The very moment someone commits to "Sales Training" they have put themselves, their sales team, and their company at enormous risk. How could this be? Consider that over 90% of behavioral change initiated in the sales department, FAILS. The risk is very real, and it is much more than just losing the investment made in the training and valuable "on-the-street" time. The risk is permanently destroying the momentum and morale of the "troops," and at the same time building enough cynicism among these same salespeople to nullify any future performance enhancement effort that corporate leadership may pursue. So how does an organization avoid this substantial risk? Planning, and reinforcement.

We often see legions of salespeople marching off to workshops. It is management's expectation that they will go, work hard, and drink the "special Kool-Aid" necessary to come back "reformed". It is the seller's expectation that this is "Yet another brilliant idea by management" where, they will go, enjoy the break, have a good time, and "drink from a fire hose" in a 3-4 day workshop. Additionally, the salesperson believes that in terms of their day to day duties; in the long run, nothing will change.

Sales training, in and of itself, does not create behavioral change. Yet companies continue to treat sales training workshops as the be-all and end-all required for behavioral change in a sales force. While the participants may be exposed to many good "tactics," behaviors and ideas, after the initial excitement they feel post training, they are left to flounder without the motivation, desire, tools (i.e. habits) or perspective to change their behavior for the long term.

Why is it so difficult to change salespeople's behavior? Salespeople are inherently resistant to change because most of what they have learned was "self-taught." To make matters worse, their sales behavior has been conditioned by success and failure in the real world of selling, where positive and negative reinforcement is financial. It is well known by Sales Managers that sellers will "follow their wallets." Thus, to truly change sales behavior, management needs to make it clear it is a matter of financial risk and reward.

What is the real cost of failing to create the desired behavioral change? These costs range from loss of a leadership position in the market, the inability to forecast revenue accurately for investors, missing sales targets, and plummeting share prices, just to name a few. Clearly, all these issues have large financial impacts associated with them, and they all involve more than just the sales department. When real change does not occur, the actual impact is exponentially greater than the hard costs associated with sales training.

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