Selling With Noble Purpose, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 19Training Your Frontline to Be Noble Purpose Sellers

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.

—Abigail Adams, former first lady of the United States

When leaders want to change the behavior of the sales team, training is usually the first solution. As you've seen, though, seller behavior is often the result of the system surrounding the sellers.

There's a reason this chapter is toward the back of the book. The ecosystem surrounding your sellers has a far bigger impact on them than anything you can do in a training program. Having said that, if you want your frontline sellers to adopt new behaviors, training is crucial.

In Chapter 13, you learned the dirty little secret about sales training—the dismal stats about how much well‐intentioned training is forgotten in the field. This chapter is about how you can avoid that trap and make your training stick. We've talked about the mindset shift your team needs to make. Now let's look at some specific techniques to get them there.

I'd like to introduce you to a new world of sales training, one that doesn't involve PowerPoint from the front of the room. We're going to take a dive into directed self‐discovery learning. To help you experience why this is so different from traditional training, I'm going to ask you to place yourself in this scenario and answer the questions as if you're a participant in the room. Are you ready?

Learning vs. Lecturing

Imagine you're ...