Sales leadership · 3 min read

Tuesday Mornings at 8:30

Sales training is sold as a methodology. What you are really buying is a standing appointment, and it is only worth what your people attend.

By Jeev Trika

In May 2018 DMA was new, and I wanted its salespeople trained in a proper selling methodology. I chose Sandler, which I already knew. The local franchise offered a one-year seat license per person: a two-day boot camp, materials, a behavioural assessment, and a live session every Tuesday from 8:30 to 10:00 in the morning, which the team could join remotely.

I negotiated it the way I negotiate anything, starting from what we would actually use:

We certainly won’t be attending all, we won’t be using any of your resources or eating and drinking in the meeting rooms. We also don’t need the DISC assessments etc. We are interested in listening in and participating.

I named a monthly figure per person, and added:

If that is acceptable, let’s roll. If not, no harm no foul. It’s just the stage of business we are in and that’s what we believe is fair value to us at this time.

The trainer said a year at that rate was not feasible, but offered four months. I asked for eight, because that would give our people “a chance to grow and close before we sign up again.” He came back at six. My reply:

We requested 12 months, you suggested 4 months - let’s do this at 8. We can sign the agreement today if agreeable to you.

The agreement arrived that afternoon.

Then the Tuesdays

Six months later, in November, the trainer wrote to one of our team. He had lost him partway through the session, while asking a question about role play, and wanted to make sure our team was engaged. He suggested cameras on.

He forwarded it to me with his side: the trainer’s audio had cut out, not for the first time, and after ten minutes of silence they had logged off. Then he added the question that mattered:

Perhaps we should decide if we are going to continue, and if so, ensure we commit the time so we don’t distract from the rest of his group.

My reply that evening was dismissive. I told him the trainer’s concern was commercial and not to read too much into it.

His question was the right one, though, and it is the one any company buying sales training has to answer. There is an irony in it. I had negotiated the price by arguing we would not use everything, and not using everything is exactly how a training program fails: the boot camp is exciting, and the weekly session is the first thing to slip when there is a call to make.

What stuck

The methodology did outlast the subscription. In March 2021, reviewing DMA’s proposal templates, I wrote to the team:

Every proposal needs to solve the “pain” for that unique customer; needs to be business savvy

Then a list of what every proposal had to establish: revenue now and expected revenue in six months, traffic now and in six months, conversions now and in six months, collected at intake, shown in the presentation, and measured in every progress report. “Pain” is in quotation marks because it is the method’s word, not mine. The habit of quantifying it before proposing anything is the part that stuck.

In January 2022 I wrote to a former Sandler trainer I had worked with and asked her to take me through the boot camp again, along with a couple of employees: “Go through the Sandler methodology; or a ‘Sales’ methodology you like :)”

That line is the honest summary. The specific method mattered less to me than having one, and going back through it. I apply the same test to myself, which is why I still go back to school at fifty.

If you are buying it

Negotiate the price; trainers expect it. But the number that decides whether it was worth it is not the fee. It is how many of those Tuesday mornings your people actually sat through, and whether anything from them shows up in a proposal two years later.

Putting a rhythm like that into a team that has never had one is the fractional sales work I take on.