Use Sales Skills in L&D to GTD

If you ask an L&D professional what they have in common with their colleagues in Sales, you would probably expect them to say, ‘Not much’.

Yet, even though Sales and L&D have different goals, motivations and pressures, they share the same need to sell. Salespeople identify opportunities to create value for customers; they support and influence complex decision processes in order to win deals. L&D staff identify opportunities to create value for the organisation; they support and influence senior leaders in order to gain budget approval for learning initiatives. Both groups face the same ‘do nothing’ decisions, deferred investments and fuzzy attention spans. Both parties need to sell to Get Things Done.

Unfortunately, that’s often where the similarity stops. There’s a major imbalance in how the teams are equipped to tackle these obstacles; salespeople often receive extensive training in how to identify and pursue opportunities, but L&D staff do not.

This difference is problematic. Like salespeople and account managers, L&D professionals need to build long-term, consultative and trusted relationships with senior executives and other influential stakeholders. In the sales arena we often assess where teams sit on a spectrum from transactional to transformational behaviour; the same thinking can be applied to L&D. Take a look at this graphic and ask yourself whether your L&D team are acting as – and perceived as – trusted Business Partners?

Am I seen as a trusted business partner?

At the bottom-left of this grid are pure Administrators (or order-takers), who deliver limited results and are not considered trusted advisors by their internal or external customers. In the top-left corner are the ‘pushy’ types who may achieve short-term wins, but not in a sustainable way. There aren’t usually too many of those in L&D, but there are lots of people in the bottom-right quadrant: the Friendly Helpers. These people lack some of the skills, confidence and/or domain knowledge needed to act as proactive partners with their own leadership teams. They execute well and build good relationships, but are not transformational. World-class L&D teams, on the other hand – as with world-class sales teams – aim for the top-right corner. They challenge their internal clients to create disruptive value, and are viewed as proactive Business Partners.

The difference between being a Friendly Helper and a Business Partner isn’t about how well you understand business or even L&D. It’s more about how well you can sell and build trusted, senior relationships.

The full range of sales skills is outside the scope of this article (please contact Imparta directly to discuss sales training for your L&D team), but let’s look at one of the foundation skills behind any successful sale: the ability to build trust with senior stakeholders.

In Maister, Galford and Green’s excellent book ‘The Trusted Advisor’, they define trust as follows:

The trust equation indicates that trusted advisors have three main characteristics:

1. Credibility: the customer’s perception of your expertise, clarity and honesty.
Tips: Know your subject. Give advice when you’re asked for it. Don’t exaggerate. Be passionate.

2. Reliability: how much customers think you are dependable and consistent.
Tips: A reputation for reliability is slow to create and quick to destroy, but you can make a strong start by under-promising and over-delivering. Always do what you say you’ll do, in the time you say you’ll do it.

3. Intimacy: how strongly the customer feels you’re emotionally engaged with the issues they face, instead of just seeing them as a source of revenue or work.
Tips: Be curious and an active listener. Uncover what people are measured on, and what they see as their challenges and their wider goals. Remember these and link your recommendations back to them.

The equation also shows that trust is dramatically reduced by self-orientation.

4. Self-orientation: the extent to which the customer perceives that you’re focused on your own targets, fears and desires rather than theirs.
Tips: This can result from small behaviours such as interrupting and finishing the customer’s sentences. It can also result from bigger issues such as recommending something without linking it to organisational needs, or worse: talking about why you need it to happen.

The equation suggests that suspending your own agenda is the quickest way to build trust. In L&D this means putting your stakeholders’ and buyers’ concerns first. It doesn’t mean you can’t have your own goals, but it does mean that only by truly understanding and meeting your stakeholders’ needs do you have the best chance of achieving them.

The Trusted Advisor approach is just one sales tool or methodology that L&D teams will find helpful. There are many more. Sales teams are routinely taught subjects that range from interpersonal skills – like listening, questioning and emotional intelligence – to strategic skills – like need identification, behavioural science, stakeholder management, competitive positioning and risk alleviation. These skills can be equally helpful to L&D teams as they look to achieve their objectives in a more effective way.

The next time your organisation invests in sales training, ask your provider to include your L&D team. Even better, ask them to deliver a module demonstrating how the strategies, communication skills and methodologies employed by the best sales personnel can really help L&D to GTD.

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[1] Source: The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford. Published by The Free Press, and a highly recommended read.