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Executives, Managers and Rainmakers cannot be effective with stand-alone techniques (sometimes called “strategies”). If you’ve ever explained to someone what to do in a sales interaction (perhaps questions to ask, or a particular strategy to employ) and you were frustrated by their inability to do so, then you’ve experienced firsthand how techniques alone are insufficient to change how people behave. The colleague or subordinate returns from the selling opportunity and confesses “I forgot to” or “it wasn’t appropriate in this case” or “I wasn’t comfortable yet”. These are all examples of the excuses (in their case, solid reasons!) why they didn’t follow through on your advice.

Effective training and management of any kind (and especially sales or rainmaking training) requires 3 elements concurrently. The areas below fit together like a 3 legged stool. Without addressing all 3 areas, the structure will eventually falter:

Technique – These are the scripts, strategies and techniques that most people think of as sales training. Telephone scripts, questions to ask and closing techniques fall into this category. Personally, I dislike telephone calls that sound scripted and find most traditional closing techniques to be unusable by professionals and equally ineffective at retaining long term clients. (If you use traditional closing techniques and they work for you and your colleagues, feel free to stop reading the rest of this article)

Behavior – The split second reactions and decisions a professional makes on a daily basis to create new business. Behavior is a function of the time professionals invest to practice as well as efficiently prospect for new opportunities. Some examples include attending networking events, making phone calls, giving seminars or talks and attending trade shows. It is extremely rare for any amount of training to be effective if the professional or salesperson is completely passive, i.e. sitting at their desk waiting for the phone to ring. Even if ample opportunities do come to them, my experience has been that rainmakers who do the behavior and prospecting activities have a higher success rate. They simply have more opportunities to practice and refine their skills.

Attitudes – Beliefs or destructive “tapes” that constantly play inside a person’s head. Examples of beliefs that will undermine both behavior and technique include: a strong need for approval (or fear of rejection), a belief that discussing money is impolite, preconceived notions about what constitutes “a lot” of money, a false belief that the professional should be educating their prospect prior to understanding the prospect’s problem and poor self-esteem (feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy). This is merely a partial list of undermining attitudes. The more undermining attitudes a rainmaker, salesperson or manager has, the more time is required in training. When a subordinate or colleague has difficulty carrying out your business development suggestions, look to undermining attitudes (not intelligence or willingness) to understand why business development is so easy for you, yet so difficult for them. Proper training and coaching can reprogram many of these attitudes. However, if the undermining beliefs are significant enough, it may not be in the best interest of the firm to attempt the effort. Additionally, training or coaching may not be a wise investment simply because your team has insignificant room for improvement. In these cases, challenges with business development lie elsewhere (poor management, below average quality of fulfillment, non-existent business tracking systems, etc.)

Click “Assess Your Team” to learn how to identify if your team has shortcomings related to technique, behavior and attitude and expected ROI prior to committing to a training/coaching program.

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