Excerpted from Chapter 13 of Transforming Your Sales Force for the 21st Century, by Dave Kahle
One of the higher-order sales leader’s initiatives is this: To encourage your sales team to strive for mastery. The dictionary defines mastery as this: to become an expert in. A “master” is someone who is “very skilled and able in some work, profession or science.”
I have an easy way of defining a sales master – Someone who is in the top five percent of the profession.
Imagine what your company would be like if you had a group of sales masters.
Your customers would be committed to you. Your market share would constantly grow. Your suppliers would be lining up at the door to get you on their side and to offer you special deals. Only the wildest dreamers could think of the things you would be able to do with your business. You’d be immensely profitable, and your sales force would be one of the most valuable assets you could imagine. Truly, having a group of sales masters would transform your business.
The payoffs from such a transformation would be so big, it’s worth playing a little, mentally, with the idea. What would be the characteristics of a group of sales masters? How would you know if you had such a force? Here’s my list:
- They would be recognized by the people with whom they interacted as expert, exceptional performers. That means that the manufacturers whose lines you represent, the customers with whom they work, and your internal people would all recognize your sales force as exceptional salespeople.
- They would be measurably more effective and productive than their colleagues in other companies. They would be more profitable to you and would be more highly compensated than the average.
- They would be constantly changing and learning, continually committed to improving themselves. “Comfort zones” would not be words in their vocabulary. They would recognize that the world around them is changing more rapidly than at any time in their lives, and that, in order to maintain their expert standing, they must continually change and grow at least as fast as their environment.
- They would be company-people, willing to make changes, do what you asked them to do, understanding that they are employees of an organization which is larger than they. They would be directable, profitable, and accountable.
I could go on and on, but you have the idea. Such a group of employees would make your business more profitable, and your life more pleasurable. Certainly, the acquisition of a group of sales masters would be a coup equal to the best, most effective things that you could do.
So, why don’t you do it?
Probably because you are good at managing your business, not at developing people. You just don’t know how to do that.
But that can be changed. You can accomplish this.
First, it’s helpful to understand the differences between training and continuous improvement.
Remember, training is instruction so as to create competence. Stimulating people to mastery requires continuous learning. My definition of learning is “positive behavior change.” That means that we change our behavior, we do something differently, in positive ways. By this definition, we don’t really learn anything until we act differently. For example, I recently fielded the following comment from a sales manager who was a participant in one of my monthly telephone seminars: “Following your program, I asked my group of seven experienced salespeople how many of them knew to do the things that you advocated in your program. All seven indicted that they knew them. Then I asked them how many of them actually did it. None of them did.”
There is a big difference between knowing and doing. Learning, for adults in the business world, is not a matter of acquiring intellectual information. It is a matter of acting and changing one’s behavior. Thus, the salespeople who said they already “knew” the information were, at the same time, admitting that they had not learned it. If they had learned it, they would be doing it.
What about the acquisition of knowledge? Say, for example, product knowledge? Isn’t that intellectual? Let’s think about this for a moment. Why do want your salespeople to know the products they sell? So that they can use them to solve customer’s problems, to help their customers achieve their objectives, to answer questions about them. All of these are behaviors. They need to have the knowledge in order to do the behavior. It’s the behavior you want, and the knowledge is one step towards the means to that end. It is possible, for example, for a salesperson to have great product knowledge, but be unable to apply that knowledge to solve the customer’s problems. While knowledge is helpful, it’s the behavior of solving the customer’s problem that you want.
So, striving for mastery is a matter of continuous learning. Mastery is evidenced by what you do, not what you know. To become masters of their professions, salespeople, then, need to continually improve what they do.
Our attempts to encourage and stimulate “mastery” then become focused on helping our salespeople change their behavior in positive ways. This is a life-long challenge, as no salesperson is as good as he/she could be.
How do people learn to change their behavior?
There are two basic ways that adults learn: targeted and serendipity. Targeted learning occurs when we define some learning that we want to obtain and then set out to acquire it. For example, if you take on a new product line, you expect your salespeople to learn the products, their specifications, prices and applications. The conscientious salesperson who is committed to mastery decides to learn those things and sets out to acquire the information and knowledge that will allow him/her to sell the new product line to the customers.
Here’s another example. You or your sales manager spend a day traveling with one of the salespeople and point out that the salesperson seemed ill prepared for the sales calls. You challenge the salesperson to do a better job of planning and preparing for every sales call. You have targeted a behavior and challenged the salesperson to learn to execute that behavior more effectively.
These are both examples of targeted learning. Someone, either you or the salesperson, has targeted a behavior to be changed. The salesperson’s job is now to work on changing that behavior.
Serendipity learning is something else entirely. It’s the way most adults learn and grow in most areas of their lives. Serendipity is defined as “happy chance discoveries.” We, without intending to, constantly make happy chance discoveries and change our behavior as a result. Here’s an example.
On one weekend away from home, my wife and I visited friends in Detroit. The two women went out shopping. At one of the malls they visited, they discovered a new bakery and thoroughly enjoyed the muffins they sampled. Since then, almost every time we visit the northern suburbs, we stop at that muffin shop for a treat.
We didn’t set out to find a muffin shop. We did not target a change in behavior or look to add something to our itinerary in our visits to Detroit. None-the-less, we changed our behavior and now act differently, because of a happy chance discovery.
That’s the way most salespeople, unfortunately, have learned to do their jobs. In a visit to a customer, for example, that customer may have pointed out a feature about one of the products that impressed him. The salesperson hadn’t known about that feature. He now realizes that this product has something that impresses this customer. He’s made a happy chance discovery. To the next customer he talks to about this product, he mentions the feature. He’s changed his behavior on the basis of a happy chance discovery.
Most B2B salespeople have learned the jobs, to the extent that they have, via serendipity learning. While serendipity learning may be the way that most of us learn and grow in most areas of our lives, it has some problems when it comes to gaining mastery of our jobs.
- It depends on our individual inclinations.
Different people, encountering the same “discovery”, can learn different things or nothing at all. It all depends on their inclination. For example, my wife and I, as well as our friends, are foodies. We like to eat. We enjoy exceptional and unusual food. We are inclined to investigate anything that looks good. So, when we walk by an attractive food store of any kind, we’re inclined to stop and sample.
If it were someone with different inclinations, they may have never made the discovery we made, nor changed their behavior as a result. For example, you would have never stopped in the muffin store to begin with if you were dieting, or a committed vegan.
The same thing happens in sales. A developing salesperson may focus on finding a problem to solve. He’s so focused on solving customer’s problems, that he never notices the customer suggesting some positive opportunity for the salesperson. He never learns the lesson to listen constructively to the customer because he was just not inclined to do so.
- Varies in the lessons learned.
The lessons that the salesperson learns vary dramatically because they are filtered through the perspective of that salesperson’s inclinations, attitudes, skills and life experiences. What one salesperson learns from a situation may differ dramatically from that lesson gained by another salesperson.
Let’s go back to our muffin store as an example. If you were overweight, on a diet, and inclined to avoid all sweets and carbohydrates, your stroll by the muffin store may have helped you strengthen your resolve. “Muffins are high-calorie, high-carbohydrate food,” you think to yourself. “I should avoid them no matter what.”
The lesson you gain from the chance encounter with the muffin store is exactly the opposite of the lesson we learned.
Two salespeople have a similar experience – they lost an order they had been working on for some time to a competitor who did little work other than discount the price. One resolves to never put that much time and effort into a customer again. The other decides to be more careful in which customers he invests. Two different lessons – two different behaviors – from the same event.
I am always amazed at how two people can experience the same event and draw such different, and in many cases, contradictory, conclusions from it. This is one of the main reasons that salespeople, left to their own to learn by trial and error, often develop in two dissimilar ways with dissimilar behaviors.
- Dependent on our attitudes toward learning.
The quantity and quality of serendipity learning is dependent on the depth of the learner’s commitment to learning and changing. In other words, given two salespeople of roughly equal skills, education and experience, the one with a commitment to grow and change and learn will eventually eclipse the other.
I see evidence of this every week. When I do a seminar for a company with a variety of salespeople, there are always those who are eager to learn and those who “know it all.” Those whose attitude shuts down their receptivity to learning experiences
rarely grow at the rate evidenced by those who are eager.
It takes an average of 17 years of serious involvement with a skill to rise from entry level to world-class. Just because someone is qualified to do their job doesn’t mean that they are performing at the level of competency at which they could be performing. Those salespeople who are dedicated to learning will eventually rise to mastery level. Those who aren’t, won’t.
So, what do you do?
With that understanding behind us, let me propose a process to “encourage and stimulate the quest for mastery.”
Step One: Mandate the quest for mastery.
Let everyone know that you expect every salesperson to constantly work on improving his/her skills and competencies and eventually become a master of their profession.
Raise your expectations of them. One of the reasons why many B2B salespeople do not think of themselves as professionals is that they aren’t treated like professionals. You expect every professional to continually learn and keep on top of the changes and challenges of his/her profession. Accountability in personal growth is a necessity.
Let them know that. Mention it often, announce it in sales meetings, write it into job descriptions, and make it an issue in evaluations. The achievement of “mastery” is a requirement of the job, and you, personally and publicly, expect it.
Step Two: Begin with an individualized behavioral assessment.
If mastery is about how salespeople behave, then we should focus on their behavior. Remember, it’s not about what you know; it is about what you do.
The implication here is that there are some behaviors which are more effective than others. Sales is more science than “art.” Just like in any other profession, there are specific behaviors which are more effective than others. Salespeople dedicated to mastery must continually strive to add the most effective behaviors into their repertoire.
If you are going to pro-actively assist them in the pursuit of “mastery,” then you need to have codified a set of behaviors that exemplify how sales masters go about their jobs. You can create your own list, or you can use that which we have already created. Check our individual sales assessment connected with one of my books, How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime.
Once you have articulated a set of behaviors, then you need to continually assess your experienced salespeople in their implementation and mastery of those behaviors. There are a number of ways in which you can do this, but probably the most effective is to travel with the salesperson and rate him/her on those behaviors.
Share your assessment with the salesperson and together, in dialogue with him/her, decide which of them to focus on improving.
Step Three: Inject them into learning events.
A learning event is any experience from which they can draw lessons and then change their behavior in positive ways. Typically, seminars, books, CD and video programs are all common examples of learning events. But there are other, less visible, ways to create a learning event. A sales meeting where the participants dialogue about aspects of the sales process and effective sales behaviors can be a powerful learning event. Talking with a sales manager after a coaching day is another. Availing yourself of the developing technologies: encourage the salespeople to join our B2B Sales Group in the XI Community, where they will be exposed to the best thinking of their colleagues and a group of sales experts.
What is important here is that you regularly inject your salespeople into an experience from which you expect them to learn. At least monthly, put your salespeople into a learning event.
Step Four: Publicize and praise progress.
More than twenty years ago I received the “salesperson of the year” award from the company for whom I was selling. The picture of me receiving the award is still hanging on my wall at home. I still have every award I have ever received for sales.
I’m not that atypical. Recognition is important to most salespeople. One of the best ways to promote and insure more of any activity is to publicly praise the salespeople who engage in it. Make a point of publicly recognizing any salesperson who attends a seminar, reads a book, or shows evidence of improving himself or herself in any way.
Implement these four practices and you’ll be well on your way to leading a group of sales masters.
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