How many books have you read? How many podcasts have you listened to, or how many workshops have you done all in the hopes that you'll learn the secret sauce to becoming a top salesperson?

As sales professionals, what does it take to master your craft, and as sales managers and leaders, what do you train and coach your people on so that they can adapt to new systems and processes in this hyper, fast world we live in?

To master your craft, and to develop top performers, we have to constantly be working on the fundamentals. But what are those fundamentals? It's something that the sales community still can't agree on. For how long now has report after report come back to tell us that barely 50% of salespeople are making their quota? Despite the technology and training that we're spending every year, the results still haven't changed.

It’s end of month and if you are anything like the sales people and managers we just started working with, today you are either sighing in relief that you made quota- even if it was at the last day, or wincing in anticipation of the explanation you are going to have to give on why you missed quota.

It’s like in school when you would have to cram for a test the night before, everyone is blurry eyed, probably sick from stress, and can’t wait to just get it over with. The same reasons students end up cramming for tests are the same ones that happen to sales people at end of month.

Last week my husband asked me to teach him how to play piano. The extent of his piano skills was playing with one finger the Miami Vice theme song. Showing him how to play reminded me how I first started and also how many sales people and managers end up starting in their roles as well.

I have been talking a lot about the book ‘The Science of Selling’ lately because it begins to tell us- according to objective science- how buyers buy and the behaviors needed by salespeople to align to that.

It’s about time that sales leaders and experts turned to proven science. Rather than the bias of our own individual experience and success, proven science is a concept that has been verified through vigorous, scholarly research. It has been tested and verified through multiple sources. It goes through a peer review.

Behavioral scientist David G. Myers wrote, “A scientific theory explains through an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events.” Scientists do not debate core scientific principles. (Cold calling is dead! Social selling is a scam! Sound familiar?) Is it any wonder why sales leaders and salespeople are confused and overwhelmed? How can they possibly know what is real, tested, and true? There needs to be a consensus as to what is known (according to science) and what is not known.

And while science answers many things, it raises even more questions in my mind. Now that we know what we should be doing, the next question is- will we do it and how well? How does our own psychology play into this formula? Can we truly change our own psychology?

And given this science-how does training and coaching need to change and work together? How can we help leaders develop their people and how can salespeople quickly adapt and change- not just once but continuously? And not just according to the latest fad, tech, methodology, or an expert’s “special sauce” but according to scientific principles?

One of the problems with sales today

This morning I read Dan Tyre’s article on the HubSpot blog “6 Phrases Sales Managers Use That Always Backfire”. The article and some of the comments highlighted what I see as one of the major problems happening with inside sales today.

Every so often I notice a pattern happening with coaching clients. The one that has been getting my attention lately is that most seem to be in reaction mode. For example, rather than asking buyers layered questions leading up to demos and meetings, they typically wait until the meeting or demo happens to see what they wanted to talk about.

Or they wait for buyers to get to take a specific action on the website before they will pick up the phone or reach out to them.

Or even worse, they dump a lot of information on the buyer and wait for them to sort out what is important to them.

What will it take to create respect for the sales profession?

The state of sales today reminds me of what the state of the medical profession from the 16-18th centuries was. Sales, like medicine, has been evident since the beginning of recorded history in one form or another. Like salespeople today, being a medical professional (doctor, surgeon, apothecary) then did not grant the same level of respect that modern medical professionals take for granted today.

Prior to the 16th century, medicine was more mystical and based on the observations of a few. In fact, if you wanted to study medicine prior to the 16th century, it would include both physical and spiritual therapy from herbs and suitable diet as well as Mass, prayers, relics of saints, and music.

Have you ever taken a CPR certification class? When my kids were newborns I had a day care business and got 1st Aid certified. Two days of book work , classroom, and role playing exercises with dummies. I was bored and thought it was silly, until one day one of the kids starting choking on a piece of fruit and instead of panicking I stayed calm and did what I knew I needed to do.  

A few weeks ago I was talking with an executive whose “... expenses have gone up 40% in the last few months but haven’t seen the results yet.” They had already spent a lot of money on technology and consultants to try to improve their sales and revenue, and even though they believed sales coaching could help, they didn’t have the cash to invest. Worse than that, the previous investment made them leery of investing more in sales development without a guarantee of success.

“Do I need to hire a coach, or a trainer?”

A little background: This question has come up several times over the past few weeks, but with different variables because everyone’s business and situation is different. When I start noticing patterns in conversations, it sparks my curiosity and I start to create my own hypothesis of those patterns based on 1-1 conversations and research.

For example, when this question first started coming up I read Mike Weinberg's “Sales Management Simplified” (highly recommended!). As the question continued to surface, I started (and am halfway through- so don’t give me any spoilers!) Keith Rosen “Coaching Salespeople into Champions.” After more than 3 of these requests came to us, I started to notice a pattern through all the differences. (You can read about two of them here, but for this post, the most recent happened again last week at the #bossales Enterprise Meetup.)