As I mentioned in a recent blog post on Government funded support for startups in Ontario, Communitech is an excellent organization. One of my favourite things about Communitech is the Peer2Peer groups; I am part of the Senior Sales and Business Development Peer2Peer group. This week we had a presentation on Achieving High Performance in Sales by Guest Speaker Craig McQueen from Ninety Five 5. This blog will be some of the highlights from his presentation.
The basis of the presentation was focused on these three points:
- Everything you need to be great at sales is learnable
- The means to help people become great has greatly improved
- We should incorporate this to improve
Craig also talked about how traditional sales training is not the solution for high performance sales. It is like drinking from the firehouse for a period of time and then trying to remember and incorporate all of the learned knowledge into daily and weekly habits. He talked about how the drip method was a lot better.
Craig talked about the five steps to master, broken down into the following:
- Simplify
- Practice
- Apply
- Confirm
- Expand
There were some great points on what makes a great sales improvement system:
- Simulate tough situations
- Find a common coaching platform
- Busy is the enemy of better, make some time for development
A large part of the conversation stated that people are not born to be in sales, just like they are not born to be a hockey player or doctor. Craig had talked about the “Willingness to learn is the key to being a great sales person”. He also indicated that anyone could become a sales achiever no matter what the personality. This was the one main point that I did not agree with.
I really enjoyed the presentation and although I didn’t agree with all of the points that were brought up, I did take away many interesting points to think about. I will be checking out some ways to add more ongoing sales education and situations. One of the resources that I will explore is the Ninety Five 5 site and some of the information and tools.
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