A recent talk at an exhibition got me thinking about what you can learn in one day and why continuous learning is so important.

Over the last few weeks, I have ran a couple of polls about how often people do sales training or should do sales training.  The overwhelming response was that it should be done every year.  However, I know for a fact that not every organisation does this so I then investigated why.  These are the results.

Continuous training is important for a company’s overall performance. If you want to be a high growth company, or just keep the profits that you currently have, investment in training for your staff is a simple way to achieve this.

Investing in your staff is crucial to the success of the company.  This cannot be a one-off investment, it has to be continuous.  We constantly need to be learning to enable us to do our jobs more effectively and more successfully.  Invest in sales training on a regular basis rather than just occasionally.

You may think that the answer to this question is relatively straight forward.  For many companies, it is simply about developing the skills required to do the job.  These skills might include finding customers, call planning, needs analysis, relationship building, negotiations etc.  However, these are just part of the knowledge that is required to be successful in sales.  The way that training is delivered also varies and can consist of a range of activities.

Why bother going to an exhibition if you are not going to make an effort to engage with your customer? Having just come back from a major exhibition, here are some of my thoughts on how to spend your time there productively.

I asked ChatGPT to tell me the three most important things for a sales person to do and guess what, it got the answer correct!

I lost an opportunity once because the CEO of the company was asked to leave! I had done everything correctly up to that point in order to win the deal but I still lost it. Sometimes that happens. You can read all about it here.

Before a customer can buy a product, they need to understand how that product will change their existing processes and why that change is a change for the better. If the product is simply presented to the customer without them understanding why they need to change, the opportunity will frequently be lost.

Presenting is all about communication. We want to get some message across to our audience, whether this a sales pitch, a plea for investment, instructions on how to manage a task or anything else. If the message is poorly presented, then no one is going to listen to it and we are wasting our time. Think about what you stand to benefit from a great presentation and then think about how much you might want to invest in ensuring that it is a great presentation.

The Apprentice on BBC1 gets some bad press. Mostly, I think, because people think that it is a real business programme rather than an entertainment programme. However, this does not mean that we cannot learn something from it.

To be successful in sales, you need to be able to close deals. However, closing is the easy part. The hard part is getting everything right up to that point. Here are five things that you need to focus on getting right to make closing easy.

The answers obviously depends on what you are selling, who you are selling to and what experience you have. It is quite different selling shoes in a shop than it is selling aeroplanes to multinational airlines!

No matter what you are buying, you have to believe that you are going to get value from it. Two different people can easily value the same experience quite differently.

Who has not stood in line at a petrol station and thought, “You know what, I need a chocolate bar right now!” The bars are put next to the tills for exactly that reason. We do not really need the bar but we see it there and it makes us think that we need it. It is not quite so straight forward in business to business sales as this article explains.

The first thing that any sales person needs to do when they meet a customer for the first time is to establish some trust. Fundamentally, no one buys from someone that they do not trust.

When we try to sell our product to a customer, it is highly likely that they have a choice of product. There will be similar products available. As a result, you may have to persuade your customer to choose your solution rather than the competition. To do that, you have to focus on the uniqueness of what you offer.

In almost every conversation that I have with customers, I end up talking about what a good customer looks like. This is not a question of how they look physically – we really do not care if they are male, female, black, white, short or tall. The question is essentially, will I enjoy working with them and are they more likely to buy my solution than another customer?

Mark Twain is quoted as saying “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” I love this quote. As it stresses not only the importance of preparation but that for things to look like they are unprepared takes preparation! Preparation is crucial before any presentation that you need to make.