Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

More on Age Bias and Texting

One of my blog correspondents has been raving enthusiastically about the diversity of employees at her new inside sales job, where the manager of the department has loaded the team with people of a myriad of ages and ethnicities. These differences of backgrounds and cultures has created a very strong team that seems to be energizing everyone, and she says it’s elevating the concepts of Best Practices and team communication to a high level, as the inside reps bring their diverse experiences into the dialogue as to how best present and sell the solutions the company offers. Some of the most effective and efficient teams that have gone through our inside sales training courses have had this type of diversity, too. 

A while back, I blogged about concerns over age bias in inside sales teams, and this past week, the San Jose Mercury had a front page article describing a lawsuit that’s now moving forward against a major Silicon Valley company because of an alleged age-bias issue. The worker is claiming, among other things, that he was told he was not a good “cultural fit,” a term I’ve heard used several times in the past year as an excuse for not hiring an experienced inside sales rep. In each case, the rep was an exceptional one, was very successful in previous inside sales roles, and would have been a formidable contributor to the success of the company. This will be an interesting case to watch, as the concept affects, or will potentially effect, virtually everyone reading this post. 

So what’s texting got to do with this? Texting has become a standard method of communicating, especially among younger inside sales reps, and recently I blogged about using mobile phones in creative ways to engage prospects and customers. If you’re a texter, be careful about assuming that your prospects are actually receiving your texts, if you choose to communicate that way. Recently, someone texted my landline, so assumed I got the message. I didn’t because it was on a landline. My colleague Trish Bertuzzi is fond of saying the inside sales business is not the “pen pals” business, and there’s still no better way of communicating information over distances, where KPIs (key performance indicators) dictate large numbers of qualified prospects and sales. So if you do like to text your prospects, ensure that they like communicating that way, and that they’re using mobile devices and will be amenable to receiving them and responding to you.

Reach your quota faster through your mobile phone

I just delivered our Telesales Skills for Field Reps course to a few dozen field reps working for one of my clients. They’d taken all the well-known, standard sales courses, but realized they could be far more effective by doing better qualification work on the telephone before they made face-to-face sales calls. They were all very sharp reps, and one asked me how to apply these telephone techniques when he was on his mobile phone, and couldn’t take notes. 

I replied that prospects and customers today are so savvy about mobile phones that they won’t mind if you tell them to hold on a second while you pull over and park so you can take notes. Actually, many Field sales reps are used to “living” in their cars, and their mobile phones are essentially their main offices. What they’re doing to make their sales days more effective is something every inside sales rep should consider as well. 

Today’s post is for you inside sales people who aren’t yet using your mobile phones to increase your sales pipelines while you’re on your way to work. Even if you start your workday at 8 am, you’ll find a significant number of prospects --- particularly high-level ones --- that will be in their offices before 8, and will be available to take your call. If your commute is one hour (pretty common in any metropolitan area), you can actually increase your sales day by at least one hour by using your commute time as prospect calling time. 

Most high-level (CXOs, VPs, Directors) prospects begin their business days as soon as they leave home. If you reach these people from your office during the standard work day, end the call by asking for their mobile numbers, and tell them you’ll always be happy to call them while you’re going into work or coming home. A significant number of high-level prospects are engaged in meetings for virtually their entire business day, and may welcome a commute call from you. 

And you can make calls after you leave work, as well. Many times, your best prospects are staying late. Make it a habit to include your mobile number on your outgoing email signature, and leave it on your voicemails, too. That way, your prospects can reach you when they’re commuting to and from work, because they know you’re accessible by mobile phone on the road. 

So there, you’ve just figured how to extend your sales day by two hours by using “dead” time that you may now use just fighting traffic. Since you’re sitting there, you may as well make some money from it. And if you need to take notes, just pull over for a minute or two, write everything down, and get back on the road when the call is finished. Add your new “mobile office” to your Best Practices Playbook.

Improving pipeline quality: what constitutes an “A” lead?

One of my inside sales training course clients had a real dilemma a couple of weeks ago. Since her Lead Qualification reps were being compensated on appointments being sent to the field, she was finding that there were a significant number of unqualified appointments being made, and the Field salespeople were beginning to complain. 

One of the problems was that there wasn’t a lead grading system in place, so a lead was characterized as either being an appointment or a non-appointment. This is not an isolated incident, and I see this quite frequently. Naturally, if no lead grading system is in place, Business Development reps will create as many appointments as they can, because that’s how they’re measured and compensated. 

To fix this, a lead grading system should be put in place, and compensation should be adjusted accordingly. My feeling is that unqualified leads should never be part of a compensation package, and the best place to start is by defining what constitutes an “A,” or fully qualified and compensated lead. 

One of the concepts I teach is that there are six basic qualification question types, and each question should be asked on every qualification call. Here they are, along with my ideas on the responses that might constitute an “A” lead: 

Requirements: The prospect has defined at least one technical or product/service requirement that links to an element of the proposed solution. 

Timeframe: The prospect intends to buy within 90 days. 

Decision Tree: The decision process is defined, leading up to the appropriate VP or CXO. 

Scope: The potential size of the opportunity is defined, encompassing all individuals, departments, and divisions within the enterprise that will be eventually using the solution. 

Business/Consequence: A business problem is identified that links to the proposed solution, as well as the consequences of not solving the problem. 

Budget:  Has a budget been allocated for the solution in question? This question must always be asked, but a “no” answer is not necessarily a deal-breaker, as budgets can be allocated if the Business/Consequence, Requirements, and Timeframe answers constitute a qualified lead. 

This is a model, and it’s going to vary somewhat depending on your product. For transactional sales, maybe the “A” lead timeframe is 30 days. For large enterprise deals, maybe it’s 3-12 months. You can craft your own “B” and “C” categories after you’ve determined what an “A” lead is, and perhaps tweak your comp plan to reflect that as well. 

Although the issue on the table is sales leads going to Field reps, the case for ranking lead qualification categories is critical for all Business Development teams. Asking the Field for input regarding what they think constitutes an “A” lead is important too. After all, the Field is the customer. 

If you’re a Business Development manager who hasn’t yet implemented a lead ranking system, now’s a good time to start. And if you already have, it’s worth a check at least once a year to ensure that youre ranking system is giving the Field what it needs, and you’re compensating your team members on the activities that best reflect on the profitability of the company. And be sure to add Lead Ranking development and maintenance to your Best Management Playbook.

Critical Steps in training your in-house Inside Sales team

This week I’m delivering a presentation to the American Teleservices Association under the topic of Call Center Training: Trends, Techniques, and Tools. All of what I’ll be discussing comes directly from what I teach in my inside sales training courses, and it’s important enough that I’m including the ideas I’ll be discussing here in this week’s blog post. 

It’s in outline form, but all of you Inside Sales Directors and Managers will find enough data in it to compare it with how you’re training your team now. This training process has made thousands of reps successful, so take a look: 

You’ll want to train your inside sales team on the following 6 focus areas:

1) Pre-call research skills
2) Contact skills
3) Qualification and Questioning skills
4) Closing skills
5) Understanding and developing organizational structures
6) Objection handling

Defining the 6 most critical training focus areas 

1) Pre-call research skills
a) Prior same-company contacts in your CRM
b) The prospect company’s website
c) Prerequisite: ensure your reps all have their own LinkedIn profiles, and have added their customers and colleagues as contacts to their own LI profiles
c) Look at your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. Check for interesting background info as well as people in common
d) Prospect website, Hoovers or OneSource, if necessary to find the proper executive
e) Do reaserach in three minutes or fewer, so you can make your call KPIs

2) Contact skills

a) Have a concrete sales objective prior to making the call
b) Call High whenever possible
c) Use appropriate opening language to the title of the individual you’re addressing (Admins, execs, etc) 

3) Qualification and Questioning skills

a) Determine which questions must be asked to fully qualify the prospect. Included would be Timeframe, Requirements, Size of opportunity, Decision process, Budget

4) Closing skills

5) Understanding and developing organizational structures

6) Objection handling

Reinforce your training continually by:

1) Role playing through mock telephone calls
2) Side-by side, in booth coaching during actual telephone calls

Three of the most common issues I deal with in training

1) Failure to establish a valid call objective
2) Inability to call high
3) Lack of understanding of the prospect’s business, and how he or she will gauge the ROI of my proposed solution 

So there’s a précis of the model. Successful training programs are both an art and a science, and this model presents many of the most important scientific elements. Now you’ve just got to add the art. Add this model to your Best Management Playbook.

Salesforce 101: a cautionary tale on successfully implementing a CRM

Salesforce.com is a CRM database tool that's become the standard for many companies' inside sales teams, and I've seen it used many times when I coach team members during my inside sales training courses. It's powerful, but like most robust tools, it needs to be tweaked for the characteristics of the team using it, based on use cases. Generally, I encourage my clients to either have a dedicated Saleforce.com expert on staff, or utilize a consultant to assist in making the best use of the CRM.

One of my blog correspondents is going nuts over how her company has implemented Salesforce, and she's made a very cogent, if impassioned, statement about how it's not working as well as it should at her company.  What triggered her correspondence to me was the ongoing discussion on the blog based on my KPI (Key Performance Indicators) post. She's got a litany of concerns, including some that relate to intra-company politics, but basically what she's dealing with is a sales process that's not working as well as it could. She wants to remain anonymous, which is why I'm telling the story here, and it's not listed as a blog response.

I'm posting it here, because she addresses issues that I've been hearing a lot over the past few months. I'll let her tell it in her own words. If you can relate to her issues, you'll know you're not alone. And if you don't have similar problems, congratulate your CRM expert for doing a great job.

Here's what she has to say:

"Data Quality 101. I've been burned by the company buying a bunch (7000+) of "leads" from somewhere & loading them into Salesforce.

"The alleged quality was questionable. For a 10% sample of my patch I kept statistics on: address, phone, URL, description & contact. Boiled down to taking an AVERAGE of 7 minutes to bring a single Account record up to callable quality. So I'm doing DATA ENTRY, while I'm paid on sales. Would you have any idea if there's a mechanism or accessory for Salesforce that quarantines incoming 'leads' into a pending status before accepting them a valid?

"One of my big, first clues to Salesforce was their introductory training video... where at one point they go out of their way to emphasize the importance of using "good naming standards/conventions" when choosing a opportunity name.  So if one time it's called BCBS MA & another time Blue Cross/Blue Shield Massachusetts & another time BlueCross/BlueShield Mass... duh you'll get results all over the place. Guess what?  Busy salespeople are NOT typists.  They'll make up whatever name makes sense to them at the moment.

"Surfing the Salesforce site last night was not enlightening.  ‘Data Quality' seems to be no more complex than de-duplicating.  Basic challenge... when the CEO puffs up his chest ‘We're using Salesforce...' which means we're way cool, this essentially slams the door on the question, ‘...yes, but HOW well are we using it?' Another non-unique challenge... the freshly appointed Salesforce administrator took it as personal insult to imply that just perhaps everything in Salesforce wasn't 100% up to snuff.  How dare you challenge my manhood!  I just do not understand why people get so tied up in their shorts over common stuff like this... admit it, knuckle down & fix it & get on to selling."

Geoff here again. So there you have it, some pretty frustrating words from an inside sales rep trying to motor through a challenging situation. Lots of my readers are management people at startups, just beginning to put together an inside sales team. If you're in this category, put some serious thought into pre-tweaking your CRM to get in inline with your KPIs, and try making a few calls yourself as a use case to ensure that your system is set up to optimize the successful work of your reps. Add this to your Best Management Playbook.

5 steps to fast-tracking your career move to upper management

I read a very good article today on career development strategies, written by Kriengsak Niratpattanasai, a management consultant who writes periodically in the Bangkok Post. While his article is geared to people already managing, I'd like to take a more basic approach, and suggest that if you're a Business Development or Telesales rep right now, I think it's a very good idea to look at your career in its current state, and design a plan for your next career step.

A good number of inside sales reps fail to do this, primarily, i think, because many of us landed in this profession by accident. Inside sales was just something we'd do to bridge the gap to our next real job. And now, 5 years later, we're making real good money, have exciting conversations with prospects, and know an awful lot about business in general. But we're still not thinking career, when perhaps we should be.

Consider a model that could work like this. Say you're fresh out of college, and six months into your role as a BusDev rep. There isn't any reason that you shouldn't set your sights on eventually managing your (or another) BusDev team. By working hard and smart, you could easily be there in 5 years. As an Inside Sales Manager, you could set your sights for a director position in 5 years. Complete the model until you project yourself to be a VP.  The model suggests that if you work hard, continually exceed quota, develop your career and business skills, you could be a VP 15 years from leaving college. If you started the whole process at 25, you'd be a VP at 40.

If this sounds crazily aggressive to you, consider the fact that over 150 people I originally trained as reps are now in management. This didn't happen by accident. So I'm going to give you some steps to execute that can get you started:

1) Determine what job function you want to have in 5 years. List your 10 and 15 year plans, too.

2) Conduct a critical self-analysis on your current skill set. The questions you should ask are:
   - Are my current skills adequate to perform my current job at optimum proficiency?
     - What skills will I have to improve or obtain to exceed at the management job I'd like to have in 5 years?

3) Once you have a list, meet with your own manager to discuss your "5 year plan." Ask him or her for a brutal assessment of where your skill set is today, and where it needs to be to move to the next level.

4) Armed with those two improvement lists, start a plan to make immediate improvements. If those include additional training your company won't pay for, figure out a way to acquire those skills through other means. Books and Toastmasters come immediately to mind as two possibilities.

5) Keep your manager in the loop, by meeting occasionally to discuss the progress you're making, and to get additional feedback. Remember that your own manager is on an upward career curve, too. These discussions will be great for both of you.

So there's your 5 point plan for becoming a VP in 15 years. You don't have to be 24 years old, either. As far as I'm concerned, you should start this process at any age. Chances are you won't be doing this all at one company either. If you've taken all the right steps, you very well may be interviewing at another company eventually for that high-level position.

One of the great things about living in tough economic times is that you're forced to really think about what matters in your career. So the challenge I'm throwing down is this: think proactively, not reactively, about where you're headed, and start taking some notes today about where you really need to improve to get to the next level. You won't be alone, as all successful people beat themselves up over something they could have done better yesterday, then figure out fast how they'll do it better next time. So add a process for fast-tracking your career to your Best Practices playbook.

World’s most challenging telesales environment? Bet you can’t top this!

Part of what makes delivering inside sales training courses interesting is discussing the tough challenges with which each team is faced. Sometimes the working environment itself is an issue, but if you think your working conditions are challenging, you'll love today's post.

Last week I visited a client in Bangkok, and his office is near the corner of Rama IV and Silom roads. If you've been reading or seeing the world press reports, you've heard about the huge protests and Thai military deployment. This is all happening outside my client's door. On Thursday, three M79 grenades were launched from an adjacent area. All of them exploded, one of them no more than 100 feet from my client's front door. Those are tough working conditions!

My client's building has been shuttered, the Sala Daeng skytrain station which most of my client's employees access when coming to work has been damaged by a grenade and is now occupied by government troops. Public transportation to and from that station does not currently exist. Telesales people are working from their homes using a duplicate CRM, but now there's a concern that because the building's power was shut off during these 95 degree-plus days, internal IT systems may not be found to be operable when the power returns.

So my client gets my vote for having the most challenging telesales working environment I've seen this year. Would you agree? People from many countries read my telesales tips blog, so if any of you have an unusually challenging inside sales working environment story, write back and tell us about it!

Speed interviewing: is this dodgy hiring technique based on speed-dating?

This blog was begun as a way to share some of the best practices in inside sales techniques that we discuss in my telesales training courses, but has evolved to encompass inside sales management techniques and practices as well. Last week's post on the concept of yearly commission checks prompted both blog responses and a number of telephone calls. One of the most interesting communications I've received about the whole process of interviewing came from Barbara, who emailed the following story about an uncomfortable interview experience she went through with a well-known high technology company. I'm reprinting it here because many inside sales executives and managers are readers of this blog, and I'm sure they'll want to avoid having interview candidates feel as badly about their companies as this candidate feels about the company she just interviewed with. Multiply that number by 20, as that is the number of people that were "mass-interviewed" that day. At the end of Barbara's story, I'll have some specific recommendations for things to avoid when interviewing someone.

About the candidate: Barbara has 10 years successful experience as both an inside and field-based sales rep selling hardware solutions. The company she interviewed with sells both hardware and software, and Barbara was interested in an inside sales position. Here's her story:

"I, along with at least 10 other candidates, was brought in at 8:15 am on the morning of the interview. The in-house recruiter finally came down stairs about 8:35 to bring all of us up to a conference room on another floor. We were all in business suits. I was told there would be  another session starting at 11:15 am, more candidates, with the same format.

"We all sat around for another 15 or so minutes, tension building, until the director of the sales group for which, if hired, we'd be working, came in and gave a 10 minute summary of what was happening and introduced the "interview team" of probably 7 other people. One by one our names were called (not quite like the Registry of Motor vehicles, but close) and we were escorted into individual conference rooms for the first of our 30 minute interviews. I was last.

"The in-house recruiter made small talk until the person I was supposed to interview with arrived about 10 minutes later. It started off badly, because the first person I interviewed with had no clue about the industry I came from or how we go to market. He proceeded to grill me asking what CIO, CEO and every other high level IT executives I knew. I told him I dealt with hardware people and he became angrier. Then we started role playing. He told me I had no inside sales experience and wondered why I was there. I told him I did, and that I was already interviewing for senior management, director VP roles. I totally threw him off. We started to role play. I had to set up a call, and close him He just didn't get it, or me, or my background, or how to interview candidates. We ended our "hostile" chat with him saying, because of my hardware background, "If you are willing to give me 200% then we will ‘take a chance' and bring you on." He asked for references, my reply was to check my LinkedIn profile (my references are there) and he was very put off by that as well.

"The second guy I interviewed with was so desperate for someone who knew even a little about hardware and how a system worked, that about five minutes into the conversation he said "we need you" and "I'm going to put my recommendation in to hire you." He asked me zero interview questions. He briefly scanned my resume, made a comment about how good it was that I was well familiar with a certain microprocessor, then repeated himself on how I had such a great background, and how he would strongly recommend me for a role with the company. He told me he was asked to interview candidates early yesterday morning and that all the people interviewing were given questions to ask the candidates.

"The 3rd person I interviewed with was the inside sales manager. She asked me a few questions, then we started a role play where I set up a cold call. She asked me how I felt about making 50-100 calls a day and I said it was no problem, but felt quality of quantity is what really mattered. She ended the interview.

"At the end of the 3rd interview I walked back into the conference room and the in-house recruiter was standing there, more small chat. I felt I performed well and was still quite dumbfounded about the whole process. We made small talk, and she told me to "call me next week." At that point I knew I did not get the job. I was also not escorted down to the lobby. Not one of the people I interviewed with handed me a business card or any company collateral. The only common thread was that they all asked me why I wanted to work for the company. The following week, I got a two liner email declining me as a candidate and a thank you."

So there's Barbara's story. My guess is that with the exception of the inside sales manager, none of the people doing the interviewing knew prior to one day earlier that they would be interviewing inside sales candidates. If they received questions to ask during the interviews, they certainly didn't follow them.

Putting a bunch of candidates in a room and "speed interviewing" them may not make the eventual "winner" feel very good about wanting to accrue any longevity with the company. Professionalism starts at the top, and issuing a "cattle call," not giving out business cards, and not even bothering to walk the candidate to the door sends loads of messages about how the company operates, not only to candidates, but to everyone who works at the company. I imagine this company's attrition rate is significant.

Putting together a list of Best Practices often consists of listing poor practices and resolving not to do things that way. If you're a hiring manager, insist on treating every candidate that walks through your doors the same way you'd like to be treated when you yourself are engaged in interviewing with a company with whom you'd like to work. If you do, you'll have great candidates wanting to work for you, and your attrition rate will be lower, too.

Those of us who work in a high tech environment do so for a number of reasons, which generally include a high level of professionalism, easy access to management, and a philosophy of focusing on solutions rather than problems. Taking the "high road" in interviewing practices gives a company the best shot at hiring effective individuals that will reciprocate with the same degree of professionalism they were shown in the initial interview. And I'm trusting that Barbara's interview process was an industry anomaly, rather than an emerging trend.

Commission paid once per year? That’s a new one on me!

In my telesales training classes, reps tend to crab a bit sometimes about company policies. Often, these are about how Marketing could do a better job getting them leads, or how cumbersome the CRM is to use. I tell them that I've yet to see a company whose sales reps didn't have the same concerns, and these generally are the result of a red hot company growing real fast, fast enough to easily outgrow systems that would have been adequate if the company were not growing at all. In other words, hot companies have growth challenges, while failing companies don't. My recommendations are to do a better job with the leads you have, and leave the CRM headaches to someone else (I remember the days of keeping prospect info on 3x5 cards, so any CRM is a joy, compared with that). And, as just about all of us in high tech telesales know, change is constant, and embracing change is a big part of what makes superior reps superior.

Last year, several pay practices that drew complaints did cause me to raise an eyebrow, although these came from companies outside my customer base. One concern was the practice of paying reps commissions quarterly instead of monthly, and I blogged about this, because it has the opposite effect of motivating sales people to close sales fast, which is one reason I'd like companies adhering to this practice to rethink it.

Recently a blog subscriber of mine encountered a new one that I hadn't yet heard of, and it's being offered to Managers who are interviewing for sales management jobs. If you're a rep, it's worth reading this as well, because payment packages do have a way of eventually filtering down to the rep level. This individual was offered a decent yearly base, but would have to wait a year to collect the accrued commission. The benefit to the individual would be a huge commission check at the end of the year. What are some of the drawbacks? Here are the first few that come to mind:

1) If the individual leaves the company before a year elapses, he or she gets zero commission.
2) The individual can only leave the company within 30 days or so after haven received the commission check, in any subsequent year. Otherwise, again, any accrued commission will be forfeited.
3) And therefore, the individual sacrifices career mobility, unless he or she chooses to stay in that particular company, and somehow negotiates a pro rata commission if moving to another position within that company.

I can see what's in it for the company. People won't want to leave "prematurely." When people do leave, the company can just about predict the month he or she will be leaving. And overall, this practice locks in solid performers for years. Great for the company, but not so great for the individual.

One of the characteristics of the high tech world is that startups are always introducing fascinating new technologies, progressive companies are improving the ones they already have, and this environment of continual and rapid change tends to benefit everyone down to the consumer level. So when you're interviewing, do a thorough job of reading your offer letter, and don't be afraid to question elements of the employment contract that may have an impact on any potential career moves you may eventually want to make.

5 Ways to Ensure your Sales Training Program Won’t Succeed

Third in a 3 part series on sales training theory

The first two articles in this series addressed business processes that must be in place before you consider sales training as a solution, and the value of Bloom's Taxonomy as a training foundation. Today's post addresses how the training itself can go wrong, even if everything else is in place. Everyone that funds a sales training program wants it to succeed. But many times it doesn't. The biggest failure point results from lack of ongoing reinforcement of the principles learned in the training class. But there are other failure points, too, and we've heard several of them that are the ones most often voiced among inside sales execs, managers, and reps. Here are 5 of the most common:

1) Lack of a plan to ensure ongoing reinforcement of the principles taught in the class
2) "Chunking" curriculum into blocks delivered over time
3) Not seeing and vetting the actual curriculum before it's delivered
4) Training delivered from remote locations
5) Inadequate budget to deliver a curriculum that meets stated training objectives

Whether you're going to buy training or develop and deliver it yourself, those are important pitfalls of which to be aware. Here's an explanation:

1) To avoid having your training forgotten or unused, have a reinforcement plan in place that will guarantee the principles will be applied after the training takes place. Most of the time, reps are pretty pumped up about the training once they finish the class. In the training business, that's called a "sugar shot." So they go back to their desks, try one or two things, forget a few others, and a few days or weeks down the road, not much has changed from their pre-training behavior. Our favorite way of reinforcement is to have inside sales managers coach their own reps on a regularly scheduled basis that remains in place year-round. This is interactive, and allows the manager to cross-pollinate best practices with the rest of the team. Less effective are "push" strategies, like updated email sales techniques, and "pull" strategies, which often consist of visits to sales training websites. Most reps never get around to reading sales training emails, text messages on phones, or visiting sales training websites. However you choose to do it, my opinion is that you're throwing away both money and time by not building in a reinforcement piece that works.

2) Beware of "chunking" sales curriculum into blocks delivered over a period of time. The process of "chunking" is the delivery of a curriculum over a period of days, weeks, or months. It doesn't work well for sales training, because all curriculum areas interact with each other, and reps tend to have questions that relate to inter-curricular activities. Receiving all curriculum in a continuous iterative session promotes the learning process called "rehearsal," which allows reps to move concepts from short-term to long-term memory, and it's a critical step in the process of how adults learn knowledge and adopt new behaviors. For example, when reps are trained on innovative ways to open calls, they'll ask about everything from follow-on questions, to closing, to effective questions, to organizational charts. When you chuck your curriculum, your trainer will invariably respond to some questions with "sorry, we can't cover that today, because it's covered in next week's module." When you do that, reps learn pretty quickly not to ask about anything that's not on today's "list." All reps think differently, but you want your training to be interactive. Reps tend to drive curriculum by thinking of how they could have applied the material in past sales situations, and "out of the box" questions engage the class, and they learn more effectively. Chunking takes away one of the most powerful teaching tools, which is about going right to a later module when the class wants to drive it there.

3) See the course materials before the class takes place, and discuss or change elements of the curriculum with which you disagree, are uncomfortable with, or don't quite understand. As a manager, there's nothing worse than sitting in a training class when your instructor delivers a method that you know won't work. Believe me, your senior reps will know it, too. By then, it's a little late to change the curriculum, and your trainer may use the piece you didn't like to build on a hierarchy of behaviors linked to that principle. Your trainer could also have a compelling reason behind the principle, but the place to hash it out should occur well before it's delivered in class. If you're a manager that disagrees with a principle in the class itself, the credibility of the curriculum and instructor will be damaged, and reps will begin tuning out. Always see and vet your curriculum in advance so it can be modified if necessary before the class takes place.

4) Remote sales training these days is often an invitation to hidden multi-tasking as the training is taking place.  Just about the worst thing that can happen in a sales training class is for your reps to be unengaged with the trainer and curriculum to the point to doing other things during the class. That would include checking emails and texting on portable devices, fast-forwarding through the course materials, and daydreaming. These all happen pretty frequently when training is delivered from remote locations. It's pretty common for management personnel in the room to be doing the same thing, too. Since the trainer can't physically walk around the room, he or she isn't optimized for ensuring that everyone is engaged.  When the trainer is physically in the same room, he or she can walk around the room, constantly pinging everyone on curriculum data points, and can ensure that those PDAs are put away so people take the training seriously. In most societies these days, people have been brought up to multi-task when they're watching television (and remote training is television). It's second nature, and a habit nearly impossible to break. The physical presence of a trainer is a different story, and there are different expectations and expected behaviors of the part of learners.

5) Be careful of making training decisions that are based primarily on budget issues. Every company wants to save money, and doesn't want to overpay for anything. But it's the job of your salespeople to bring revenue to your company, and you wouldn't be considering training if there weren't performance gaps that you perceive as being critical to your overall financial success. So seriously consider determining what your best training solution is, then tackle the budget issue to see if you can get it worked out. Remember that your salespeople work roughly 2,000 hours each year, and successful training and continual reinforcement will make that training successful every single hour of the year. So find the training solution that will work optimally for you, and make a case for getting the funding approved to do it. The old adage of "when you buy quality, you only cry once" really does apply here, and most companies that have achieved less-than-expected results from training have realized that going the cheap route caused them to have to regroup and train all over again because the expected sales results never occurred, and that the behaviors the company wanted to change never did.

So there are 5 common failure points that are part and parcel to the business of training. Sales execs and managers love to talk about training, what worked and what didn't, and what to do better next time. In my interviews with them in discussions about my inside sales training courses, at least one of the failure points listed above was given as a reason they felt their training budget had, to a large extent, been wasted in the classes delivered by their previous training providers. Whether doing training yourself or hiring an expert, keep this checklist handy, avoid the pitfalls, and have a great training session. And add avoiding these pitfalls to your Best Management playbook.