Accepting the unacceptable

There are dozens of books outlining the secrets of success and how to boost your sales performance. Many of them are valid and lessons can be learned from most. It seems to me that there is an obvious starting point before applying any of these tips. Before you can improve significantly you need to take stock of where you are now and perhaps most importantly, accept that current performance is unacceptable.

One of the problems I face on occasion with clients and their sales teams is an inherent belief that they are doing everything possible and they just need to ‘sharpen-up’. Unfortunately, if the sales person believes his or her performance to be within acceptable standards the blame must lie with the economy, or their clients, or some other innocent excuse. Think about it; even throughout the last recession people were still selling and people were still buying. Was the sales director softening and explaining the lower results to the board with the justification that there was a recession or did they ask for a sales training budget to ensure that their people were motivated, refreshed, and able to go out and close those extra orders?


Psychologists have discovered the Law of Readiness that essentially states that until the sales person recognises that their previous behaviour is unacceptable, much of the sales training will be lost. Sometimes this can be more straightforward to illustrate by looking at colleagues’ performance, competitors, or year-on-year figures.

Letter of the law

There are other factors to keep in mind before embarking on a spending spree with that sales training budget. Two more ‘laws’ that play a significant role are: The Law of Relevance and The Law of Self-Interest.

In order, the Law of Relevance means that any training needs to be—in the learner’s mind at least—relevant to their company’s products and services. I have seen many an initiative fail be-cause the participants switched off early on in the workshop dismissing what was about to follow as being irrelevant. Sometimes companies fail to understand that it can be easier to sell a tangible product as opposed to an intangible service.



Service sales people can often be heard bemoaning that it is all well and good selling say, a vending machine, but it will not work for our services. Sometimes it is just a matter of semantics—one UK based exhibition client had an issue because the sales trainer used the American term for an exhibition ‘stand’, calling it a ‘booth’. So care really should be taken in ensuring the trainer and the delegates use the same nomenclature.

The Law of Self-Interest is an interesting one because it can have a disproportionately large impact on the outcome. If a sales person can be convinced that as a direct result of applying some of the techniques and ideas on offer they will improve their conversion rate, their whole attitude changes from reluctance to almost a state of greed, such is their desire to go out and secure those extra sales.

Sometimes managers fail to grasp that boosting performance is not always about boosting activity, but activity is easier to monitor and hence to manage. Making an extra ten calls a day will not always bring as high a level of results as say, making five more ‘effective’ calls.

In my dim and distant days, I used to work for Yellow Pages as a telephone sales executive, and—this next phrase will give away my age—we were tasked with 120 ‘dials’ a day. It was a dial not a key pad, push button phones were in the realm of sci-fi. There were always two types of reps, those who diligently made their 120 dials and hit their daily target most days and those who spent most of their day having a bit of a laugh, would glance at their clock, realise they had only half an hour left of effective selling time, and would bang in two or three good calls and, yes, also hit their daily target most days too.

Recession legacy

The last recession has changed what we do and how we do it. It is no longer a numbers game, it is about working smarter not harder. If you think about the facts, most companies during that period shed staff and yet not a single one of them shed targets pro rata. They were all asking fewer people to do more work and hope that got them through.



We are all busier and have more to do in what appears to be less time to do it in. Making extra calls is not always an option, primarily because of demands on our time and also because we do not all have an unlimited client base—there will only be a certain (often finite) number of people who will be prospects for your products and services so we cannot just burn through an enormous database and hope we hit our targets through high call volumes.

My final advice would be to ensure the trainer you use is up-to-speed with best practice and that their material is not several years old as a ‘tried and tested’ model. What works today is very different to what was working even as little as ten years ago and will be, without a doubt, very different to what will work in five years hence.


Key actions:


    Take stock of where you are: you might need to accept that your
    current sales performance is not acceptable

    Take care that your sales team and trainer use the same vocabulary

    Making extra calls will not necessarily help: making more ‘effective’
    calls, however, will

    Remember: post-recession, times have changed—sales teams must     work smarter not harder

Your text here...