Since there are limited formal college degrees or education in Sales (check out www.salesleadershipcenter.com for the list) it is incumbent on us as Sales professionals to find ways to improve our skills on a consistent basis. Some of our education comes from books, seminars, and training courses which all have their own value (some more than others). However, most of our education comes on the job and learning from experience.  We tend to learn by trial and error which is ultimately one of the best ways to learn. The key is paying attention and putting some structure to our trial and error efforts so we can learn faster and be more proactive about our development.

 

We can train ourselves to get better every day in sales by taking a slightly more scientific approach and not just making it up as we go. The more structure and objectivity we can insert into our process the more we can make measurable improvements.  One of the best ways to apply this is by ‘split testing’ almost everything we do.  Marketing run split tests all the time.  They send out different e-mail templates to see which ones get higher response rates or create different landing pages to find out which one drives more traffic. This is all in an attempt to gather data that helps them determine what works and what doesn’t so they can get better and improve results.  We can do the same thing in Sales.

Here are a few ways we can implement split testing in our day to day sales activities so we can train ourselves and get better every day:

 

• Prospecting approaches – most of us don’t think about the approaches we use when prospecting. We tend to take a random approach and apply whatever we think is most appropriate based on the situation. However, if we were to define some of our approaches, focus on one at a time, track and measure the results we would quickly start to find that some approaches worked far better than others. Examples of approaches could be: calling early in the morning; leaving a voice mail and sending an e-mail immediately afterwards; calling into a vertical industry with a specific value statement; calling the competition of an existing client; etc.  Here’s a recommendation – develop 4 different approaches of your own, use each 100 times and track how many attempts, responses and meetings get set up from each.  Keep the ones that produce better results and dump the ones that don’t.  Keep split testing different approaches and messages until you come up with 2-3 that you know work.

 

• Objection handling – most of us deal with the same group of objections on a regular basis. Here’s a recommendation – write down one objection (word for word) that you have the hardest time dealing with.  Then come up with 2 different ways to handle that objection (examples include: feel, felt, found; justification; reprioritization, etc.).  The next 10 times you get that objection use one approach and the next 10 times you get the objection use the other approach.  Keep a simple piece of paper on your desk to track the positive and negative responses to each.  After dealing with the objection 20 times see which approach got you more positive responses and use that one moving forward.