Henry Ford once said that if he asked his customers what they wanted they would have said "faster horses"
Similarly if you ask a Sales VP what he wants from his trainer (either internal or external), you'll typically here the skills he wants his reps to have.
This is analogous to Henry Fords horses. Sales VP's do not want their reps trained in negotiation, presenting, questioning or any other 'skill'.
They want different behavior from their reps, leading to different results, based on the premise that the same behavior will get the same results. They want their reps using their sales skills. This is a far cry from having the sales skills.
So the question is how do you get people to change their behaviors. Anyone with teenage children knows that you can easily train them in how to fish or change a tyre. If you want to fundamentally change their behavior make sure they hang out with friends with the behavior, opinions and beliefs that you want your kids to have and just stand back and watch operation transformation.
The same is true of organisations. There is six billion dollars spent annually on sales training. My observation is that most of this is wasted. The reason is that we try to change behavior from the bottom up by 'training' sales reps in the latest fad. When this fails, we look for another wall to bang our head against (SPIN Selling, Value Selling, Question Based Selling, Relationship Selling, Pain Based Selling, ad nauseum Based Selling).
None of the content is bad, much of it is quite good. But that's missing the point.
It would be far more effective to select the top three reps in a team of one hundred and focus 80% of training and coaching resources on them. These are the 'exemplars' or key opinion formers in the organisation. What they do (behavior) others will follow.
The fashion industry knows this only too well. Why do you think they put so much effort into getting fashion influencer's to wear their clothes/accessories? They are masters at identifying key opinion formers. That's how they quickly and efficiently change the behavior of entire markets.
The truth is we've been complacent in the sales training business. For too long our customers were willing to shell out good money so that they could tick the training box. All too often the measure of a great sales trainer was how entertaining s/he was whilst occasionally making points that everyone already knew (but just didn't practice)
Complacency is dead, it's high time we tore up the old script up shuck things up a bit.