Are You Surprised When Your Training Works? [Academy]

Are You Surprised When Your Training Works?

After teaching thousands of seed sellers all over the world how to sell seed to farmers, I’m still amazed at how surprised so many of them are when they discover the training actually works. The look on their faces is priceless and the comments they make afterward provide me with some great testimonials. It’s obvious that most of their shock comes from never having the right kind of training because when you have the right tools, selling seed is not that hard. I know that, because virtually every person I’ve trained who had no sales experience to farmers, make it look easy. Once they are fully trained and have role-played every part of the sales call, they are successful. And the interesting thing is, they don’t act surprised. It’s only the so-called experienced ones who going into shock.

One of the reasons my sales training sessions have been so effective is because I’ve made hundreds of seed sales myself, testing the concepts and showing others how to execute them. I learned early in my career leading more than 40 District Sales Managers and 1200 sales reps that you can’t teach what you can’t do yourself. For example, whenever our company raised the price of our seed which was never a popular move among the salesforce, my first job was to train the salesforce on how to handle the price increase. They needed to believe in it themselves before they could convince someone else it was a necessary move. Once I showed them how to “sell” the idea to prospects and customers, my next goals was to be the first one to fill an order book with sales from new customers. That would prove that increasing price was not a sales stopper. When I did that, they all had surprised looks on their faces that said, by golly, the training works.  

But I wasn’t the only one using that kind of strategy to put surprises on the faces of their sales reps. I got a call from the Director of Sales of one of my large retail clients. He wanted me to teach another session of the Seed Seller Blueprint Strategy. The best part about working with this organization was they made sure EVERYONE in their company went through the training. They believed every employee, whether they were a receptionist, a person behind the counter, a warehouse worker or office worker, needed to know how they were attacking the marketplace. We finished the visit and just before we hung up he said, I need to tell you a quick story.

He said, I took two of our of our so-called experienced sales reps with me to conduct Post Planting Report Card visits. He said, these two guys were not buying into your Blueprint strategy and were saying their customers wouldn’t do some of the things you were telling them to do. They said customers wouldn’t go to the field with them and thought the post planting report card visit was silly.  He said I decided to take them on a couple of calls to show them how this part of the Blueprint works, and if it was a success, they would be the best candidates for testimonials on how everyone should be following the Blueprint.

He said, he had asked each grower to meet him at one of the fields so he could do a Post Planting Report Card Check. They agreed to meet him there.  He said, not only were the growers interested in the process, but they were also impressed with what they learned. The result was those customers decided to buy either fungicide, or fertilizer based on what happened in the field so they could continue to support the crop. One of the salespeople said to me, you didn’t try to sell them anything, they just wanted to buy. They said, it was so easy how the farmers got involved in figuring out their bushels per 1000 plants and how that was established at planting time.”

Those kinds of calls make my day. In fact, they make my entire year because there are so many field sellers who make the process of selling seed so hard. To me, it’s easier than it has ever been to sell seed to farmers. When I hear of people who discover how easy selling can be when they give farmers the kinds of new experiences I teach, I’m not surprised, just excited. As they said in my favorite movie “It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart of course, another angel got its wings.

Happy Selling, I’m Rod Osthus