under French control. He had sent his brother William ahead to try to secure a monopoly, which he achieved by bribing a secretary, but William otherwise did little to prepare for the arrival of the first shipment. Martinique did not work out so well, but the experience he gained there helped him establish a market in Cuba. In the ensuing years he set up markets in Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah, with various levels of success.
When he embarked on his enterprise, Tudor began a notebook, and his first entry read:
“He who gives back at the first repulse and without striking the second blow despairs of success has never been, is not and never will be, a hero in war, love, or business.”
These were brave words, but it almost did prove to be a slippery speculation and if he knew then how much he was going to need that mindset, he may have stuck to working for someone else. Plagued by bad partners, occasional poor judgment, debtor’s prison, and the little matter of the War of 1812, he struggled for almost 20 years before he finally became consistently successful. In those days, when you couldn’t pay your creditors you were thrown in jail until your friends and relatives could raise the money to get you out. At one point, Tudor was sitting in a jail cell until his friends could raise the money to have him released; as he contemplated his surroundings, he wrote: “I smiled to think that anyone should believe I was beaten.”
In the end, he finally overcame all obstacles and became wealthy, selling an item that at home was at best a commodity and at worst a nuisance. He sold ice as far abroad as Calcutta and Bombay and became known as The Ice King. By the time of Tudor’s death in 1864, ice exporting had become a hugely successful global business. From the first shipment of 130 tons in 1806, the trade grew to 146,000 tons in 1856.
Unquestionably, Tudor’s perseverance and grit were critical factors in his success. But it was his selling approach that finally made him successful. Tudor’s main selling challenge was to transform ice from a novelty item into a necessity. How did he do it? He demonstrated remarkably sophisticated sales techniques that we would recognize today. Although he might have benefited from a little more tact, his example of insight selling in Martinique two centuries before its time is worth quoting at length:
“The man who keeps the Tivoli garden insisted ice creams could not be made in this country & that the ice itself would all thaw before he could get it home! …so putting my fist down pretty hard upon the table I called for a pen & ink. I wrote an order for 60 lbs. of ice & in a pretty warm tone directed the man to have his cream ready & that I would come & freeze it for him in the morning which I did accordingly being determined to spare no pains to convince these people that they can not only have ice but all the luxuries arising as well here as elsewhere. The Tivoli man recd. for these creams the first night $300 – after this he was as humble as a mushroom & shrugging up his shoulders said he knew nothing hoped monsieur would take some coffee – some liqueurs. ‘Devil take your coffee.’ Said I & came home.”
But his main customers were the coffee-house keepers, and he showed a deep understanding of his their business success factors by insisting that bartenders not charge a premium for adding ice to drinks. By holding the price steady for a superior offering, they could draw business away from other bars in town, which in turn clamored to become customers in the next season. Even better, the bar patrons became hooked on cold drinks. Tudor estimated that it took about three years in a location to establish the cold-drink habit.
He also had to educate consumers. At his first stop in Martinique, he complained that customers bought the ice and took it home without insulation, and then returned to complain that it had melted in the tropical heat! He had to explain that they had to insulate it in blankets, and then sold them the blankets at $1 each. Tudor also developed a “little icehouse” for the home which ran on three pounds of ice per day and ensured constant demand.
Tudor was constantly innovating. He came up with an idea for a cooling jar which allowed bartenders to produce more cold water cheaply; he experimented with different ways to build icehouses; he tinkered with better ship designs. On the production side, his employee Andrew Wyeth devised better methods of cutting the ice from the New England ponds, which improved efficiencies and standardized block sizes.
With perseverance, innovation, and customer insight, Frederic Tudor single-handedly created a lucrative industry using sales practices that were way ahead of their time. He truly was one of the great salesmen in American history.
Tudor deserves to be better remembered, and the best part of this story is that Tudor Ice is making a revival. The modern-day inheritors of the Tudor Ice company are setting out to prove that you can sell a commodity at a premium…but that’s a story for a future article.
Note:
If you want to learn more about Tudor’s remarkable career, here are two valuable sources:
The Ice King: Frederic Tudor and His Circle, by Carl Seaburg and Stanley Patterson
Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness, Philip Smith
In Part 1, we posed the problem of providing help to clients in such a way that they actually find it helpful, so that they act on the advice given. To do so requires that we establish a climate of equal status between the salesperson and the client, generate a sufficient level of trust, and ensure that the client takes ownership of the solution. That, in turn, requires a questioning process called humble inquiry, which Schein elaborates on in his book, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (BK Business)
As Schein defines it, “Humble inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”
How does this differ from the typical form of questioning used in sales? First, let’s assume that the salesperson actually asks questions and listens to the answers, which is definitely not a given.
Assuming that the salesperson goes so far as to ask questions, the typical approach is to ask a few qualifying questions up front, identify problems/opportunities that fit with their advantages, possibly diagnose why the problems exist, and then provide insights in the form of solutions. Or, they can work through a specific methodology such as SPIN. There are two common threads in all these questioning approaches: first, the salesperson asks them with a specific goal in mind, and, second, it’s important to keep control of the conversation.
That’s why salespeople are often told not to ask a questions to which they already know the answer, as if they are cross-examiners in a criminal trial. In this way, they can keep control of the direction of the conversation, which puts them in a “one-up” position.
But what if being in control interferes with a trusting climate, or prevents the client from saying something that may actually shed better light on the situation? In that case, the salesperson may solve the wrong problem, or solve the right problem before the client is ready to act on the solution.
Notice the stark difference between directed questioning approaches and humble inquiry, which requires that the questioner “access their ignorance” and sincerely ask the most open-ended of questions, those which may totally surprise them with the answers given.
Humble inquiry begins with open inquiry, which is simply gaining a sufficient understanding of the client’s situation, without an agenda. Your goal here is to ask and listen, without judging or formulating responses. This is important for two reasons. First, being too highly focused on what you want to find out can easily obscure important information which may be necessary to uncover and solve the real problem at hand. Second, it impairs the development of trust, because the client senses your agenda and is on guard for the other shoe to drop.
How to use humble inquiry in sales conversations
Schein does not address sales situations specifically, so the rest of this article represents my own thinking on how humble inquiry can be used during a sales conversation.
First, should you even use it? If so, when is it appropriate, and how should it be used?
Your ultimate goal is to make a sale, so why not proceed directly on the path that will take you there, instead of wasting time in aimless conversation? It seems like poor use of the precious time you actually have with them. The second concern is that no salesperson likes to lose control of the conversation, and it’s easy to think that listening without an agenda is a form of unilateral disarmament which will lessen your chances of making a sale.
The answer to the first concern is that except for automated computer trading algorithms, no purchasing decision is based entirely on 100% logical, quantifiable reasoning. The person sitting across from you is a real human being with real – and unique – human needs, feelings, quirks, and aspirations, and they like to feel important and valued. One of the best ways they do is to have others actually take an interest in them. That good feeling may make a difference in the immediate sale, and be a basis for a fruitful long-term relationship.
As to losing control, that could happen if humble inquiry were the only tool you had to bring to the conversation. But, just because you start with it does not mean that you can’t switch to your other questioning approaches at the appropriate moment – in fact you will have to switch at some point. When you feel the discussion has arrived at the right point, you can phase into your diagnostic and expert roles.
Another approach is to listen carefully to the client and then use what Schein calls “constructive opportunism”, which is your ability to recognize conversational openings that you can jump into, to explore something further, or probe to uncover additional needs. Based on your expert knowledge of how your product or service addresses typical customer needs, you will probably hear plenty of keywords that indicate POCR: problems, opportunities, changes and risks. The benefits of this are that it’s less disruptive to the natural flow of the conversation, and the issues that emerge are the client’s own ideas.
Keep in mind that if you decide to try humble inquiry in your sales conversations, it will not be easy, as I’ve been discovering. You will have to overcome habit, culture and human nature. Our sales habits lead us to pounce on perceived needs; our culture values doing and telling; and our natural human instinct is to claim higher status that comes from showing how smart we are. But if you can persevere through the difficulties, you stand a better chance of providing help that is truly helpful, and isn’t that worth the effort?
[1] Part 1 was based on Schein’s first book, Helping. That book also explains the humble inquiry approach. Unless you really want to dig deeply in to the topic, you don’t have to read both books. I would recommend Helping if you only want to read one.
