2

Instituting Higher Standards
and Regular Training

Preprogram Your Organization to Run
Like a Finely Tuned Machine

According to an article in Harvard Business Review, only 10 percent of the population has what’s called “the learning mind-set.” These are people who seek out and enjoy learning. The other 90 percent of the population will not look to improve their skills unless they have to as part of their job requirement. Today, most professions—real estate brokers, accountants, financial planners, stockbrokers, lawyers, healthcare professionals, masseuses, and so on—have mandatory continuing education because they found that, without it, people wouldn’t keep current with the information necessary to be accepted as a professional in their field.

What if your doctor wasn’t required to keep up to date with medical advances and hadn’t looked at a medical text in 20 years? He or she might be prescribing medicine that is now known to be harmful or doing procedures that we’ve proven ineffective. Yet in most companies there’s little or no training and there’s rarely mandatory training.

Some managers view training as an interference with “work” to be done. But think of the tale of the woodcutters: Woodcutter A cuts wood all day. Woodcutter B keeps stopping and sitting down. At the end of the day, woodcutter B has three times more wood than woodcutter A. Woodcutter A asks: “How could this happen? You were resting all day!” Woodcutter B says: “I wasn’t resting. I was sharpening my saw.” Take time to sharpen your skills, your tools, and your resources, and you will be more productive.

The Tribal Method of Training

Joe’s Bank just hired Sam, and he’s about to go through his new-hire training. At Joe’s Bank, they use what I call the “tribal method of training,” where information is passed from person to person by word of mouth, like cavemen might have done. Sam is told to watch Betty for two days, and then he will be ready to do things himself. There is no formal methodology, no classroom-style training, no training manuals, no role playing. It’s all just one person sitting with another person and watching what that person does. Just watch and learn. If Betty has a bad day, a bad attitude, or bad habits, Sam might think these are acceptable as well. This is the worst kind of training you could possibly have.

On the other hand, banks like Wells Fargo, Banker’s Trust, and Citibank—all former clients of mine—have classroom-style training programs with policies and procedures for every thing. At one of these companies, Sam goes through extensive classroom training before he ever sits to observe another teller. When he finally sits down to do so, he can actually spot when she’s doing something wrong. Sam has learned his job, but the training shouldn’t stop there. Improving and advancing the skills and professionalism of every person in your company is an ongoing process, and formal training sessions should be regular and nonnegotiable.

Your industry and competitors might be advancing, but, without mandatory continuing education, your team isn’t. In this chapter you’ll learn how to set the standards of achievement in your company or department. You’ll learn how to implement mandatory training programs and how to make them fun, interesting, and stimulating so your staff loves them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person army or a Fortune 500 firm; you need to be working on your skills.

I had an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) client who was trying to penetrate the 100 biggest manufacturers in her market using a method you will learn in Chapter Six. A key element to this process was that her sales staff had to toughen up. The grim reality is that without great training, the majority of salespeople will never call a prospect back who rejects them even once. Few salespeople will call back even twice after a prospect has said no. This was definitely the case with this OEM company. Its salespeople would have given up after the first rejection from those manufacturers. But we were implementing a corporate initiative and it was absolutely mandatory that they learn how to persevere.

We knew that it would take a coordinated and highly monitored effort to solve this problem. We had call reports that the salespeople were required to fill out that showed what their activity was, and then every week, I personally selected salespeople for what I call “the hot seat.” I drilled them with specific questions about the prospects they had contacted—what their efforts were, what they said, and what the prospect said. Because they knew we were going to be doing this every week, it slowly raised the bar of performance in the whole company.

This was not easy or immediate. Every salesperson started off not really doing the required activities. But when they were put on the hot seat by me, with all 50 of the other salespeople as well as the president of the company, the vice president of sales, and their sales manager all listening, they quickly realized they had better respect what we were going to inspect.

For the first three months there was barely any progress and, on their own, this company and its sales team probably would have given up. But after three months of steady marketing to the executives at these manufacturers and more or less forcing the sales staff to keep calling the same prospects who kept saying no, we started to make nice progress. Every week we would go over what the salespeople were saying and what the prospects were saying. In each case, I’d tune up their skills. Within six months the sales crew had gotten in to see 54 percent of those they targeted.

With consistent, relentless, and organized training on just this specific concept, we raised the standard dramatically and then policed it throughout the organization. These salespeople learned that consistency in their approach—no matter how many times they were rejected—results in a tremendous conversion rate of prospects to buying clients. They are now the masters of selling in their industry.


image Exercise

With training, every one sings in harmony. What kind of music is your organization creating? Write down whether the following statements are true or false in your business:

  1. All employees perform each aspect of their job with a high degree of excellence and consistency.
  2. Results are somewhat predictable because training and skills are consistent.
  3. Each supervisor would give a similar answer for each question or problem.
  4. Each employee would give a similar answer for each question or problem.
  5. Client treatment is similar, no matter who the client deals with in our company or department.
  6. All staff members know what is considered good performance or attitude.

If you answered false to any of these statements, you aren’t serious enough about training. Without training, employee activity will be intermittent, inconsistent, moody—maybe even indifferent or rude—because you have not set standards. With proper training, every employee will know the ideal procedure for initial contact with a client, the questions they need to ask every single client no matter what, and the follow-up procedures that you absolutely insist upon. The more proactive training you have, the better the…every thing in your organization. This book will take you very deep into all these issues, but the purpose of this chapter is to emphasize that the most important thing you can do is to insist upon mandatory and regular skills training.

Training Sets Standards

Deliberate and constant training radically improves employees’ understanding of company objectives and helps to raise and set standards of performance. If you don’t train, you can’t expect people to get to the next level. That’s why most companies stay small or have to continually waste time addressing the same issues and problems over and over again.

Training Makes Money

Quality training is guaranteed to make you money. In the case of the company going after manufacturers, it had been in a four-year decline when we started our program. With consistent training it experienced a dramatic and much-needed increase in sales. Your sales team knows what to do and can handle any situation with ease because you’ve covered it in your weekly sessions together, right? It’s the same with customer service (which you will learn more about in Chapter Three) and every other area of your business.

When clients experience consistent top-notch service no matter who they are dealing with in your organization, they will keep coming back. Without training, you’ll lose clients that might be saved if you proactively address issues as they arise. Standardized client interaction and follow-up procedures mean that you are constantly building better client relationships that will lead to repeat business and referrals. Again, this book will give you a full formula for all these things in subsequent chapters.

Training also saves you money because it reduces employee turnover. When employees know exactly what to do in any situation, they have the tools to thrive in your organization. Training boosts confidence and reduces stress. Because training also sets a clear path for performance, it will be easier to measure and reward employees for exceeding performance standards. With organized and regular training programs, your company or department will be a better place to work.

Train or Be Derailed

The health of your business is not so different from that of your body. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you were choking, would you rather your friends try to learn the Heimlich maneuver right then and there or would you prefer that they already had training and practice doing it? Training is proactive. It keeps your company healthy and prepared no matter what crisis arises. If you don’t train, you force every one to be reactive, so your chances for survival decrease dramatically.

Training can save lives. I taught self-defense in New York City when I was 25, training many top executives at some of the biggest companies in the world. I remember presenting to a major oil company when the chief of security said that he thought self-defense training was a bad idea. “People will get false confidence and probably get in more trouble.” I asked him if he had any kids. He had a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old daughter. Two weeks prior to that meeting there had been a horrible situation in Queens where an 18-year-old girl was dragged onto the roof of her building, sexually abused, and then thrown off the roof to her death. I asked if he remembered the story. He did. The girl had the attacker’s skin under her fingernails, showing that she had made a gallant fight. In a life-threatening situation, you’re in one of two categories: either you have no training and you’re guessing, or you’ve had training and have very specific ideas of what you can do. I asked the executive which category he’d rather his daughters be in: trained or untrained. He said, “I see your point.”

It’s the same with any area of your business. When your employees confront any situation, they’re in one of two categories. Either you’ve addressed it and trained them and they have the information they need to deal with it, or you haven’t addressed it or trained them and they’re going to be guessing. Which category would you rather your staff be in?

Some people fear that they won’t remember things when they’re in crisis. But your brain has a crisis scan function that kicks in during those situations. When adrenaline is pumped into your system, your brain speeds up, searching for what it has available to get you through the crisis. Over the years of teaching self-defense, I heard many examples of this—where someone in a crisis would not just remember what to do, but would even remember me teaching him the move.

When I was 18 years old, I drove a car off a cliff while racing a friend on a rainy night (not a very smart move). As I was coming around a curve, the car broke from the wet ground and there was another car coming at me. I punched the gas and spun the wheel at exactly the right time to avoid crashing into the oncoming car and regain control. But the road curved again and there was no way I was going to make it. I had sped up to get out of danger and now I was going too fast. The car slid off the road and hit a lawn at 80 or 90 mph. I felt the car double its speed as it careened across a slick lawn. The car hit a tree, spun sideways around the tree, and toppled 265 feet down a cliff. An untrained body would have stiffened up with fear and broken every bone.

The only reason I’m still here is because of my karate training. As my brain signaled “crisis,” my body knew from years and years of karate practice not to tense up and resist, but to relax. I was floating around on the inside of that car. I was bouncing off the sides, the steering wheel, the roof, and before each impact, I would block my face from being hit. The car finally came to a crashing halt in the treetops. I survived that night because of training.

The point is that any kind of training can intervene in a crisis or in any situation that you want to change. Here’s another example of a situation that was not a crisis but that posed a serious challenge in my company. We have a massive radio campaign that is driving leads to our sales team. People call in response to the ad to get more information sent to them about what we do. We tell them that in order to send them the right information, we need to know a little more about their business. We ask a few questions about what they do and then we ask them what their two biggest challenges are in growing their business. In the process, if it seems appropriate, we mention that, as an alternative to just receiving information in the mail, they can sign up for one of our training programs on the Web.

We had five new salespeople who started in a single week and about five out of 10 prospects responded to that alternative offer by saying, “Well, send me the information and then I’ll decide.” This went on for a week with hundreds of people throwing up this objection for which the salespeople had no comeback. The minute I heard this, I trained them to use this script: “Well, sir, I’m happy to send you the reports. In fact, they’re already on their way. But let me tell you what happens to people who receive our reports. Either they read the reports and are so impressed with the information they end up signing up for the Web seminar I’m talking to you about now. Or they’re in such a reactive mode, reacting to their business, that they never take the time to read the reports or to improve their business, and they end up doing nothing. My question to you is: Are you the kind of person who would rather take action and learn how to double your business? Or are you too busy reacting to your current business to take the time to learn the skills to improve it?”

Using this script, the salespeople improved their closing ratio. Of the prospects who would usually use that objection, half would sign up for the Web seminar right there on the phone. So performance improved immediately just by adding another piece of training to the process. This situation was not exactly a crisis, but we were losing half our prospects because no one took the time to think about what would be a logical comeback to that particular objection. This shows that a little training goes a long way.

So let’s not have people making up what they’re going to do in a crisis or in any other situation in your company or department. Let’s have them know what to do in every situation because you address it weekly.

Repetition Is Key

When designing your training programs, remember that repetition is the key to preprogramming your company or department to run like a machine. The design of the Ultimate Sales Machine program was conceived with the simple law that no one gets good at anything without repetition. Karate requires tremendous discipline. You’re just repeating moves over and over. This is true of tennis, golf, or any other sport. Practice, practice, practice and then, when you’ve begun to master your moves so that you know what to do automatically, it gets exciting. But pigheaded discipline comes first.

Just how serious are you about your company? Are you playing at business or taking care of business? According to Sun Tzu in The Art of War, one of the five essentials of victory is this: “He will win whose army is animated with the same spirit throughout all its rank.” 3 How are you going to animate your whole team with the same spirit? Three words: training, training, and training.

Most of the better training programs come in and blitz an organization with a lot of information and then they leave. The staff has a nice healthy glow for about a week afterward. The perception is that you received a lot of value, because you gained a lot of information. But in reality, without continuous follow-up, very little sticks from a one-shot training. That said, one-shot training is better than no training, but you’re about to learn that there is a better way.

By rotating core material regularly, the same concepts are constantly reinforced and reiterated. Skills are impacted immediately in either training method; yet, over time, skills are impacted permanently with consistent repetition. When you get all of your people speaking the same language and following standardized procedures, internal communication improves dramatically because every one shares a deep and rich pool of the same knowledge base.

Taking the time management skills you learned in Chapter One as an example, here’s what a typical learning curve looks like and why repetition is so essential. In this graph, we see that right after someone does some time management training, there is an immediate increase in skill. What happens after training occurs if there is no follow-through? As you can see here, there is an immediate falloff of the newly learned skill. That’s where most companies and programs stop; hence, some minor skill remains, but it’s not like you’re going to magically turn every one into a time management expert with a single training experience.

image

What I do, in my own companies and with clients, is constantly teach the same information again and again until the skill is permanent. The skill improves again with another training session, but there is greater improvement because it’s the same material being covered. The falloff occurs again, but it’s not as dramatic as last time. Then another training session takes place and then another, and the skills improve even more, and the dropoff is even less. You see that, with each training session, mastery is that much closer.

How to Run a Training Session

To begin a training session, people should be told what to expect:

When people have a clear understanding of what they are about to hear and see, they will be mentally prepared and focused for the training.

It is important to create a training environment that is conducive to learning. Make it fun! Create an open environment where people can make comments, jokes, and suggestions without reproach. This isn’t military training. People should look forward to it because they know it will be interesting and stimulating. As I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, learning is not something most people do naturally. Since most of your staff will be reluctant to take time to train, you must make training fun, interesting, stimulating, and even an exciting experience. And above all, training must be mandatory. Put it on a schedule as a nonnegotiable commitment. No doctor’s appointments. No dentist appointments. No excuses. Even one-person armies must treat it this way. Set a schedule and commit to following it—no matter what.

As you will learn in Chapter Eight, we retain significantly more information if we both see and hear it rather than just hearing it. But we retain the most information if we are actively involved in our learning such as when we participate in role playing or other learning exercises. At the very least, always use visual aids in your training because they drastically increase retention. Data dumps are okay for initial sessions when you need to relay a lot of information. However, the highest retention will come from practical application and regular and consistent involvement. That’s where you get the big gains in productivity. So don’t just create a training booklet and hand it out. Set the time, reserve the room, and make the training session mandatory.

Encourage questions, jokes, insights, participation, and humor. Treat all questions with respect, no matter how pointless you think they are! Keep your people focused, but don’t make them feel stupid.

There are a variety of training methods and tools you can use to suit your material. It is a good idea to mix a few methods to meet your needs and keep people awake. Let’s consider a few.

Lecture Format

This means you talk and they listen. This method is good for a data dump but not for anything that requires substantial input or group processing.

Group Questions

You present broad questions to the group and ask for a show of hands. This method keeps people engaged because it is interactive. Asking group questions is also very helpful when you want to show what is at stake in a given training session. Leading people to their own conclusions is much more powerful than you telling them what that conclusion should be. You might ask the following series of questions: “How many people get frustrated when they don’t know the answer to a customer service question?” “How many of you would like to be so much of an expert that no matter what comes up, you are prepared to deal with it?” “Who here thinks that training and role playing would give them additional insights into how to deal with more situations?” Asking these types of questions can guide a group to the conclusion you want them to make.

Group Discussions

As in the group questions format, you are facilitating discussion around a given topic or issue and want specific feedback from your group. This keeps every one engaged, but here the substance of their answers is crucial to the training session. For example, if I’m teaching a seminar and ask, “Who here has done workshops at their company?” I might get a show of hands. But then I ask, “How’s it going?” At this point, I am going to get specific feedback from which I can extract common themes that need addressing in the training session.

Demonstration Training

With this training technique, the supervisor demonstrates how the employee should perform the task. Perhaps you are working on making appointments. The supervisor sets the scenario—she’s calling a prospect for the first time and her goal is to get an appointment with the CEO. The imaginary receptionist answers the phone. The supervisor delivers the script of what every one on the sales team will say to get past the receptionist and through to the CEO. After demonstrating, the supervisor will then solicit questions and probe to determine the level of understanding from the employees. The supervisor will then ask the employees to demonstrate back to the supervisor, which leads to role playing.

Role Playing

Role playing is an extremely effective way to train. Let’s take customer service as an example. A company that is looking to be at the top of its game will already have outlined “the seven most common customer service issues.” Even though you may have a manual that lays out what to do in various situations, role playing can really drive it home. Role playing helps each person automatically do what he’s supposed to do even if he’s rushed, challenged, or surrounded by distractions.

The other day I was calling my cell phone company because my phone magically started receiving about six text messages per second—every thing from the news to the weather to horoscope predictions. I was calling to get this feature shut off and, I’ll admit, I was impatient because the customer service person didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, even though I thought I was explaining it clearly. My wife was sitting next to me when the customer service person hung up on me. My wife’s thought was that I deserved to be hung up on because I was impatient with the customer service rep. Except now I was furious. If a customer is unhappy, have you trained your staff to hang up on them or to console them?

In reality, this scenario was disastrous but as a role play between a supervisor and a customer service rep it would be a fabulous tool. With the supervisor acting more and more obnoxious, the exercise would serve the dual function of preparing employees for the worst and providing comic relief for the training session. So yes, you can have fun and joke about irate customers (like me), but it sets the tone of how those people are to be treated. Not hung up on, but nurtured. You can tell when you encounter an organization where this training has been done and when you get one where it has not been done.

Hot Seats (Going Deeper)

Hot seats are a highly effective method of improving skills. I use these constantly with my clients. As we work to implement a new program or procedure, I hot seat sales reps. I drill down again and again on minute details until they get everything practically perfect.

For example, we had a client who sold office equipment. If sales reps went to the office manager in a prospect company, they would get nowhere. The typical office manager did not have the authority to approve the budget for replacing the major equipment like copiers and computer systems, even if they were 15-year-old antiques. The attitude was always this: as long as it’s working, don’t fix it! Office managers might know the long-term advantages of upgrading their office equipment, but often they were ineffective at persuading senior management to spend the money. My client wanted to get to the CFO instead. But reps found that most CFOs bunted them right back to the office manager because that’s who’s in charge of the office equipment. To get around this, we deliberately went after the CEOs, knowing that they would bunt us down to the CFO. We worked on this “CEO bunt” method and perfected it.

Hot seats were key to implementing the CEO bunt because I constantly found that the sales team had not done some step in the process we had expertly laid out. For example, a key ingredient to an effective CEO bunt is to give that CEO a tool that he or she can pass to the person you really want to reach. Usually that’s a follow-up memo, yet I cannot tell you how many times hot seats revealed that the salesperson had not done this step.

I put the salespeople in the hot seat and asked them questions on every single part of this process until I was sure they absolutely had it down and would do it right the next time. I even did this with the owner of this company. Just from this one process, this team went from making four appointments a week to 30 appointments a week. But to be clear, it took five months of pigheaded determination and discipline to turn this company into the Ultimate Sales Machine.

Case Studies as a Training Method

As I just did with the office equipment story and as I do throughout this book, your training should use concrete examples and case studies in which the concept you are teaching made a big difference. People remember stories, especially when they are dramatic or humorous. There are two ways to include case studies in your standard training. One case study should show how someone did every thing wrong and how that made the situation worse. Another case study should show how someone did every thing right and how well it worked.


image Exercise

Right now, for your area, think of a case study that illustrates a great point about how something should be handled. Write it down in as much detail as you can remember.

Test Before and After

For every concept or skill you teach, develop a test on that area for the staff. And if you really want to see your training stick, give staff the test before they take the training. That shows them how much they’re going to learn and, more important, makes the answers stick when they learn it. Then, after the training, they take the tests again and feel accomplished when they get all the answers correct.

The Spot Quiz

In the companies I’ve run, spot quizzes are an institution. The staff comes into the weekly meeting and I hand out a spot quiz like you used to get in school. The staff groans, laughs, and makes jokes, but little by little, whatever you cover, again and again, eventually sticks. What are the six steps to time management? The 12 steps to get an appointment? The seven steps to selling? The six questions they’ll ask every prospect? They know the answers. I have had them so programmed that if you quizzed some salespeople who haven’t worked for me in 10 years, they’d probably still be able to fire the answers right off.

Technology Training Can Be a Boon to Productivity

I remember reading that most software programs are used to about 10 percent of their potential. The other day I was watching a consultant who works for us download a file from his email. He opened the email, opened the PowerPoint document, and then went to “save as” in the menu and saved it in a folder. I reached over and, using the mouse, simply dragged the item into the folder. He couldn’t believe it was that easy. For years, he had been saving attachments as separate docs, not knowing you could simply drag them into the folder of choice.

Fortunately, this was not a technology consultant, but his company had never had any technology training at all. The skill level was embarrassing. I suggest that every company have some kind of ongoing and continuing technology training so that all employees know how to use the technology they have in the fastest, most efficient way possible. There are excellent tutorial software programs out there that teach you how to use technology effectively.

The best way to conduct technology training is to have mandatory times when this will occur and to make it fully interactive. As the instructor goes through the material, each person should follow along by executing each task for himself. Simply showing employees how to perform some operation does not mean they will be able to do that operation on their own. Those who are good with technology often get impatient with those who aren’t—they want to just grab that mouse and show them how it’s done. I have a technology person like that on my staff and I constantly swat his hand away and insist that I do the clicking myself so I learn better. And, again, the key here is repetition. Better to teach five shortcuts and repeat them three weeks in a row during your training sessions than to teach five new shortcuts every week and have none of them stick. We are all so busy doing our jobs that we don’t take time to learn these shortcuts.

For example, I like to enlarge the type on my screen so that I don’t have to use my glasses while working on my computer. And then I have to remember to put the font size back to normal-size type before sending the document on to a client. One day while my tech expert was watching me do this, he showed me that right on the menu bar of Word, there is a little window where you can enlarge the “view” without enlarging the actual type itself. Simple, fast, and I never have to remember to change the size of the type. Over the years I have surely wasted a month of my time enlarging type and setting it back to normal size. There are probably dozens of things you do for which some genius programmer has created shortcuts. Another way to learn technology, if you are a high-level executive, is to go through some of your normal tasks while a more technical person watches over you and shows you shortcuts.

Email is another area where training is key. I was the last person to do email and now I can’t live without it. But I learned it by having an expert watch over my shoulder and walk me through it and then come back several times during the course of the week to show me more and more shortcuts and easier ways to do things. Same with PowerPoint. I couldn’t live without these tools today. The productivity boost is enormous.

Now let’s introduce the most powerful training you can possibly conduct in any company or department.

Workshop Training

Workshops are a powerful way to facilitate training, improve skills, and implement new procedures. This method is so effective for improving any company, department, issue, or skill that we have devoted an entire chapter to it. In the next chapter, you will learn how to use workshops to solve every problem in your organization and improve any skill area.


image Exercise

What’s your training plan? Everything works better with a plan, so jot down the answers to the following questions to begin creating your unique training plan. Write down whatever comes to mind even if you don’t know where to begin. In the next chapter, you will learn how to get very clear on how to develop your training plan by using these notes to create an organized program.

 

Conclusion

Developing a regular and consistent training program will enable you to effectively and systematically accomplish the following:


Train new employees who can hit the ground running.

Upgrade knowledge and skills of existing employees so that everything they do works better, smarter, faster.

Provide continuous professional development so your staff becomes more and more effective.

Solve any and all problems that come up in your organization.


If you take the time to sharpen skills and improve knowledge in every possible area, your company will start to run better, smarter, and faster—like a finely tuned sales machine. The companies that conduct the best training will own the future, so train constantly, train with enthusiasm, and train as you entertain. Lastly, and this is not to be overlooked, train or feel the pain.

With consistent training every week in every area of your company, you can put higher and higher standards into place and raise the bar of performance for your entire staff. If you really want to become the Ultimate Sales Machine, training is an absolute must at every level, no matter how large or how small you might be.