Confessions of a Sales Trainer: The Training Days

During the two years that I worked as a sales trainer for Health-Mor, incorporated, I was able to master certain tricks to perform during sales training sessions. It was easy to get inside people's heads, and mold them into whatever I wanted them to be.

Health-Mor is the company that manufactures the Filter-Queen air cleaning/vacuum system. Many of the techniques that I used were the same ones that were used by Kerby, Rainbow, Cut-Co., and many other sales companies.

Before going to work with the Filter-Queen company, I had gained a lot of public speaking experience. In high school, I was a highly awarded debater and speaker. I also taught debate and public speaking for four years after getting into college.

The key to being an accepted speaker is spending most of your speech on giving people exactly what they want to hear. Strangely enough, I studied the speeches of FDR, Churchill, and Hitler for years. These three speakers spent 95% of their speeches just saying what people wanted to hear. The rest of the speech would be spent telling the people what they should want.

At Filter-Queen, all potential workers would have to spend three eight-hour days in training. All of the other workers were instructed to leave my trainees alone, and to do their best to stay clear of us.

These people had been brought into this training under the notion that they would be getting paid to present our product to people. They would not be under the notion that it was actually their job to sell the product to make money.

These training classes would usually consist of about thirty-forty people. It would be explained that our company was only looking to fill about a dozen positions, and that many would not make it through training.

In reality, I knew that most of the people in the room would want to jump ship at the first realization that they were training for a sales position. There would be a few people that I would call after a day of training to tell them not to come back. These were usually people that I became annoyed by.

Day One of Training