Background There is a cyclical nature to sales training that reinforces the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. How do you create long-lasting, significant change that allows your sales team to develop habits that allow them to be consistently successful? The story plays out in sales organizations around the country. Salespeople learn about Spin Selling, Consultative Selling, Solution Selling and other sales approaches, in brief bursts of training conducted once or twice a year. But those approaches aren’t integrated into the sales process and the sales managers are too busy trying to hit quota to think about capturing those things that are working so the team can repeat them. Why is the sales manager so busy? Because the bottom 25% of their sales team isn’t pulling their weight and the manager must do their job for them, effectively selling out the future for the present. Why is the bottom 25% of salespeople so ineffective? Because the company doesn’t know how to hire top sales talent – and even if they did, they don’t really know what they are looking for. They can’t put their finger on exactly what the problem is with the process. So what often happens is that rather than coaching a team to better performance, sales managers threaten them because it is more expedient. So salespeople leave and new ones must be brought in. And so it goes . . . around and around. How do you get off this crazy cycle of ineffectiveness? How do you train your managers to manage and your sales people to sell when you aren’t even sure what is broken? How do you create a closed-loop sales system that uses real time feedback to continually improve the sales process and to feed vital information into the marketing engine? How do you build a farm system of sales talent that provides continuity and scalability in your business? The answer is with a third-party performance optimization program. It’s what we do at SalesPOP! Read more about our philosophy here.