Dear Mike,

When interviewing sales candidates, I used to ask “what sales education programs have you taken?” Later, it was “what sales books have you read?”. Now, I ask “which sales videos have you watched?”

The Easy Way

AI can improve the sales process in so many ways.

• Can AI help you write more clearly? Yes.  
• Can AI help you understand your prospects better?  Yes.  
• Can AI help you craft more compelling talk tracks? Yes.  
• Can AI speed up pre-call research? Yes.  
• Can AI automate your email campaigns? Yes
• Can AI provide insights into customer personas? Yes

So where's the problem?

Something for Nothing

We all wish sales could be easy and effortless. Kind of like the GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy for weight loss. Magical results without the need for all that annoying diet and exercise.

While the GLP-1 wonder drugs help with weight loss and cravings, they do nothing for muscle tone and fitness. You can be thin but still flabby and out of shape. So it is with sales. AI can help craft a great email message and create a beautiful sales proposal, but it can't help with live sales calls or difficult conversations.

AI is making sales reps less and less able to perform the very skill they need to succeed: influence prospects to take action.

Experience vs. Training

Highly successful salespeople can earn huge incomes. High six figures and even seven figures, easily on par with successful doctors, attorneys or accountants. But how does their training compare? How many years does it take to become certified in these fields?

• Doctor: 11 years (minimum)
• Lawyer: 7 years
• Certified Public Accountant: 4 years
• Sales: 0 years

We expect salespeople to have skills, but look at any sales recruiting job posting. it will require "X Years Sales EXPERIENCE, but no requirement for sales TRAINING or any type of certification. Five years of experience may be one year of experience five times.

People often assume sales is like riding a bike. Easy to learn, and once you do, you never forget. Instead, why don't we think of training more like chess? Simple to learn the basics perhaps, but requiring years of training and practice to become a master?

The Death of Sales Training

The 1980s and 1990s were the pinnacle of professional sales development. Corporations like IBM, AT&T, Pitney Bowes and Xerox would invest months of basic training for every new hire, and then continue their professional development every year thereafter.

The Xerox Training Academy was considered by many to be the "Harvard MBA of Sales". It required months of preliminary training and preparation before attending their training facility in Leesburg, VA. There, each salesperson spend weeks of grueling training on the products and selling practices. Like a Marine Boot Camp, a full 30% of attendees did not "graduate" out of the school. If they couldn't pass the final sales exercises, their employment was terminated.

My former company, Lanier, created a similar training culture that was so competitive, it was written up in the book "In Search of Excellence" by Tom Peters. Rigorous training on every aspect of sales. Videos, workbooks, activity benchmarks and milestones, sales blitzes and competitions. Role plays were video recorded and the feedback was brutal.

Included in our three months of initial training was an initiation ritual. Each new salesperson was required to stand on a desk and recite the company's three minute positioning statement word for word, in front of a jeering, heckling audience of their peers. I still remember and can deliver that talk track to this day

Most of what passes for sales training today is a series of short video clips accompanied by a laundry list of product certification tests created by the vendors. No wonder most new salespeople can't properly do the bare minimum to succeed:

• Articulate your value proposition
• Qualify a prospect or opportunity
• Identify unconsidered needs
• Create a compelling reason to take action
• Differentiate your offers from the competition
• Cost justify your solution
• Persuasively handle resistance and objections

The average new sales rep is no more able to execute fundamental sales skills than they able to find their way across town without the help of a GPS map application.

Am I a cranky old guy complaining that the new generation is lazy? Of course. That doesn't mean there's isn't a strong element of truth. For an eye-opening look at today's college grads, read this article from an (anonymous) Professor at a public university.

Trans4mers Sales Leadership Group

NYC

September 8-9

TEDx Warrenton

Warrenton, VA

October 25