Business leaders attend sales-training session at the Sandler Sales

Long Island Business News, Jul 16, 2004 by Adina Genn

In a recent Thursday morning, nearly 25 business and sales leaders sat in on a weekly sales-training session at the Sandler Sales Institute in Hauppauge. The morning's topic: self-management.

Attendees shared, sometimes in groups of three or four, sometimes with everyone in the room, how they nurtured prospects in the hopes of turning a dialog into a future sale.

Leading the morning's discussion was Rich Isaac, president of Legend Development Services, who's the authorized licensee of this particular Sandler location. (There's another on Long Island and one in Queens). Also lending insight was Catherine Wright, vice president of the Hauppauge franchise.

Why are you not doing the things you know you need to be doing to be more effective? Isaac asked the group.

Isaac's question elicited no shortage of replies, and those included not setting goals, a lack of accountability, disliking the idea of making cold calls, fear of stepping outside comfort zones and encountering rejection - or even success.

The attendees hailed from a wide range of industries, including insurance, marketing, information technology and printing. Most had already undergone fundamental training and were there for The President's Club, a more advanced series that enables enrollees to move from blue belt to black belt in sales, Isaac said.

Sales training is seldom taught in college, perhaps because it requires practical, real-life experience, experts say. But the lack of preparedness can leave sales reps with less than stellar results. Reps may find themselves with too few new leads and too little business with existing clients. Also, they may unknowingly mishandle sales calls, only to leave without an invoice in hand.

Perhaps that's why sales-training companies, consultancies and speakers find a large and eager audience.

Dale Carnegie Training, which has an office in Hauppauge, offers ongoing sales and leadership training to nearly 70 companies, including Estee Lauder, Computer Associates and Mercy Hospital. Brian Tracy, a speaker and consultant on personal and professional development - and the chairman of Brian Tracy International - boasts of limited seating at his upcoming September seminar, Increase Your Sales & Income in 2004, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York.

And for Adrian Miller, owner of Port Washington-based Adrian Miller Direct Marketing, a provider of sales training and business development, business is awesome. Miller said the company has worked with thousands of reps.

The biggest problems encountered by salespeople? They don't have enough new business prospecting, and the sales funnel gets empty, Miller said. [Often] they're busy working with existing clients and find prospecting the hardest. And they don't get as much business as they could and leave some on the table, letting competitors get a share.

Miller, who works primarily with groups on-site and occasionally with clients one-on-one, helps reps expand their horizons, partly by finding new opportunities with existing customers.

David Sandler, the founder of Sandler Sales who died in 1995, believed in finding a better way for buyers and sellers to communicate. He advocated for an I'll-stop-selling, you-stop- resisting strategy that encourages the two parties to get to the heart of the buyer's needs and how the seller can best lend support.

Isaac shares with the class his own sales experience in wooing new clients. Recently, he told a prospect, I get the impression that right now you wouldn't be comfortable reaching into your wallet. Is that fair? When the client said, Call me in a couple of weeks, Isaac replied, Call me when you'd like.

I put the pressure off him, Isaac said to his audience.

That gives you the chance to have a real discussion, noted Rob Rossiter, a principal of Diversified Concepts, a provider of employee benefits in Oyster Bay, and an attendee at the seminar headed by Isaac.

That prospect may or may not end up reaching out to Isaac, who added that he would certainly keep him in his marketing file and send him the occasional e-mail. Don't let go of him, someone in the class advised.

It's apparent at Sandler that the classmates are well versed in the institute's vernacular, speaking knowingly about R vs. I (role vs. identity, a concept to bolster self-confidence when facing rejection, so that you realize it was your role as a salesperson, not you personally, that was denied, empowering you to try again.) And they speak of being an I 10, meaning I am a 10, a quality person of the highest caliber.

Outside of the classroom there's real work to do, including writing in journals, role-playing, setting up goals and activities that produce, and confiding in an accountability person to climb to the next level.

Even though companies within the same industry sometimes attend the same seminar, there hasn't been a conflict of interest to date, Isaac said. They may be competitors in the field, but as long as you're in [the class], it's like a support group, said Rossiter, adding that the course is as much about personal growth as sales training.