THREE WAYS TO TRAIN

Knowledge + Attitude + Skills = Behavior

by Hank Trisler

A lot of what passes for training these days is some old dog standing up in front of a group and telling them "How I Done it." It consists of war stories and cute-sounding phrases, most which are largely ineffectual and only partially true. That sort of training is a blast for the trainers, but often bores the learners and seldom does much to change behavior.

"What's that you say? Behavior? My job is to teach 'em how to sell, not change their behavior," one might well say. And one might well be wrong. Our job is not so much to teach people what they don't know, but to help people behave as they don't currently behave. Behavior is comprised of Knowledge, Attitude and Skills, as exemplified in the Pawn Broker's Globes above. (I used to say Pawn Broker's "Balls," but that often brings about tittering, another word almost certain to induce tittering.) Let's examine these three words and how you can use them to improve the results of your training programs.

KNOWLEDGE. If a person isn't performing in a certain way and couldn't if his/her life depended on it, the problem is a lack of knowledge. The best ways to convey knowledge are lecture and reading. Lecture has fallen into disrepute, largely due to its overuse and poor quality. Trainers love lecture, as it's the easiest form of teaching to prepare and deliver. You just jump up and run your jaws. It's also the most fun, from a trainer's point of view.       

The key to effective lecture is to see how little of it you can use to convey the bare minimum of knowledge necessary to do the deed. Good lecture is strewn with real world examples and supported with visual aids and written material, from either pass-outs or text books.


The subject of effective lecture has already filled libraries, so I'm not going to bore you with more of it here. The key is to see how little lecture you can get by with and how much learner involvement you can use to supplant the lecture.


ATTITUDES. If the thinking is stinking in your sales force, look to yourself first. Attitudes are caught, not taught. As long as we're slinging platitudes, try, "What you are speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say." Sales critters are like children, in that they will obtain and reflect the attitudes of their leaders. The very best way to get an honest, positive, "can do" attitude in your team is to have and project those qualities yourself.

SKILLS. A tried and true training formula taught me years ago went:

• You tell them how.
• They tell you how.
• You show them how.
• They show you how.
• You drill for skill.

A truly skillful performance will only occur after it has been repeated often enough to commit it to the unconscious mind. Now, you can do this in the field, which is where a lot of us "old dogs" did our learning, but it's godawful expensive compared to drills you can perform in the classroom.


One of the more effective drills I have found is the three-person instant role play. The group is divided into three-person teams: salesperson, customer and a neutral observer. A problem, or objection is displayed and then the salesperson has sixty seconds to deal with it. At the end of the minute, the observer tells the team what he saw and how it might be improved. Then you change roles and go for the next problem. The key is to do things fast, to avoid boredom and to quicken reaction times. Greater detail and lots more exercises are available in NO BULL SALES MANAGEMENT. Get hold of a copy, it'll make money for you.


Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. If you let your people practice flawed techniques, you'll end up with flawed people giving flawed performances. Your weekly sales meeting is a terrific place for practicing for a half hour, or less. It warms the folks up and get's minds moving, in addition to honing skills.


Any thoughts on training that you'd like to share? This would be an excellent place to do so.

MOTIVATING SALES CRITTERS

by Hank Trisler

As a sales trainer, a question I'm sometimes asked is, "Are you one of those motivational speakers?"

The answer is, "Probably not. Motivation occurs internally and is not something one person normally does to another. If I were to motivate your people, what, specifically, would you like me to motivate them to do?"

"Go out and just sell the hell out of my Doogers. Man, we're up to our hips in Doogers and I need my sales critters to make 'em go away, pronto."

Well, I suppose that would be dandy if that's the way it worked, but if you inspire people without some clear direction of what they are to do, they just get all pumped up and run out in the parking lot looking for something to kill. Can't find their car.

Before I begin to design any sales training program, I need the clear answers to four basic questions. When, and only when, the management team and I are in agreement on these questions am I able to help them direct their people. The questions are:

1. What are your people doing well now? The hippocratic oath tells doctors, "If you can do no good, at least do no harm. " Good advice for those of us attempting to increase performance levels.

As a young man, I inherited a sales team heavily reliant on "canned pitches." They had every word memorized and lists of objections with the answers thereto. I HATE canned pitches. I think they sound phony and make one look like the negative perception people hold of salespeople. Accordingly, I banned the use of canned pitches. I told them to go forth and ask intelligent questions and offer logical solutions to the customers, based the their perceived needs.

It was a blood bath. I abolished a system that was working, though not as well as I might have desired, but working nevertheless. Without it, they were lost.

2. What should they be doing better? Let's focus on the specific activities of the sales force. Do they need more prospects? Need to do a better job of need finding? Need better questions? Should they be more persistent in asking for the order?

3. What should they be doing that they are not doing at all? This is fairly straightforward. This is probably what management has been haranguing them about for years. List the desired specific behaviors.

4, Why aren't they doing those things now? Could they do them if their lives depended on it? Pay close attention, as this is where your training exercise is created. If they don't know how to do the desired activities, education is the key. More often, there are other reasons than lack of knowledge. They know how, but they just don't want to do them, or they want to do other things more.

When we have this information in hand, we can go to the next step of program design: how we bring about changes in behavior to improve performance.  Stay tuned, because in our next issue we'll discuss knowledge, attitude and skills, which combine to determine behavior.

HE LIKES ME...

by Hank Trisler

Jennifer, who teaches my "gentle" yoga class, recently returned from a month's excursion to India. Naturally, she was eager to teach us all she'd learned. After a half-hour of her forcibly dismembering us, I asked her what the Hindi word for "gentle" was.

She admitted she didn't know, which I allowed was all too obvious. Several of us had a little chortle and we went on to complete an hour-and-a-quarter of medieval torture.

After the class, a stern faced gentleman--unknown to me--strode up to me and told me that yoga was a meditative process and that comments like mine were not appropriate.

Well now, I'm not real accustomed to people telling me what is or is not appropriate and I don't wish to become so accustomed. I told him I was thankful to him for helping me correct my behavior in such a way as to be more acceptable to him, but I really didn't mean it. I had the jaws.

Now I should be a big enough boy to laugh this sort of thing off, but I guess I'm not. Every time I'd see this guy, I'd get the jaws all over again and fix him with the notorious "stink eye." He would return in kind and we'd stalk around the room like a couple of dogs with their backs up. I don't know if he was enjoying this, but I wasn't. I hate to spend all my time angry. Especially in yoga class.

Paul Castain wrote in his excellent Sales Playbook blog about having a grim expression on his face as a natural state. Well, I must admit to the same shortcoming. I think I'm just looking serious, but folks have told me I look like I just ate a piece of excrement. I thought about how I look when I'm with people who like me. I smile. They smile. We smile. I wondered how I would look at the fellow in my yoga class if I thought he liked me and decided to smile at him.

Yesterday, I smiled at him and bade him a "GOOD MORNING." He looked like I slapped him. Obviously he hadn't experienced the same revelation that I had. I decided to further enlighten him by telling others of my discovery. I pointed him out to several people in the class and told them that he liked me. He must like me, or he wouldn't go out of his way to help me correct my behavior. They all agreed that he must like me and we smiled. He didn't, but I'm sure he'll come around in the fullness of time.

I meet people while walking my dog and usually just nod. I figured that's enough for people I don't even know. For the past couple of days, I've been doing something different with those I encounter. As I approach them, I think,  "He/she likes me," and it makes me smile. Almost without exception, everyone has smiled back at me. It's kind of fun. They're smiling, I'm smiling, we're smiling. Sure beats hell out of having the crimson posterior all the time.

If you're in a sporting mood, try thinking that everyone you meet likes you and see if it makes you smile more. I'd sure be interested in getting some more experiences to add to my research.