Institutional Intelligence

I just attended a sales training seminar which focused on how to do a better job of pushing products for the company.

I’m old. Really, really old. And I have been selling, in one form or another, for most of my adult life. I’ve had more than my fair share of “training”.

Selling, as my experience has shown me, is nothing more than solving problems…at a profit.

First you need to find out what the problem is, figure out how what you’re selling can solve the problem, and then determine to what degree the customer wants the problem solved, meaning how much money are they willing to spend to make the problem go away.

Now you have just been taught in one paragraph what it took a trainer half a day to teach.

I think they make these training seminars painful so that you’ll actually look forward to going back to work.

As a rule, I try to take any opportunity to learn. What I learned today is that my company has no idea how to teach product knowledge or selling skills.

It was amazing to learn how ill informed the salespeople at the training were. At best they had no idea about how to answer customer questions and at worst they have been giving customers simply dead wrong answers, sometimes for years.

The poor trainer may have been the most clueless of all. She had very little institutional intelligence she could shed on the training beyond having us open the book and watch the video.

So how, exactly, are you supposed to get the product knowledge that customers expect?

In the two years I have been with the company, this was my first training seminar. Sure, they show you video’s and make you take competency tests before you wander out onto the sales floor after orientation, but none of that training has anything to do with what happens in the real world. You are basically swinging without a net.

If you don’t come into the business with some knowledge about what you are selling, then you are forced to learn it on your own or hope that someone else in the department has an idea about how to answer customer questions.

As a Home Improvement Warehouse, our employees are supposed to be a font of knowledge for the customers who wander in. At least that’s what the TV ads all say.

Customers expect me to know which wood flooring is best for a dog that can’t stop peeing in the house, which products will protect ceramic tile from a cat that can’t stop throwing up, and the best way to get bleach stains out of the carpet.

Here’s an idea; train the dog, shoot the cat and don’t be stupid enough to mess with bleach while standing on the carpet.

I know that’s a little rough for you cat lovers, so if you’d like, you can shoot the dog or the dumb bastard that spilled the bleach, your choice.

So unless you are old like me and have come into contact with more than your share of dog pee, cat puke and bleach stains, you have no way of knowing how to respond to these, all too common, customer questions.

It can be frustrating for new employees which helps explain the huge percentage, in some cases 90%, of employees leaving within the first 30 days. Nobody wants to feel dumb, and you certainly don’t what to take abuse for being dumb from a complete stranger.

So you are left with using your free time to search out information on your own so you can become a better employee…at a salary of $11.50 and hour, or you have to depend on the senior people in your department, if there are any, to point the way.

That’s why nobody knows anything.

The information they get on their own may or may not be correct and the history handed down from the elders may be just plain crap. Either way, there is no real way to become smart about what you sell unless you do the work on your own.

Imagine a fireman that picks up his skills on the internet, or a doctor who reads a few brochures before an operation. I know those are extreme examples, but if you spent anytime with my customers you’d know that they do expect me to constantly pull their butts out of fires and to do brain surgery.

And the worst part is that the company, and store management, expects it too.

Why is there so little time or money allocated to continuing education for employees?

Why does the company put so much emphasis in their marketing about having well trained employees and then tells those employees, by their lack of commitment to any substantial training program, that they aren’t worth the time and effort to train?

The company believes that its employees are their most important asset. They just don’t think that you, as one of those employees, is all that important.

This is just another symptom of the emerging trends that will hasten the down hill slide of big box retailers. If you don’t invest in your people, then you loose a big part of the value you should be delivering to your customers. If your employees can’t give them the information they need, then they will find it someplace else, and that someplace else where be will they spend their money.

Here’s a new slogan for you;

“Let’s build something together…with you doing most of the work”