While we’d like to call him one of our resident experts here at entreQuest, the Outsourced VP of Sales Mark Slatin is hardly ever home at the office. He’s always out working in-the-field managing our partners’ sales teams be they around the corner, down the Interstate, or up the coast.
We’re not sure where he found the time to write but his wisdom did somehow make its way into words for OnPoint Magazine – “a publication dedicated to the independent office product dealer.”
In his upcoming article titled “Why Sales Training Is Overrated,” Mark explains why most motivational programs and skill sharpening seminars do not produce more profitable salespeople. He makes his [on] point with the help of Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, Jr. too but we won’t give any more details away at this time.
We can discuss some wisdom from another great American though - Albert Einstein - who once defined insanity as: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
With that in mind, Mark and the rest of us here at eQ can’t help but be curious as to just how many typical training programs and seminars a salesperson has to undergo before he or she realizes that the results will always be the same. How many before you realize that your results will always be the same? How long before that moment of clarity restores your sales sanity and you acknowledge that improvement will require deploying your desire for better results on a deeper level? Before you realize why sales training is overrated?
Mark will take care of answering that question in the next issue of OnPoint Magazine. But why not try to come up with the answer on your own before his article hits cyberspace?
Take five minutes and think about every motivational/educational seminar, course, program, speech, etc. that filled you with immediate inspiration to take over the world but all too soon soon subsided into that feeling of that world being back on your shoulders. What were the similarities between the suggestions of the experts who led these events? What in their messages matched?
Now take it deeper. What were the similarities in you before, during, and after each of these events? What marred the messages from making a sustainable difference in your sales performance?
See if your answer to why sales training is overrated comes close to Mark’s reasoning in the second quarter issue of OnPoint Magazine. In the meantime, feel free to contact eQ if you need a hint.
Jeremy Steinberg is an Outsourced VP of Sales at entreQuest who has led companies across the country to increases in revenue by driving the performance of their sales teams to unprecedented levels of achievement.
