As promised, part 3 of our three-part series about data found in last year's ASTD's State of Sales Training research study is here. Part 1 focused on the importance of aligning sales training with other corporate training as well as corporate goals and initiatives, while part 2 focused on the "who, what, and how" of sales training. Today, part 3 will focus on the "what" and "how" of selling skills.
Not only does the data show the trend of increasing "soft skills," it also shows evidence that stereotypes of "smooth-talking" salespersons are likely outdated. Over one third of respondents indicated that persuasion and negotiating are either not included or only included to a small extent in their selling skills training. In other words: used car salesman with the loud suit, cheesy smile, and greased-back hair? Your days are numbered.
However, while consultative selling skills has the highest incidence in training programs, it doesn't appear to have any significant correlation with sales success. On the other hand, the skills that have less chance of being highly integrated in a training program, persuasion skills and negotiation, at least show a relationship with sales performance. So it looks like "hard skills" still have their place in the sales environment.
Training Ethics
One surprising piece of data is that a large number of respondents say they don't receive any training in ethical decision making. Studies have shown that ethics training for all employees was considered an important internal practice for ensuring an ethical corporate culture (AMA and i4cp, 2006), so is this cause for concern?
Or is it that organizations who strongly believe in ethics already believe that they have ethical teams who don't need the training? In other words, do they think that other companies and competitors should receive ethics training?
Regardless of the reasoning, sales team members communicate directly with prospects and customers. The inclusion of ethical decision-making in selling skills training may still be worthwhile.
How Sales Teams Learn
Now that we've established what sales teams focus on learning, the next best question is: how do they learn it?
Interestingly enough, of the top five ways respondents said they learned selling skills, only one of them is tied to classroom learning. Sharing tips with one another plays an important role in learning skills, as does trial-by-fire. More than half of those surveyed (53.9 percent) answered that they learn selling skills by being formally mentored or coached.
Does e-Learning apply to Sales Teams?
While relationship-based and immersion approaches, respondents are less likely to consider leveraging technology to share their knowledge about selling skills techniques. More than six in 10 respondents (61.6 percent) said that sales team members do not learn selling skills through Web 2.0 tools at all (30.1 percent) or only to a small extent (31.5 percent). This includes bulletin boards, wikis, portals, and other similar vehicles to facilitate knowledge-sharing. Likewise, 58 percent of respondents said selling skills are either not learned at all (29.0 percent) or only to a small extent (29.0 percent) by using a technology platform.
This could present a golden opportunity for companies to take better advantage of technology to share knowledge among sales team members. The only condition is that the technology has to be able to help in the highly interactive person-to-person selling environment.
Additional analyses were performed to determine if respondents' views about learning differed depending on their organizational role. Specifically, our analysis showed that respondents with a sales focus were significantly more likely than other respondents to report that sales team members learn more by reading and were significantly less likely to report that they learn by attending classes created within the organization.
Conclusions
Learning professionals might be concerned by this finding. It suggests that while they believe classes add value, sales team members don't agree. Learning professionals might benefit from exploring this apparent skepticism about classes and trying to determine the underlying causes by pursuing certain questions: can reading be done faster than taking a class? Or is reading simply associated with greater scheduling flexibility?
