Learning to Unlearn

Kathy Sierra over at Creating passionate Users, has a post entitled The future is not in learning.

While this isn’t a post talking about sales, it is an important thing to understand both for sales people and sales managers.

Here is why this post is important to you.

If you are a sales person, I can guarantee there are a number of things you need to learn to unlearn before you will be successful.

You need to unlearn things like:

• The bad sales habits you learned on that last  job.  You know the one you just left because you were not making any money?
• The incorrect perceptions you have about closing the sale.  It isn’t as hard as you think.
• The idea that you cannot be a great sales person
• The limits you set on your sales success

So many salespeople think that they can just keep doing what they are doing and at some point something new will happen.   During my years of sales management I was always amazed at sales people who refused to try anything new.   After reading this post I realized they were not refusing to learn, they were refusing to unlearn.  They wouldn’t let go of their past training.    There resistance came from fear of giving up something that was out of their comfort zone.

The best salesperson is someone who is willing to throw away what they thought was the best way in order to learn something new.     Great sales people are constantly developing themselves and understand that there is always someone out there who can do it better.    Great sales people look everywhere for ideas, and not just the same old books on selling.   The look outside the box for solutions to things that are happening inside the box.

And if you are a sales manager, you need to help your team understand how to unlearn those bad habits and old sales tactics.  Only when you help them unlearn, will you be able to help the learn to be more successful on your team.    Don’t get frustrate and give up when they don’t get it.   Spend a bit more time and find out what they already know that is blocking their ability to understand what you are saying.

So what are you ready to Unlearn so you can begin learning?