John Linton ......is more difficult or more simple than most people think.
32 months ago we set out to build a 'corporate sales force' by recruiting recent graduates with no sales, or even business, experience and 'teaching' them to sell data services to medium/medium large businesses. We have done that well enough for them to have 'won' 1,500 times against virtually all other providers of data services to the business market places and 'taken' those customers away from them. For the whole of that time we have been gradually building up the number of sales people we have in Australia (now a little over 20) and from October 2010 we began a similar program in Sri Lanka where there are now a little less than 20.
To date we have used a sensible program of 'mentoring' to help each new employee understand how to approach business customers and promote Exetel's data services to them. This has worked very well, in most cases, and can continue to work well in to the future. It is an excellent concept (absolutely not unique to Exetel but I think we do it better than any other company I have been associated with or am aware of) but it's limitation is that it only allows for slow growth in the actual development of new sales people - even with three North Sydney based sales teams only one new 'sales person' can be developed per month.
So, as we need to develop between five and ten new sales people a month, each month, of 2012 the issue of just how we do that becomes the major obstacle - seeing it cannot be done via the mentoring program that we have used to date. Developing sales people capable of selling a semi-complex service such as data via EOC or Fibre is generally deemed (from the opinions I have heard expressed) to be lengthy and difficult - and quite expensive. Personally, I have been quite heavily involved in 'sales training' for the majority of my time in business (either receiving it or delivering it). My, personal, opinion is that 'sales training' is largely a waste of time if not a complete myth. I long ago formed the view that, literally, anybody could sell anything if they had a good mind and were given the right product backed by the right 'tools'. I think this view has been pretty much been validated by what Exetel has done over the past three years.....as it has been previously several times.
So now the challenge is to go beyond what has worked for us, so well, over the past 32 months and put in place a process that, over the coming 24 months will allow us to develop (and then effectively manage) a 'sales force' of 300 people - predominantly in Sri Lanka. Not the easiest set of tasks for anyone but almost certainly capable of being accomplished if the right ways can be developed and the right people found to manage those processes; and the constant refinements that will be necessary. The issue is - what processes will produce the required results and how do you find the people to carry them out? I have seen how not to do this several times - stretching back some forty years with the most recent mega flop example around ten years ago. All of those failures illustrated the sheer folly of thinking that you can actually teach anyone to 'sell'.....and then compounded it by thinking that you could ever develop people via 'sales trainers'.
Yes, I know that all over the world major corporations are running huge 'sales training' programs with mega billions of dollars spent on 'campus' training facilities and their associated personnel. So that must be the right way of doing it? Ask anyone you may know who has attended a 'sales training' course and see what value they place on what they have 'been taught'. Perhaps the answers will surprise you....but if anyone ever says they found it valuable and it will increase their ability to do their sales job better then I am wrong to hold this view and Exetel will fail in its ambitions. But then I always seem to hold different views on practically every subject to the majority and, I think, I am nearly always correct - at least on subjects on which I have significant experience and demonstrated competence.
So my view of 'sales training' is that it consists of a few hours setting out the processes by which an intelligent person can self develop the processes by which they will train themselves by acquiring the information they need to make a success of a sales career. It will be an interesting challenge over the next few months to put this 'different view' in to practice on a much wider scale than we have attempted to do in the past. It is based on my observation that "sales skills" have not changed for 4,000 years and there were no "sales schools" for the first 3,900 of those years.
You actually can't teach compassion for your fellow man ("man" used in its generic sense), responsiveness to other people's needs and honesty.
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