Why to Avoid the Sales Trainer Who Wants to Teach You to Cold Call

Salespeople are supposed to sell. Cold calling is not a selling function but a lead generation function. So, it is not salespeople who should do it. Leads are supposed to be provided to them by the marketing folks.

Most sales training programmes don't work beyond the spike of temporary motivation, which dies down in a few days, so then salespeople are back to square zero. The other question is why a large part of sales training is motivation.

My stab to the answer is this: A group of uninspired but motivated (which is an external threat in disguise) people go out and chase another group of people (prospects) who run for dear life to avoid the former group like the plague.

When the members of the former group catch up with the members of the latter group (prospects), wrestle them to the ground and beat them until prospects give in and buy something.

After the successful "transaction", the member of the former group start chasing other members of the latter group. And the same process repeats again and again.

And this is what most sales training programmes teach.

The problem with many sales trainers is that they are sales trainers. They can't see sales in the context of business development, which includes marketing and post-sales service too. They get blindly bogged down with chasing more and more people. For many of them marketing means nothing more than prospecting.

But really marketing, selling and post-sales service make up the business development continuum as three seamlessly integrated processes. They join together like the oceans: Seamlessly, invisibly. As far as I know there are no signposts floating in the oceans: "Welcome to the Atlantic Ocean", "End of Indian Ocean".

The other problem with sales training programmes is that they are training programmes not education programmes. And there is a huge difference between training and education.

This may sound brutal here, but if it is, so be it. I have a problem with sales trainers who advise their clients to do more cold calling. The fact is most people hate doing cold calling, and because of this fact they are likely to fail. Hey, how can you succeed in something you hate? It's plain retarded. So, they fail, and then the sales trainer can go back to do more cold call training. The world is sceptical enough, so unless you sell newspaper subscriptions, cold calling is call for disaster. People hate making them and hate even more receiving them. One must be an idiot to force one's people to do it.

This reminds me of the words of Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas D. Dee Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business: "What kind of doctor would you be if your patient was bleeding faster and faster, and your only response was to increase the speed of the transfusion?"

For salespeople to thrive, they need qualified sales leads generated by the marketing folks. And in this age of technology leads can be easily generated 24/7 using automated systems, not manual labour.