Training to improve salesmen's performance

Abstract

Traditional sales training has concentrated primarily on the sales interview and has given salesmen a series of behavioural guidelines to use in that situation. Sometimes these have been in the form of such mnemonics as AIDA — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action; sometimes as in the rather better Rank ‘Customer and You’ films they have consisted of a series of relatively simple rules of thumb. Another approach has worked through giving the salesman some idea of the customers' motivation. Our approach to salesmen training has started at a different point — the motivation of the salesman himself. Professor David McClelland of Havard has over the past 30 years or so been researching the relationship between the level of achievement, affiliation and power motivation, on the one hand and the level of success in various occupations on the other. He found that salesmen, like entrepreneurs, they work on their own to a marked degree and have the opportunity to get quick feedback on results of their work — they either make a sale or fail to do so — are successful if they have a high level of achievement motivation. He also managed to isolate the strategies and behavioural characteristics of people with such a high level. Finally he proved that the level of achievement motivation can be developed by training.