Sales School: Yes or No?

I attended my first official sales training class right out of college. About 60 people from all walks of life were put up in a hotel for 2 weeks. Each Monday through Friday, we would go to an office building a few blocks up the road and sit in a classroom, where we'd hear lectures on how to keep the prospect's attention or memorizing countless rebuttals when the client didn't want to buy. We were even taught some things that I considered a bit sinister, like how to get a little old lady to open the door to her home when she didn't know us from Adam.

Here are some takeaways from various sales training classes/schools. 

1. Some will focus on product only. In my opinion, this stinks. I worked for a large insurance carrier who didn't tell us how to find prospects, but wanted us to know how to explain their rather large portfolio of products. That's great if you have a client, but trying to figure out how to find these people on my created a long and horrible learning curve. No wonder most of their agents were gone within 6 months.
2.  One company really emphasized their sales pitch more than anything. We were to told to memorize a script that had been literally written in the 1930's! It was hokey and sounded like something from an old Humphrey Bogart movie. We mocked it incessantly with our Jimmy Cagney "You're gonna to buy from me and you're gonna like it, see." Again, so much turnover from the sales crew should have been a sign to the upper management.
3. A very large company brought in young ladies to train us who had never been in sales. And these people actually had the nerve to critique us. Imagine having someone who has never played basketball one single day in their life argue with you about your jumpshot. Utterly ridiculous! 
4. They all love to tell you how much it costs them to put on training. I remember one "instructor" constantly harping that "it costs us about $10,000 to train you all". We were in her office and she spent about 3 hours a day with us. Needless to say, no one believed her. and from the examples above, you can see that they don't get a great return on their investment because their idea of training was bad. None of these companies had more than a 15% retention rate after 3 years.

Over the years, I've gone to sales schools for different companies. Some were one day affairs and others were 3 weeks. And the best companies were the ones that had ongoing training.  But the obvious sign of a successful sales training program is how well you do with the information given to you. 

Chris Castanes is the author of "You're Going To Be Great At This! A Sales Memoir" and is available to help your sales team with a workshop or seminar. For more information, click here.