Solidify with Effective Training

Kevin Price of “The Price of Business” discusses new innovative training solutions with Lin Fisher of Baker Communications

[Kevin Price]:  Welcome back to the “Price of Business.”  I am your host Kevin Price.  Talking to you about you and your business.  Was noting this morning my good friend Eric Bolling, whose program, Strategy Room I’ve been on very often.  Love being on there, over there at Foxnews.com.  Eric Bolling is going to be in to chair for Neil Cavuto I think either this week or I think all next week actually.  He’s going to be the host for Neil Cavuto.  He’ll do a great job.  Props to you my friend.  Hope it goes great.  I want to introduce our next guest.  He’s in, again pinch hitting for Mr.—my goodness, I’m having such a Monday on Wednesday.  It is not even funny.  He’s in for our friends over there at Baker Communications.  How are you my friend?  Good to talk to you today.

[Lin Fisher]:  Doing great Kevin.  Good to be with you again.

[KP]:  Lin Fisher.  Good to have you with us.  What are we going to be focusing on?  I know it’s got to be customer relations management oriented. 

[LF]:  Absolutely.  So, we’re going to be talking and continuing our string of discussions around CRM, but today we’re going to be talking specifically about using training as a strategic tool to transform the sales organization.  Specifically going beyond just functional how to training and really getting to the heart of the matter which is using it as a strategic enablement to support business processes like generating revenue, which is what we all care about right?

[KP]:  Right.  And Walter Rogers, the president there at would normally be sitting in the chair or at the mike that you’re at.  He actually wrote a new column: “Solidify with Effective Training.”  This is going to be a perfect complement to the article that you can find at Houstonbusinessdaily.com.  Tell us exactly the  scope, the parameters of our conversation today.

[LF]:  Yeah, so there’s a couple of things here that are pretty evident, which is sales people just don’t care about training.  They really don’t care about CRM adoption.  But the executive teams and people that put the—

[KP]:  Customer Relations Management.

[LF]:  That’s right.  People who put these systems in place, like leadership teams, they care about those types of things.  But, you know, as we all know…I’ve been a sales person for twenty plus years and I’ve actually contracted this really bad disease.  It’s called SAD.  It’s called Sales Attention Deficit disorder.  It just simply means that sales people have a very short attention span and because they don’t care about training or CRM adoption, if you don’t really get to what’s in it for them, which is basically retiring quota, then you’re really missing the mark all the way through.  Today, I wanted to just quickly talk about how using training to actually create organizational transformation that actually sustains and sticks.  Sop, I have a quick question for you Kevin.  How many times have you been to training over the last four or five years? 

[KP]:  Oooo.  Probably half a dozen times. 

[LF]:  Right, and let me ask you this question.  After you leave that training, I’m sure you went through some great training right, and you got some great nuggets.  After say, five days or a week or so, how much of that training did you actually use and put into practice?

[KP]:  Um, yes.  [laughs]

[LF]:  Exactly.  Exactly.  The whole reason why is because training is an effective tools, but unless you put it directly into practice and start building that muscle memory then you actually will lose 95% of what you learned and hopefully, hopefully you take away one nugget that you actually put into practice.  So what we’re saying there is that, you know, traditional training and traditional enablement is not really effective to get sales people to transform their behaviors.  Like I said, what we  want out of sales people is to get them focused on generating revenue and get them focused on creating value for their…for their customers.

[KP]:  Yeah, I like that.  I like that.  So, that requires planning.  Those kind of things don’t happen by accident.  And it doesn’t happen simply by implementing a customer relations management program, but really making sure that every element that supports that program are all on the same page.

[LF]:  Yeah, it absolutely does and one of the things that we constantly run into is that sales people resist change like no other right?

[KP]:  Right.

[LF]:  Sales people, they will use anything that works.  They’ll use it till the wheels fall off.  If you’ve got a great strategy or a tactic that they like to use, then they’re going it until it just doesn’t work anymore.  So, what we want to do is we want to make sure that these sales people are taking the CRM system and driving revenue, rather than using it as a sales accounting tool or rather than using it as a must, a forced measure, having to input sales data.  We want to use it to actually drive the sales process.  So what we recommend our clients do is we recommend focusing training on the outcome of revenue generation.  When you do that it gets everybody in alignment and gets their brains focused on, “What do I need to do to make more money?”  And then secondarily, the training to get people to use the CRM actually is a secondary benefit, but not really a main focus.  It’s interesting.  It’s kind of like when, you know, you feed your dog, you know, some medicine, you have to wrap it in a bunch of cheese?  Well that’s kind of like the same thing here, but what we’re doing here is giving sales people an opportunity to focus on revenue generation.

[KP]:  Got it. Got it.  That is imperative.  That’s the reason why you’re willing to give up a system that may or may not have been okay and take the risk of changing the system. 

[LF]:  Right, right, exactly.  You know, CRM, the CRM is a functional tool, but it can also be a big weight around the necks of sales makers because if it’s too cumbersome or they really don’t understand how to apply it to their daily business then it just becomes an enormous annoyance.  So, most leadership teams Kevin fail to realize that if you don’t focus in on the actual business process and actually what’s happening down in the trenches and then map your tool back to what’s happening you’re going to get a disconnect.  And as soon as you get a disconnect with sales people and it doesn’t work, and it creates more of a hassle for them to do their job they’re going to stop using it quickly.  It’s going to get a bad wrap and then you’ve got a big uphill battle to try and get adoption up and get people to use the tool the way it should be.

[KP]:  Right.  Realistically…and I guess it depends a lot on the size of the business and the changes that are going to come with the programming, but realistically what is the typical timeframe for proper implementation of something like this?

[LF]:  Yeah, so when you implement a pretty broad tool like a CRM application or system, and you’ve got a fairly large organization, it’s going to take some time to implement, customize and really get folks to wrap their brains around it.  So, again, what we recommend is we recommend a consistent week over week process that delivers the behaviors and the tips and tricks around how to use the CRM to support you’re daily habits and to support your daily sales process.  The effective training like…Kevin, you, I’m sure you work out right?  Or at some point in your life maybe you worked out a whole lot.

[KP]:  [Laughs] why would you even presume that?  I don’t know why you say things like that.  Anyway, go ahead.  We’ll pretend I do.  Go right ahead.

[LF]:  Alright.  So Kevin, when you work out you just don’t go in there for one time and bench press 300 pounds about 20 reps and then leave for 3-4 months and feel like you can actually bench press the same amount.  What do you have to do?  You have to go back in there every week and you know, every other day and actually build that muscle memory.  And it’s the same exact thing when you’re wanting to transform behavior.  Behavior is almost like the way our muscles work.  If you don’t constantly impact that muscle in the same way it will not ever, it won’t ever grow. 

[KP]:  Right.

[LF]:  So, you know, the thing that most training individuals or professionals miss is that training is more of an event.  What we’re talking about is sustainable behavior change by actually impacting them week over week with a similar process and a similar approach, all supporting what’s in it for them, which is generating revenue.  When you do that you get people’s attention and you get people to transform how they work on a daily basis. 

[KP]:  Right, and if you don’t do that you’re going to find yourself starting over all over again.  And that’s expensive, be it in your workout or be that in your…no matter what you’re doing.  If you don’t use it you lose it. 

[LF]:  That’s right and I’ve got the abs to prove it. 

[KP]:  There you go.  You and me both.  I traded my six-pack in for a keg. 

[LF]:  There you go.  I’ve got a 40 ounce right there with you. 

[KP]:  That’s right

[LF]:  The most important thing here is that people need to realize that training is not a silver bullet that the fact is that you need to role up your sleeves, you need to jump in and work with the sales team week over week and really give them bite sized chunks that they can take and impellent immediately into their daily sales process and when you do that and you tie it back to compensation, you tie it back to metrics that are evident and actually very much out in the open for everyone to see, then you get a lot of people recognizing that this is a serious, you know, a serious transformation that we need to make and people start to pay attention and start to change what they do on a daily basis.

[KP]:  Right, right.  Very important.  Again, it’s the kind of stuff we talk a lot about every Wednesday here with the folk there at Baker Communications.  How do we get in touch with you guys?

[LF]:  Very simply, you can go to Bakercommunications.com and ask to speak to one of us or ask to speak to myself.  I’d be happy to have a chat with any of you about how to actually implement an effective training approach. 

[KP]:  Very good.  Bakercommunications.com. You will find that an incredible resource.  I’m always impressed by the huge amount of information you see there.  Thanks for being with us my friend.

[LF]:  You got it Kevin, thanks for having me.

[KP]:  I tell ya, I enjoy our visit every time we have you with us here on “The Price of Business” and you’re listening to CNN650.