How many more great customers would your sales department have if every producer on your staff was a great public speaker? In this article, I’ll show you why it’s so important to have super star presenters working in your sales team – and how to make them out of the personnel you have.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send your best salesperson to meet with all your top prospects? Because most sales territories are divided up geographically, or by industry, this isn’t usually an option available to most sales managers. With that in mind, let me put the question another way: how many more “top customers” would you have if all of your salespeople were better presenters?

What I’m getting at is that most sales managers, much less the front line producers who work for them, don’t view presenting as a sales skill. And that’s a shame, because working with groups is one of the best and easiest ways for your team to improve their bottom-line production.

For one thing, selling to groups is just more efficient. Why close one or two prospects, when you could make a bigger presentation and be working with ten, fifteen, or even fifty? The point of selling isn’t to spend as much time as possible with each individual prospect; it’s to generate signed order slips. Working with lots of buyers at once is a great way to do that.

Even more importantly, however, is the impression that a strong presenter makes. Often, a good speech given by an effective salesperson can help to close more orders than they would have individually. That’s because most people, by their very nature, are affected by the psychology of a group; they see other people excited to buy, and may become eager to buy themselves.

And finally, becoming a great presenter makes any salesperson more confident. Given that selling is largely – if not completely – a mental exercise, it makes sense to have your producers be as sharp as possible. Having the confidence to get up in front of a group and make their case helps them in other selling situations, too.

So how do you turn your sales team into a group of top notch presenters, bringing in tons of new business along the way? It won’t happen overnight, but here are a few tips to get you started:

Hire a sales trainer who specializes in presentations. There’s never a substitute for specialized instruction, and just a few hours spent with the right person can get them moving a long way in the right direction.

Have them practice giving presentations in the office. Why not end each weekly sales meeting with a presentation by one of your salespeople? They might be hesitant at first, but speaking to a group of peers that they’re familiar with is going to be easier than getting up in a room full of prospects, and allow them to practice their speeches on a friendly audience.

Emphasize the opportunities. A lot of salespeople probably would give more group presentations, if only they realized how effective they could be. Show your team that working with multiple prospects is a great way to triple or quadruple their sales, and they’ll probably show a lot more enthusiasm for the effort.

Help them to overcome fears and weaknesses. Public speaking remains a major fear for a lot of people – even normally outgoing sales professionals. Some of the men and women on your team are probably going to need more help and encouragement than others; bring each one along at their own pace, and the effort will eventually pay dividends for everyone.

Being a strong presenter is a natural sign of leadership, and those who can deliver their advice and opinions to groups of people almost always stand out above their peers. Ever-increasing numbers of corporations and associations are turning to committees to make the most important decisions. If you want to make a big sale, start a high-level relationship, or get the big promotion, you’re going to have to get in front of a few strangers and make a strong impression.

So what holds people back from becoming great presenters and enjoying all of these benefits to their career? I suspect it has to do with a common misconception, and one I hear all the time: that all great speakers are born with some extraordinary talent, and that if you’re not a naturally theatrical person, it’s just not going to work for you.

I can understand where people get this idea; it’s certainly true that some of us take to public speaking a lot more easily than others. And yet, having worked as a professional speaker myself for more than two decades – and seeing countless others come up in the industry during that time – I can tell you without a doubt that speaking is a skill you can learn, and that even the most naturally talented presenter will have to work at it continually if he or she is going to become better than average.

Most of that work, though, consists of having the right mindset. That’s because great presentations aren’t about having the right slides to display, or putting on the right suit; it’s in understanding that every time you get up to speak to a group, you have to put on a show.

That’s where the choreography part of the process comes in. When people go to see a great live performance of any kind, whether it’s at a comedy club, performing arts center, or some other venue, they know in the back of their minds that the show or routine they’re seeing has been practiced countless times over. And yet, the very best performers make it look effortless and spontaneous. They’ve become so attuned to delivering their lines and movements to perfection that you don’t notice anything but the show.

Can the same be said about most of the business presentations you see? I doubt it. Most of the speakers I come across, including quite a few professionals, lack the elements of showmanship in their speeches. But you can’t educate or persuade until you first excite and entertain. There’s a reason the television commercials we all see so often feature crazy music, funny lines, and even cartoon characters running across the screen – and it isn’t that advertisers want to be sure you’re having a good time. They know that if they want to interest you in their products, they have to interest you in watching the commercial first.

Luckily, building a compelling presentation isn’t nearly as hard as you might think. In fact, you have an enormous advantage over our friends in the advertising business, because they have to try to catch your attention at a time when you could just get up and walk away, or simply change the channel, at any given moment. During a live talk, however, most audiences are only going to be a few feet from you. You don’t have to perform back flips to keep them from nodding off; you just have to know a few basic skills and work them effectively.

Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth from Sales Training Programs?

Paying for sales training programs without measuring their return on investment is like writing a blank check to a stranger. What good is it to spend the money if you don’t know whether it’s coming back as a solid investment? Treat sales training the same way you would any other company expenditure, and track the results so you know whether it has been a good purchase or not.

One of my clients said to me recently: “Carl, every time you come to work with us, our sales go up…”

As a sales trainer, that’s a great thing to hear. But it also makes me wonder why I don’t hear it more often.

Bear with me for a second: really, I’m not trying to brag. What I’m getting at is that so many sales training clients – mine or otherwise – have absolutely no idea where their training dollars are going. Are they well spent? Are sales increasing? Most don’t know. Instead, they simply hire the sales trainer they like, or the one they think is the most entertaining, and hope for the best.

Given the dollar amounts involved, not to mention the stakes if you’re sales staff doesn’t succeed, that’s not good enough. It’s important you know what kind of return on investment you’re getting from your sales training expenditures.

Granted, that’s not always an easy thing to calculate. Sales training is not an exact science. Who’s to say that a new order that shows up a week after your latest training program wouldn’t have been one anyway? And how long can it reasonably be thought to last? Can a sale made two years after a training program still count?

The best answer I can give you these questions is that you’ll never know exactly, but the important thing is that you pay attention and try to come up with a rough figures. When you look at the sales figures following a training program, compare them to what you had in previous quarters, or against industry standards, or even the economy in general. Try to figure out, if nothing else, if the trend is at least moving in the right direction.

Even if you can’t determine whether the training is having an immediate impact – and make no mistake, you will usually see the biggest gains in the first few weeks after the program, when the material is still fresh in your sales team’s minds – at least paying attention will help you recognize other clues, like changes in behavior, that might let you know how things are going. After all, if your sales team is making a more concerted effort to negotiate higher margins, or work on their closing techniques, you’ll at least know that the training has had some effect.

Paying for sales training programs without measuring their return on investment is like writing a blank check to a stranger. What good is it to spend the money if you don’t know whether it’s coming back as a solid investment? Treat sales training the same way you would any other company expenditure, and track the results so you know whether it has been a good purchase or not.

Sales Training Mistakes: One-Sided Sales Training

If you are choosing sales training based on recommendations from senior management, what’s hot in your industry, or what your trainers are offering at the moment, you could be missing an important piece of the puzzle. By asking your producers what they need to learn, you make it easier to find programs that can help you improve the bottom line quickly by bringing in new customers.

Who decides what topics you are going to train your salespeople on? If you are like most organizations, the decision is probably a combination of input from senior management, some impressions about what’s current or trendy in your industry, or which programs your sales trainer happens to be offering at the moment.

A lot of the time, there’s nothing wrong with that approach, and it can be a great starting point. The only problem is that every once in a while, companies end up with programs that aren’t doing them or their sales team any good, because they’re a poor fit for what’s actually going on in the field.

The simple solution: ask your frontline producers what they need help with once in a while.

When you take that step, a funny thing can happen – you might just find out that what your team needs isn’t what you had planned on giving them. Even though a good sales manager usually has an ear to the ground and can tell what kind of issues are coming up with prospects and clients, there are always going to be day-to-day problems that are best known to the men and women who are making the calls, going on client visits, and getting feedback on proposals.

Granted, you might get too many variations in your answers to be meaningful. While one newer salesperson is struggling with prospecting, perhaps another could stand to have a refresher on product knowledge, and a third wants to work on closing the negotiation techniques. You might not be able to accommodate all of them, at least at the same time, but you will gain a better perspective on where each of your salespeople is at the moment, so you can go back later to get more training or just address the issues individually.

Just as likely, though, is that you’ll discover your sales team is facing a common challenge that they’d like some help with, or that one person’s suggestion will trigger agreement from the others. This is exactly what you should want from your training – a chance to work on whatever it is that’s holding your business or division back from bringing in even more customers. It’s more important to get the sales training your group needs than it is the program you had in mind, or the one that’s hot the moment.

As a business owner or supervisor, you should have a good feel for the pulse of your sales team. You probably have a strong idea of what sort of training they need already, and it could be that current market forces or industry changes mean that you don’t have much of a choice anyway. But try to ask your sales staff what sort of programs they want from time to time. The answers might surprise you, and they could be the key to increasing business in a hurry.

Sales Training Mistakes: Buying (or Creating) Training That’s Boring

Boring sales training is never effective, so make sure you’re coming up with topics and ideas that appeal to your sales staff. You’re never going to get your time or money’s worth otherwise. If you want to get the maximum impact, talk to them about the one thing you know they are interested in – making more money.

For those of us who were raised on classrooms with beige walls and long lectures, a stroll through a modern high school or university might come as something of a shock. In many parts of the country, textbooks are being supplemented – or even replaced – with software, video, and other training aids. What’s more, the material today’s young people are learning from isn’t littered with references to Dick and Jane, but real world applications of the issues they are studying.

It isn’t just technology that’s driving these changes; it’s the realization of something that’s simple yet profound: people need to be interested if they’re going to learn.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s very hard to pay attention when you’re bored, and it’s very easy to be bored when the information is not put in an interesting way. Even so, companies will devote all kinds of time and money to sales training that resembles those old-style lectures. But as helpful as the tips and techniques might be to your producers, it’s never going to make any kind of impact if it isn’t engaging them and holding their focus.

There are lots of ways to make your training more interesting, and a few of them – like using technology, making it more interactive, and choosing the right time slots – will be recurring themes in these articles. But for the moment, I’m going to skip past all of that and mention a technique that’s pretty easy to put in play, but lots of sales managers forget about: make your training practical.

Few salespeople want to spend a day learning about “Advanced CRM Retention Techniques,” or “Profit Forecast Utilization,” but I’ve never met a single producer who wasn’t interested in making more money. Show your sales staff that you’re going to present them with some practical, real-world ways to increase the size and frequency of their commission checks, and I guarantee you’re going to have a captivated audience.

In fact, making your training about profits doesn’t even usually mean changing topics, but simply framing them in the right context. Try to avoid heavy jargon: the best salespeople prefer simple language. Instead of “margin improvement,” teach them about “selling at higher prices.” Likewise, “maximize customer value” becomes “making more money off of your best clients.” Too many companies, and trainers, get so caught up in sounding professional that they forget to say what they really mean.

Boring sales training is never effective, so make sure you’re coming up with topics and ideas that appeal to your sales staff, because you’re never going to get your time or money’s worth otherwise. If you want to get the maximum impact, talk to them about the one thing you know they are interested in – making more money.