One of the most enfeebling myths about the sales profession is this:
Salespeople can learn on their own, on the job, and eventually turn good at their jobs. They will eventually develop their own style, this myth implies, and that will bring them the highest results.
That myth is accurate for about five percent of the salespeople in the world. For the other 95 percent, nothing could be further from the accuracy. The overwhelming majority of field salespeople perform at a fraction of their potential because they’ve never been consistently exposed to the best practices of their profession. Alternatively, they’ve been expected to “learn on their own.”
I like to paint. I don’t mean pictures. I mean walls and bedrooms and hallways. I love the physical nature of it, and the resulting switch in the feeling of the room. I have always liked to paint, and have done so for over 30 years. Once, for about two months, I actually made a living doing it. I think I’m pretty good at it.
Until a little while ago, when I was watching among those reality home improvement shows. On it, a professional painter presented the best way to implement masking tape, hold a brush and implement the paint.
Yikes! I was doing it all wrong.
All this time I thought I was pretty good, in my own self-taught, learn-on-my-own kind of way. I guess I really didn’t have any standard. But I almost always painted by myself, and had only my own opinion. I guessed I was pretty good equated to what I thought was good.
Then, when I discovered the best practices of a true professional, I saw that my own ideas we not equal to the standard. I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was. If I’m attending become really good, objectively, verifiably good, I have to switch my routines and incorporate the best practices.
So it is with sales as well. The world is full of salespeople who have learned on the job, pretty much on their own, and have never been exposed to the best practices of the profession. They deceive themselves, as I did, holding the opinion that they are pretty good.
And that delusion keeps them lingering in levels of performance substantially beneath what their potential would allow them.
Sales managers often share that delusion, and occupy themselves with other matters, unable or unsure how to improve the performance of their team. Commonly, the sales manager was, in a early personification, a high performing salesperson. He/she was one of those five percent who learned on their own, who studied the best practices, and who incorporated them into his routines. As a result, that sales manager, formerly high performing salesperson, expects every other salesperson to be just like him; to have the same motivation, the same drive, the same ability and tendency to learn. He, therefore, makes little effort to expose the sales team to best practices, because, after all, he did it on his own. Shouldn’t they?
Here’s where the theoretical conflicts with fact. Yeah, they had better do it on their own. However, few do. Only the five percenters of the world can be counted on to invest in their own development. The overwhelming majority of the balance of salespeople have not even spent $25 of their own money on their own improvement in the last year. The sad truth is that few salespeople see themselves as professionals and take their own improvement seriously.
That’s unfortunate. Every profession in the world develops a body of knowledge about the best way to do that job. And every professional in the world is expected, if they are serious about the profession, to regularly study those best practices, and to incorporate them into their routines with a disciplined, methodical effort. That’s why teachers have in-services, doctors go to conferences, nurses have in-service training, etc.
The job of the salesperson is no different. There is probably no other profession that is more scripted about, and to, than field sales. Over the last 50 years, there must have been thousands of books written, tens of thousands of articles published, thousands of audio programs equipped, and hundreds of newsletters and magazines published – all for the field salesperson, and all describing the best practices of the profession in diverse terms and methods.
Just as there is a set of best ways to paint a room, so there are sets of best ways to ask a question, search an appointment, build rapport, make a presentation, close the deal, and follow up on the purchase. Smart salespeople understand this, and seek to continually expose themselves to the best practices.
Beyond that, they understand that it is one thing to know what to do, but quite another to develop the habits which regularly and reliably incorporate those behaviors. They continually work on incorporating the best practices into their routines, repeating them until they become habits. Fantabulous execution becomes a never-ending mantra.
Smart sales managers do similarly. They continually expose their salespeople to the best practices of the profession, and boost every salesperson to improve by methodically incorporating them into their routines. Those companies that consistently and methodically expose their salespeople to the body of knowledge regarding best practices of the sales profession systematically outperform those who don’t.
It’s the track to improvement that the rest of the professional world understands. It’s time for the sales profession to do likewise.
Let’s no longer be deceived by the myth that most salespeople can learn on their own. Let’s put to rest once and for all time the debilitating myth that every salesperson has his/her own style of selling.
Let’s expect, like every other profession in the world, that professional salespeople be responsible to incorporating the best practices into the routines, and be measured by the standards of the professional.
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