Is Your Customer Also Your Sales Trainer?

I admit it sounds weird, but are you having your customer double as your sales trainer?

One of the best ways we can build our selling skills is by seeing every selling event as a learning opportunity.

How frequently do you assess your sales performance?  We always tend to evaluate our performance when something goes either very well or very bad.

The problem with this is it leaves the vast majority of sales calls as being nothing more than a one-off sales call.  If we could take a few minutes to assess these average sales calls, we would be in a position to learn far more.

One way you can use your customer as a sales trainer is to ask yourself, before the call, what one specific item do you want to work on.

Focus your effort on one single item. It might be a type of question you ask, how you show them something or any number of other things.

The key to this is simple — just decide something in advance.

After the call, take a couple of minutes and think back as to how you did and specifically ask yourself how the customer responded.

Don’t make any bold assumptions off of just one experience.  It’s important for you to then test the same thing on several other sales calls.  By testing it on several calls, you can then begin to sense how it works and the results you can expect.

I am not going to advocate you attempt to make 100% of your sales calls in this manner.

I fully realize there are times when the call is too important or something else arises that would make it difficult to test something.  I’ll accept it, but try to use the training concept whenever you can to allow you to turn the vast majority of average calls you make into something from which you can learn.

For many salespeople, the only on-the-job sales training they get is when their boss happens to be with them, which typically is rarely.

By applying a process where you are essentially using your customer as your sales trainer, you will find yourself better able to self-evaluate your skills.

You will become much more proactive than most salespeople.

Copyright 2011, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.