When you invest thousands of dollars in quality sales training you expect to see an immediate change in your comfort advisor’s behaviors and his or her results. That doesn’t always happen. Here are some roadblocks to getting better results, no matter how good the sales training is. You might want to deal with these situations first…then send them to training.
1. You pay your comfort advisor a salary.
A sales professional is motivated by the challenges that selling provides. He or she doesn’t want their income to be limited. Find me a sales person who wants a salary and I’ll show you someone who is happy with average results.
2. Your comfort advisor won’t run leads after 5:00 PM or on weekends.
This is a “retail” business and consumers do their shopping at nights and weekends. Sorry, but this is a requirement.
3. Your comfort advisor is obsessed with “price”.
This is very common with comfort advisors who have been installers or technicians and know a lot about the labor and materials that go into a job. They tend to think of “cost plus” and often look for ways to be cheaper. Far better to establish a flat rate or cookbook pricing model and have them sell the solution…not the price. Take away any price discounting and teach them to sell the value, not the price.
4. You pay a sliding-scale commission based on gross profit.
This is management’s way of putting responsibility on the comfort advisor for profitable work. The problem is that the comfort advisor doesn’t control the labor team and this method nearly always puts installers and comfort advisors at each other’s throats. Train the comfort advisor to provide the information that installation needs and let the installation manager take care of the rest.
5. You simply have the wrong person in the job.
He or she doesn’t fit your culture, or they are not motivated, or they are totally self-focused, or they cut corners…whatever. When you find this out then deal with it decisively. Everyone in your company knows this is going on and you will be better off finding a new person who will be a better fit.
Once all of these are cleaned up then send your comfort advisor to our Accelerate! sales training program and you will get the results you are looking for.
Good Selling.
– Tom