Are sales trainers really great in selling themselves?

If sales trainers are NOT great at selling themselves, then they clearly don't deserve your time and money. However, why you perceive them to be great is more complex, and you need to make sure you're being sold on the right aspects of their training program.

Are they just a trainer or an all-around coach? - Trainers just show you the motions. Coaches tailor these tactics to individuals and reinforce the positive behavior.

Are they generalists or specialists? Generalist sales trainers are basically motivational speakers that pepper in words like "deal" and "commission" for relevancy (I've been guilty of this myself when dealing with an unfamiliar industry). Specialists have 'carried the bag' in a certain industry or sales process type and repolicated what made them successful in a format tweaked to fit new products and culture (for example, I know telecom, cloud services and green technologies...but not much else)

Is this a case of 'those who can't do. teach'? Like many 'consultants' many sales trainers are unemployed journeyman looking for a payday. Do some research to be sure consulting/training/coaching is really what this person is committed to do full-time, so you know you can rely on them int he future when your needs change.

Are they old-school (boiler-room) or new school (web 3.0/consultative)? If they talk about "Having the guts to ask for the sale" only and never get into "Listening and using technology to track your pipeline", run scared. Loud mouths can't sell in this day and age.

Tibor, what I have discovered is so much confusion amid these 3 words, marketing, selling and sales.Ziglar said "sales is the transference of feelings." Within the overall sales process, there is both marketing and selling with distinct steps and goals. Engaging is marketing as well as selling. I once read that selling is marketing, but marketing is not selling.

Some people are SALES trainers and some are sales TRAINERS. In my experience, those trainers who bring real world sales experience to the training room are much better at selling themselves then those who got to the training room through some other route.

Thanks, Brian! I agree with you, professional experience is always more benefitial then theoretic knowledge

I have always believed that, because I have been a top performer, I can train sales people better than those who haven't "carried a bag". And, I believe the same applies to virtually all who train who can sell.
Sales people know when a person "gets it". They don't like being taught by someone who cannot do. They want to hear stories. They want to learn how to adjust their own performance so as to move closer to the close. Knowing that I've sold "black boxes" and encyclopedias door-to-door, and up to $15MM in services at one fell swoop can give me "street credibility". Story-telling is a huge part of passing along skills. And, the best teachers or trainers can both tell stories and are performers themselves: in those 2 skills alone we find the core reasons why the best training is done by those who have excelled while doing and have a desire to pass along those skills.

The essence of the question is "Are sales trainers great marketers?" If no one knows of you, no matter of great you are, it truly doesn't mean diddly squat. My challenge with this question is that "selling yourself" is far more about "marketing yourself" than actually earning the sale. People must buy you first before they can buy your sales training.

Leanne, I don't disagree with what you are saying, but I do think it is about selling, especially for those of us who are not part of massive organizations, yes it is about people buying you first, but in my case, that is much more about how you engage and sell, and less about marketing. While I do think the two neeed to work hand in hand, we should not blur the lines.

Being that much of sales is a semantically game, I think it is important how we parse things, and sometime things not only get lost in translation, but in accents. Perhaps we were more accurate in labelling things, because we do love to label, we should look at the overall exercise "the client acquisition cycle", and admit that part is sales, and part is marketing.

I am not sure about transference of feeling, because feeling don't pay the marketing and sales salaries, revenue does. I agree with what you are saying, but we need to remember that sales is very much a transient profession for the vast majority of people, these are the ones that want to avoid being "salesy", and are looking for other labels, like marketing. But I like sales, and 905 of the training I sell is because I sold it, not marketed it.