Sandler Systems training is among the more expensive (see “Three Popular Sales Systems: A Side-by-Side Comparison,” below), particularly if participants sign up for the ongoing training Sandler recommends to make its system work. Sandler’s President’s Club ranges from $6,000 to $9,000 per person, depending on the franchise, although a $2,500 preview allows a test run. About 14% of participants drop out after the preview, Mattson says. “There are a number of reasons they don’t continue,” he says. “Sometimes it’s philosophical. A lot of times, salespeople, unless they have a financial commitment, don’t want to make the commitment because it involves change.” Mattson says that while most salespeople adapt easily to changes in technique, they sometimes resist the changes in attitude and behavior that Sandler training demands.
Making sales systems work
Although the term “system” suggests uniformity, success with sales training varies considerably. And the results aren’t always immediate.
Sandler. Tom Duncan of E.H. Duncan, The Bath and Kitchen Center in Poland, Ohio, says he disliked the Sandler system at first. “If you use Sandler to the T, you can turn off a lot of people,” he says. He admits, however, that if he had known about Sandler 10 years ago, selling would have been much easier.
The key to the system for Duncan was learning about bonding with homeowners (“If they don’t like you, they’re not going to do business with you”) and getting homeowners to agree to do something before moving ahead — the up-front contracts. Of the five people in his company who enrolled in a $1,500-a-head, 10-week course, only he and two others stuck with it. “They felt it wasn’t in their personality to do that type of selling,” he says of the two who dropped out. “They felt it was too much pressure. And I tried to explain to them they didn’t have to use all of it, just parts we felt comfortable using.” What he didn’t like, he says, was negative reverse selling. “You know, ‘I get the feeling that no matter what I offer, you’re close-minded — is that a fair statement?’ You try that on some clients and they’ll smack you.”
Duncan says with many prospects, he doesn’t use Sandler techniques. “The ones you need to qualify — that’s when you need to use a system,” he says. “If you don’t know exactly what they want and they don’t know what they want, you’re never going to sell them. You almost have to tell them what they want. If you tell them and they agree, there’s your up-front contract.”
Shirey says that is one of Sandler’s best techniques. “My goal is to find out about them, and to find the pain, as Sandler calls it, get to the heart.”
Shirey struggled with Sandler in the beginning. She found it difficult, for example, to follow Sandler’s suggestion to go into a first appointment as the expert without presentation materials. Eventually, she made the system her own, putting training material into her own words.
Jeff Hurst of Hurst Total Home in Kettering, Ohio, another Sandler devotee, says the system offers many tools. “It’s very different from the common sales approach people are accustomed to,” he says. “Because you try to get ‘No’s’ for an answer. If you’re getting rejected, that gives you something to work with.”
Rea. Phil Rea’s system, on the other hand, looks for ‘Yes’s.’ “I believe you always look at ways you can say ‘Yes’ to a customer,” Rea says.
“I don’t do a lot of disqualifying over the phone,” Rea says. “I think every call is worth one appointment.”
He dismisses claims that sales systems offer a canned pitch. “Every business has a pitch,” he says. “Being phony is another thing. They have to put it into their own words.”
Most remodelers do well until it comes to the close, he says. “Some people don’t want to be put in the position to hear ‘No,’ so they don’t ask. It takes guts to be a salesperson. You can’t be scared of ‘No.’
“It’s proven that people don’t buy because they’re not asked to buy,” Rea says. His system includes 17 ways to close. “My system can get aggressive, but it depends on the person selling. You can get aggressive with any system.”
Adam Helfman of Fairway Construction in Southfield, Mich., says Rea visits his company quarterly to pump up his sales staff and to team up on leads. “He’s a true mentor,” Helfman says. “In one day his fee is paid for by additional sales, made when he was here.”
Yoho. Typically, customers of the Yoho system are single-line remodelers trying to sell the right product in the right place at the right time at the right price. “The customer is a key ingredient in sales methodology,” Yoho says. “How the prospect thinks or how the prospect feels is the major consideration in the development of our sales systems. It has little to do with the way we feel.”
Like Sandler’s Mattson, Yoho preaches the value of reinforcement, be it through training or tapes. Because the system addresses all aspects of the business, Yoho considers his sales system a soup-to-nuts marketing and sales plan.
Standardization of the sales process is good for building a legacy remodeling company, Yoho says. Retiring owners can then say, “If you follow what I’ve been doing, the same system, get your salespeople to sell the same way, you’re going to build the same organization I have.”