Sales Training In Action: How’s Your Confidence?

“A lot of the folks who enter the accounting profession are introverted, and selling is not natural for any of us,” says Jim Stelten, a partner in the CPA Service Group of KDV Wealth Management, LLC of Minneapolis. “But our firm has realized that each of us must be accountable for bringing in business.  Like it or not, we have to sell.”

More and more companies have awakened to that realization in recent years. Increasingly, people who have no sales experience and sometimes an outright aversion to selling—doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers—find themselves pushed into sales roles.

It is scary, and it’s no wonder that most of these people lack confidence in their sales skills. Yet confidence is critical to success in sales. It is a tremendous inner resource that gives you a massive edge in making sales calls, meeting with C-level decision-makers, and closing sales. Confidence may not be a sales skill, strictly speaking, but if you are selling, confidence is more valuable than any capability of your company or any feature of your product.

How much can sales training programs and sales coaching efforts do to build the confidence of people who are new to selling? Plenty, provided that the training and sales coaching are based on the right sales system.

A key reason why KDV launched sales training courses and sales coaching based on the Action Selling ® system is because “Action Selling ® is not scary,” Stelten says.

Selling may be scary, but your sales training should not be.

“Processes are involved in all of the services that we provide, like tax, audit, and financial reviews,” he continues. “Action Selling ® is a great fit for us because it is also a repeatable process. We use what we learn in our sales training and sales coaching programs in every customer interaction we have.”

A recent success story: “We made a call on the CFO of a large company.  Our small accounting firm was going up against four big nationals. I know they deliver sales training programs to their business-development teams.  Fortunately, their sales training wasn’t in Action Selling ®.

“The CFO had a sales background, so we knew going in that he’d appreciate a great sales call. But he was more impressed than I expected. After our initial call, he said to me: ‘That was one of the better meetings I’ve ever been in.  It was different because you talked about us much more than you talked about you.  You seem to care more about us than you.’

That very evident focus on the client’s needs was enabled by sales skills developed in KDV’s sales training courses and sales coaching. And what about the intangible quality of confidence?  “That victory over major competition gave everyone at KDV an extra shot of confidence,” Stelten says. “You can’t put a dollar value on self-esteem.”

For information about how to improve sales skills and make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.