Is Your Sales Training Holding You Back?

In the last ten years the sales landscape has changed dramatically! Products and solutions have improved in quality and service so there is little competitive differentiation based on these factors alone. Information on the internet is ubiquitous. No longer is the sales person the key to product/solution information. Buyers are becoming risk adverse.  Decisions that were made by one person have now been elevated to the C level  within the corporation and are often made by committee.  All of this has combined to diminish the role of the traditional sales professional.  Sales professionals must now improve their game and rise to a new level.

The question for high tech, B2B companies becomes, will our current sales training take us to the next level?  Sales training is a huge business (2.4 billion dollars in annual revenue) dominated by some very large companies.  These companies have warehouses full of stock training materials and stables full of trainers schooled in their consultative/solution selling techniques.  All of them are very similar and if you take away their branding and their "secret sauce"  you can hardly tell them apart.  Are they using the "science of selling", the performance based research, to move beyond "Selling 101" to the next level where sales professionals will need to get to to survive in the new landscape?

I have some simple observations that you can make to determine if your sales training /sales training company is using the science of selling (the latest performance based research).

Is your training still talking about:
'prospecting" instead of "making connections"?
"needs assessment/collection" as opposed to "providing insight"?
"articulating value" instead of "creating value"?
"negotiating" rather than "collaborating"?
"handling" objections rather than "resolving" them?
"Closing rather than "securing a commitment".

If you are still doing the former as opposed to the later, of 1 or more of the above, maybe it is time to stop "training" your sales people and start "developing" your sales professionals.