Sales training for senior sales people

The London based "Skills with People" course is sales training with a difference.  A lot of sales training teaches you to be afraid of objections.  Are your eyebrows raised?  Think about it.  Why else would you be taught manipulative techniques for pre-empting or preventing objections?   Why else would you be encouraged to rush to answer them, instead of slowing down, taking them more seriously and trying to understand the real, but often un-stated, concerns behind them?  Why hasn’t the penny dropped for sales trainers that the most potent part of the process of persuasion is when you tune in with intelligent empathy to the concern behind the objection (see listening with empathy and handling objections)? 

The "Skills with People" course teaches you to listen without fear of what you might hear, and without being in a rush to give the answers.  It’s not the person who gives the fastest or most powerful answers that wins the customer’s confidence, but the one who makes the customer feel understood and taken seriously.  Sales training needs to focus more on listening skills.  It’s hard for sales people to unlearn some of the insensitive habits their over-presentation-oriented sales training has given them. 

One reason why sales trainers sometimes adopt this approach is the pressure they’re under from marketing departments.  Product managers prepare sales aids, and sales people have to be trained to use them.  Unfortunately product managers often overstep their brief.  They assume there’s little more to making a sale than presenting the information they’ve prepared, and they try to control the way sales people do their job.  Often it’s with disastrous results.  Many sales people have their style ruined by being forced to adopt insensitive, ineffective and unnatural approaches to selling.

The "Skills with People" course is an antidote to some of the sales training approaches mentioned here.  See Skills with People course contents.  (See also Selling skills)