7 Red Flags That Show You Can’t Trust Your Sales Trainer

7 Red Flags That Show You Can’t Trust Your Sales Trainer | The traditional sales training system is inherently broken.

Role playing hypothetical generic sales situations are not going to help your rural sales team win.

Generic, cookie-cutter sales training peddled by a US franchise model will do your rural business more harm than good.

They always say “once bitten, twice shy” so you can triple that for your rural sales team who are going to hate you and your choice of sales training if you put them in the wrong room with the wrong trainer.

Here are the 7 red flags you need to watch out for before you ever appoint a sales trainer to help your rural sales team:

1. They don’t specialise in your sector

Offering up a handful of rural companies and client logos or saying they know farmers as they spent their childhood school holidays at their Uncle and Aunt’s farm isn’t enough.

For them to command respect and engagement from your team they need to know the market they sell to.

And in order to know your market, you need to live in your market.

Living in an urban city centre means they aren’t qualified to know the very specific nuances that farming and rural folk emit which only puts you and your reputation as a sales manager at risk if you fall for fast-talking rebuttals and appoint the wrong sales trainer.

2. They don’t offer an on-going programme

One n’ done one or two day drive thru sales training events don’t work.

Unless you want to create ineffective short-term memory structures where your team forget 80% of what they’ve been taught less than a week later.

The best sales trainers provide an on-going coaching programme that focusses on the recall and retrieval of their training content. That way their material is continually reinforced and burnt in your rural sales teams’ brains which significantly reduces the forgetting curve – and makes your training investment much more worthwhile rather than a waste.

3. They don’t align sales manager training with sales teams training

Research shows the single biggest determinant of a sales team’s success comes down to their manager.
If your sales manager isn’t right and doesn’t lead and coach in an effective way, no amount of sales training will fix your team.

Alignment of the teaching and training between managers and teams is a non-negotiable.

If there isn’t then the team get confused and the training loses all its credibility.

4. They don’t continually up-skill

Sales and sales training is continually evolving with the increasing use of digital marketing and automated, AI machine learning.

Sales training that hasn’t changed since the 80s is going to end badly for you.

You need to ask them how they continually train and upskill themselves. Ask for evidence of that.

How often are they blogging, podcasting, writing, talking and speaking?

Have they written and authored books?

What associations have they presented to and when?

If they are learning they will show this in all they do and promote.

5. They don’t offer follow-up coaching

Not all sales training however technically brilliant it might can cater for all rural reps.

Sometimes you will need specific follow up coaching to fine-tune an individual’s particular sales skill.

The best training anticipate this and ask to do it before you do because they have an ability built over decades of training experience to “read the room” and see or sense where an individual might be struggling

6. They don’t guarantee their results

If they can’t stand behind their product then don’t appoint them.

We stand behind ours making a promise that we will lift sales by a minimum of 5% within the first 90 days.

We also state we will work with them until they do or we refund every cent if we get written evidence proving all our training tools and techniques have been applied.

That way we create a collaborative, trust-based partnership ie. we teach, you apply and you win.

More often than not we see sales increases of anything from 10-30% post our sales training, even with supposed “commodity” products.

Our glowing testimonials talk for themselves.

It’s simply not fair or ethical to ask your client to take on all the risk with an all care, no responsibility approach.

That’s why we don’t whilst others do.

7. They butter you up with gifts vs results

Being invited to the rugby or a flash dinner’s fine but often these incentives are used to compensate for a lack of results.

You want substance over style.

No amount of client entertainment and corporate hosting will help you if you’re not getting the right results so don’t fall for the free gifts and false flattery.

You deserve better than that.

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So there you have it.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Hope this list is useful to you and your rural business when it comes to selecting the right sales training provider for your sales team.

PS. Please let me know what I might have missed.