Training Salespeople to Stop Choking and Start Selling

Danita Bye

Overtraining as a Heimlich Maneuver for Your Sales Team

Today we’re going to talk about muscle memory and how it applies to sales performance. But since the biggest muscle involved in sales seems to be the mouth muscle, you’re going to be skeptical from the outset. That’s okay. To be a successful manager or CEO, your skepticism muscle needs a daily workout, too.

Don't let your sales team choke under pressure.

Let’s start with sports, specifically “unconscious” athletic performance. Say you play tennis, darts, or even Wii bowling: have you ever noticed that when you stop to actually think about your serve or your throw, you choke, completely blowing that shutout or 300 game? When you just let your mind sit back and let your muscles do what they know how to do, however, you often surprise yourself with how good you really are.

Why is that? In a word: pressure, and there’s usually no end to that for your salespeople, both at work and at home. Pressure is, unfortunately, a part of life that can’t be eradicated, so there’s no point in trying to put that particular cat back in the bag. However, your salespeople’s collective response to pressure can be trained. How? By instilling choke-proof confidence and knee-jerk resourcefulness through increased sales training (sounds circular, I know, but stick with me). Call it the Sales Heimlich Maneuver. Better yet, call it the Bye Overtraining Maneuver (sounds shamelessly self-promoting, I know, but again, stick with me).

Better Sales Are All in a Salesperson’s Head

A top athlete gets that way by incessantly drilling the same key skills over and over until they become part of the athlete’s neuromuscular system. And I’m not saying that in a metaphorical way – noted science writer Sharon Begley in her book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, tells us that recent research shows, “the brain can indeed be rewired.” And that indicates we can indeed train ordinary human beings to become sales machines, given, of course, the right set of inborn aptitudes.

That’s great news for salespeople, but the markedly less great news is all that brain rewiring doesn’t count for much if salespeople outthink themselves in response to pressure. The biggest reasons salespeople begin to question themselves are a: inexperience and b: insufficient training. Only time cures inexperience, but we can do something about the sales training issue right now.

More training? We’ve already trained our salespeople! I hear you, but a salesperson isn’t fully trained until he or she is overtrained.

How Overtraining Makes Salespeople Smart and Profitably Dumb at the Same Time

For a good example of overtraining the neuromuscular system, consider tying your shoes. Unless you wear loafers or Crocs, you do it every day. You practice every day. You’re very good at it. But when a child asks you how you do it, you have to stop and think. Hard. And you invent all kinds of “bunny hops into the burrow” explanations for something your brain does without any language at all and does well without regard to pressure.

Similarly, the best salespeople, the overtrained kind, would be pressed for an answer if you asked them how they sell. Suddenly, smart as they are about most things, they’re dumb about something they do every day. Like an ad for Nike, they’ll tell you they just do it. Or, rather, their neuro muscular system does it for them. Because they’re overtrained, whether by you or another firm or themselves, their “gut” instincts rise up and take over even when pressure is at its highest.

In short, overtraining has given these salespeople the tools and the confidence not to question themselves. Therefore, their “choke response” is on permanent mute. Any (over)training this salesperson’s firm has invested in is paid back many times over, which creates resources for more training. Which develops more high ROI salespeople. And so on.

Ask your salespeople how they sell. If they can tell you without hesitation, you need more training. If they can’t, that’s much better, but you still need more training to keep your sales team in top condition. So don’t be afraid to overtrain your salespeople. In fact, make it a priority. It’ll get their mental “buts” out of the way, change their response to pressure, and let their sales muscles do what they know how to do.

Bio: Danita Bye

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye has built her reputation on building and inspiring intentional, no excuse, high-performance sales teams that deliver bottom line results. With her unique Fortune-100 turned-entrepreneur perspective, Danita helps CEOs and company presidents take their national and international businesses to the next level. Her excuse-free approach to sales management, combined with her leadership acumen, enables sales staff and sales management to increase sales, boost profitability and create predictable revenue streams, all while reducing sales costs.

As a 10-year veteran of the Xerox Corporation, Danita consistently achieved award winning sales performance before leaving Xerox to become an equity partner and national sales manager for Minneapolis-based Micro-Tech Hearing Instruments, where she increased annual revenues from $300,000 to $10 million in just seven years. Danita has authored articles in Upsize Magazine, The Hearing Review, the Star Tribune, and Business Journal, where she was recently honored as one of the its Top 25 Women to Watch. Danita also featured as a guest on “The Ruthless Entrepreneur television show” which will begin airing on Oxogen Network in 2010. Her new book, Sales Management in the No Excuse Zone, is due for release in 2010.

Danita can be contacted at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com or 612-267-3320