thZJOPBEWJYour intention is to increase your company’s market share. To that end you’ve decided your salespeople should become more adept at selling. You Google sales trainers. STOP; ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you want your salespeople trained or educated? (‘Training’, associated with repetitive actions as in dog-training and potty-training, may not be the your best choice for the men and women upon whom you depend to increase your company’s market share.) Education, on the other hand, introduces and develops skill sets and encourages free and creative thinking, so critical in the field.

2. Are you, as the boss, planning to take part in the selling education in which you are investing?
(Too often bosses enroll their salespeople in selling courses that they choose not to attend themselves.) Bosses, unfamiliar with the fine-points taught in selling courses, find it extremely difficult to encourage and support the enlightened selling disciplines with which their newly motivated salespeople return. They may even reject many of the new selling ideas. The results: injured morale, de-motivation and little or no measurable upturn in market share. These salespeople eventually resign.