Why Salespeople Need Music Lessons Before They Start Selling

I could start with a sports analogy but seriously, haven’t I done enough of those?

How Musicians Start

When I was in the music business, parents would buy musical instruments – mostly guitars and keyboards – for their kids for Christmas, Hanukkah, and birthdays. Most parents took our advice and scheduled their kids for lessons and a year later, would be back to trade-in that first instrument for a nicer and better one because their child was actually learning to play!

Teens and young adults would buy instruments for themselves but most skipped the lessons. They wanted to start playing pop and rock songs on day one. Sure, there were a rare few that could teach themselves to do that and succeed, but the overwhelming majority failed. They simply couldn’t learn to play a musical instrument without first learning to read music, notes, scales, chords, and music theory. The basics. The fundamentals.

Were you one of those kids, teens or young adults?

How Salespeople Start

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of salespeople start learning sales by making sales calls. Maybe they had a week of classroom training about the company, products, services, pricing and terms. Maybe they shadowed someone in the field or on the phones for a week. Maybe they did both. Perhaps they did neither. But it’s all the equivalent of teaching yourself to play songs without first learning to read music, notes, scales, chords and music theory.

Reading the previous paragraph probably caused most of you to remember your first month in sales and it resonated, didn’t it? That’s how you started! Maybe your foray into making sales calls delayed while they put you through a sales academy, university, or school. By the time you finished the training program you couldn’t wait to be out on your own, in charge of your destiny, making your own calls, earning commissions and killing your quota.

The Difference Maker

There are certainly advantages to being thrown into the fire. You made a lot of mistakes and had to learn quickly. You lucked into some early wins because you were in the right place at the right time. You blew some good opportunities because you didn’t know how to deal with certain challenges, people, cultures, competitors, pricing, applications and configurations.

Sales school prepares you for everything. Weeks, or even months of training, drills, role plays, scenarios, simulations, CRM, expectations, company history, products, options, specs, and metrics. It’s immersive, helpful, educational and can even be fun. And you usually go through this as part of a team or class.

There is plenty of data showing that salespeople who receive formal onboarding that includes sales training outperform salespeople who are thrown into the fire. Here are some stats that GrokAI dug up for me. First, performance and ramp time:

• Korn Ferry research shows effective onboarding boosts quota attainment by 14%, win rates by 11%, and speeds up ramp-to-productivity by about 6%.
• Companies using dedicated sales enablement/onboarding tech see 49% higher win rates and 56% faster ramp times.
• Average ramp-up time across sales roles is sitting at around 5.7 months these days, but structured programs shave that down big-time—some reports show cuts of 47% or more.
• Good structured programs shave months off—average SDR ramp is about 3-5 months with solid onboarding, but without it, reps take longer to hit full productivity, miss more quotas, and burn out faster.
  
  And for growth and ROI:
  
• Firms with strong onboarding programs hit 10% higher sales growth rates overall.
• Companies with standardized onboarding see 54% higher new hire productivity.
• Training delivers a pretty wild ROI—around 353%, or $4.53 back for every dollar spent.

The Missing Ingredient

What all of that data fails to show is what happens inside of all that training and onboarding. It’s the equivalent to reading music, and learning notes, scales, chords, and music theory. It’s sales process and methodology.

Sales process is the framework for all non-transactional selling. It contains the sales stages from your pipeline, and each stage includes the key milestones required for a successful outcome. Sales methodologies guide the sales conversations that help us move seamlessly from milestone to milestone and stage to stage.

Kurlan & Associates data shows that when we train clients on the Baseline Selling sales process and methodology and coach their sales managers and sales leaders to coach their salespeople, those clients experience an average increase in revenue of 28%.

If you are unfamiliar with formal sales processes and methodologies, this PDF shows the all of the popular processes/methodologies compared to Baseline Selling.

And this short video is a Baseline Selling walkthrough.

If you have new salespeople or are about to have new salespeople and want them to participate in sales, you can have them start making sales calls today.

If you want to them to make music in sales, outsell their colleagues, beat your competition, make a ton of money, and achieve incredible sales success, put them through formal sales training, focus on sales process and methodology, include lots of role plays, and watch them soar.

Read this article about having them shadow another salesperson.

Read this article about what your formal on boarding program should include. And this article.

And as always, if you need help – or formal training and coaching – feel free to reach out to us.