Salespeople are different!

Every good training program begins with an understanding of it's target audience. Specific training requirements are best determined by a needs analysis but salespeople, in general share certain traits. Understanding these traits can help you develop the proper training framework. Let's look at some of the traits that most salespeople have in common and the effect that should have on the construction of a training framework.


Salespeople are "people" people, outgoing, "type A" personalities. They thrive on interaction. Many training programs today try do all the training via the computer. A complete sales training program should have heavy components of interaction. This does not mean that the training has to be in person or face to face situations. Nor does this mean that computer training is not interactive. It can be, but there still needs to be the face to face training. Face to face does not necessarily mean being in the same room at the same place The web or virtual classroom can provide the interaction very economically. Reducing travel costs and time. In short, the first principal of any sales training is that it must be interactive.


Like professional athletes, salespeople are highly competitive. Their results, like the athlete, show up on the scoreboard for everyone to see. In training salespeople, I like to think of the two "C's" compete and collaborate. They compete to win the business. This competition is with outside competitors. They also compete with their sales colleagues in contests for both compensation and recognition. So building in competition in the training is good and realistic for them.

The second "C" is collaboration. This is something they do with members of the internal selling team. In the world of today's "complex sale" it is a necessity that they can collaborate effectively. In fact it is often the salesperson who successfully orchestrates this collaboration for his team. Since the sale is collaborative the training should also, in parts, be collaborative. The competitive nature of salespeople sometimes makes true collaboration difficult

Salespeople need to be able to access information/learning on demand, when they need it. So salespeople also do not necessarily approach their learning sequentially. They process information how they use it. Salespeople need information when they need to know it. A kind of just in time learning is required, that lets them move to different stages of the process and product knowledge as they need it. When they need this information they should be able to access what they need, quickly, without spending a hour going through training for 5 minutes of information. I will explain this in detail in a later entry but let me give you an example. At any given time a salesperson will be working deals at various stages of the process. So they will have to be able move across the sales process working on one deal in the closing stage while at the same time managing a new opportunity. The learning/ information must be tailored and organized to support this job requirement. Likewise a sales person may be selling a product to one client that is an advanced option of a product. Here again they do not have the luxury of going through product training sequentially but rather must be able to go quickly to that option. They may also be working with a second client that requires them, on the same day, to retrieve information, quickly and to the point, about another product.

The information salespeople require needs to be organized to help them do their job. For example, when dealing with internal organization what they need to know is: What do you do for me in the act of selling? and what do I have to do to get you to do that for me when I need it? There is a tendency for internal organization's to provide the information they think the salesperson needs rather than the information they really need.

In regards to product their learning needs are also specific. They don't have to know everything about the product. They basically need to know what I call the 7 W's: What do I sell? Who do I sell it to? Why do they need it? What is it's value? What does it cost? Who is the competition? and where have we successfully sold and deployed it?

In my next entry I will explore what I consider to be one of the forgotten factors in sales training, "Readiness to Learn."