Teaching Sales Courses
When you are teaching a sales course, use the very techniques that you are training the class in, to make your teaching powerful and persuasive.
Firstly, stand with both feet on the floor and your body square on to the audience. Most of the meaning of what you are saying is being transmitted via the way your stand, your facial expression and the tone of your voice, and is unconsciously picked up by your audience. Standing squarely and firmly on your feet communicates confidence which shifting your weight around does not.
You have to get excited to get the class worked up and learning happens best in a high-energy environment. You might have to take five minutes in the back room before you start, to do a jig, or clap your hand, or play your favorite pop song at top volume. Whatever gets you worked up and ready to rock and roll is the right thing to do.
Get your audience warmed up before you get to the real meat of your performance. Don’t just start right in with the main facts are … and here we go. Play some music while you are setting up your things or have a question and answer session about what their expectations are. Play around a little, get people joking and laughing and then bring them down for a lesson.
Before you can get people to listen to you when you are selling you need to have a connection with them. The same is true is a classroom situation. You are selling to salespeople so they should be like you, people’s persons. Utilize this to build a rapport and your lessons will appear to be far more informative and convincing than starting off with a cold uninvolved group.
Keep making eye contact with the people in your audience. Your brain takes in more information when your eyes focus on many different things. Do it too quickly and you will overload your brain and forget where you are in your lesson. Focus for short spaces of time on a person or a group and complete the sentence or thought you are busy with before moving onto the next person or group.
What you will also find by using these simple techniques is that you stay in touch with the participants and you will know intuitively when they are tired and a break would be good.