Students of the Sales Training Institute will learn to:

• Generate increased top line sales training revenue through sales skills development
• Learn to close more sales in a sales consultative approach by becoming business consultants
• Create better margins for sales training efforts while learning effective probing, supporting and closing skills
• Lower sales operating costs by increasing effective sales interviewing skills by quickly following up on sales leads
• Develop stronger telephone and face to face selling skills through high impact sales training seminars based on extensive in class practice
• Strengthen company’s identification of their strategic sales opportunities
• Design and optimize sales strategies for selling and winning business
• Become more productive at their sales jobs through pre-call planning and better handling
• Implement more effective sales communication skills through effective and efficient time usage in our sales training seminars
• Generate and practice more powerful customer sales presentations training
• Increase sales force training skills and become immediately more productive on their sales jobs
• Be more effective in their sales communications with their internal and external customers
• Apply the skills learned in our sales training seminars while energizing their fellow sales force members  

An older sales professional and a new salesperson are going to visit a potential new client. Up until now the old one has always conducted the sales negotiations and the new one only accompanied him. Now the tables are turned, however, since the older asks the other to visit this client on his own. The new salesperson is startled by this. The older salesperson then initiates the following conversation:

Old Salesperson: "Where are you now?"

New Salesperson: "That's a stupid question. I'm sitting in the car!"

Old Salesperson: "Aha! What do you think the outcome will be if you were to go into this company and request to talk to the buyer?"

New Salesperson: "He won't agree to see me as he'll be angry as I'm disturbing him. He might even have me thrown out, who knows."

Old Salesperson: "It's possible! And where would you be then?"

New Salesperson laughs and says "Right! Back in the car!"

An Austrian psychologist, Dr. Victor Frankl, names this phenomena the paradoxes of the will: the harder you try to forget something the more difficult it is to forget it.

Charlatans were working with these paradoxes in the Middle Ages: they would sell lead which would be transformed into gold overnight, provided that the person who bought the lead did not think about the wealth he was going to get. Nobody can go through a whole night which is going to lead to enormous wealth without thinking about it, however. If the miracle did not happen then the salesperson would accuse the buyer of not following his instructions.

The more your salespeople resolve to stop being afraid of some of their clients' hostility, the stronger this feeling will become (this is equally true in certain cases of some sales managers!)

You should therefore try to take the "enemy" concept to the extreme and show just how ridiculous it is. Describe the outcome of a sales call to an unfriendly customer in the most vivid way:

I am prepared to visit this client even though he has a reputation for being cynical and merciless. Ghengis Khan and Nero appear like choir boys compared to him! He is so awful he has to hire armed body guards to keep his employees from storming his office and lynching him! He has the heads of 200 salespeople who wanted to visit him mounted on his wall!

Encourage your salespeople in sales training workshops to imagine such ridiculous things, before visiting a "hostile" client, that the situation seems ridiculous.

Anyone who can laugh about their problems is on the way to solving them says Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport. If you can make a problem seem ridiculous, it will lose its power over your mind!

If the sales representative cannot reach this stage on his own, he should ask a good friend to take his problems to the extreme.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that this process is too easy. It is one of the most effective ways of solving problems ever developed!

Remind your sales representatives during sales training sessions of the following example before they make their first visit: Before you go through the door your turnover is 0 and the worst thing that can happen when you leave the company is that your turnover is still 0. It's a ridiculous problem really!

Source: Richard Stone link