Weekend At Camp Sell-A-Lot : Playing tug-of-war over sandpits, jumping out of redwoods, falling off ledges: during these recessionary Times, techniques of sales training are going right over the edge.

By Steve Salerno

Oct. 24, 1993 12 AM PT

<i> Steve Salerno is the author of "The Newest Profession," which examines modern selling. His last story for the magazine was "Bad Loans, Bad Blood," about a San Diego banking feud</i>

Ken Taub is having second thoughts about jumping off a cliff. Moments earlier, the tall, rotund, 43-year-old New Jersey realtor was the picture of wide-eyed exuberance as each of his comrades leaped into the unknown with a primal scream. But as the edge approaches and the looming 125-foot drop begins to look just slightly deeper than the Mariana Trench, Taub suffers a crisis of faith. Though it’s a cool day on the outskirts of Santa Fe, his brimless helmet is framed by beads of sweat, and he begins compulsively wiping his palms on the sides of his jeans.

“Do you know you’re doing that?” he is asked.

“Doing what?”

“Wiping your hands that way?”

“Oh. I guess I’m just a little . . . . um . . . .”

“Terrified?” his questioner suggests helpfully.

Taub laughs a jittery laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “But just a little.”

Taub’s time has come, and he is suddenly very interested in the specifications of the zip line, the heavy cord that will ferry him to ground level. It has been bobbing and sagging noticeably under the weight of each of Taub’s predecessors, partners all in something called the Leadership Experiential Adventure Program. LEAP makes the seemingly improbable claim that its course will heighten sales and interpersonal skills by teaching people to have no unreasoned fears. All you gotta do is jump off this cliff.

Turning to veteran LEAP facilitator Phil Bryson, Taub says: “You know Phil, I’m, like, the heaviest guy in the group. By a lot, I mean . . . .” Bryson smiles. “We haven’t lost a customer yet.” Pause. “Then again, we haven’t had anybody quite your size, Ken.” Then he grins and says: “Don’t sweat it, Ken. This is what you came for. You’ve done the ropes, you’ve done the falls. This is your freedom from fear.”

Taub nods, bites his lip, grabs the handles attached to the cord and launches himself beyond the precipice.

It is over in a matter of seconds. His own war whoop reverberates around the gorge as the parabolic curve of the rope uneventfully conveys his portly body first sharply down, then across the river to the outstretched arms of his ecstatic teammates. At the bottom, he is all smiles. “Oh man, it was great,” he says, taking his breaths in deep gulps.

Would he do it again right away?

“Definitely.”

Does he think this is going to help him sell more New Jersey tract homes?

“Oh, yeah.”

How?

His ruddy, childlike face goes blank for a moment, as if the word had been spoken in a foreign tongue. Then he says, simply but with just a trace of you’re-ruining-the-moment impatience, “I don’t know how. But I know it will.”

NOT SO LONG AGO, SALES TRAINING MEANT those dreary daylong seminars that kept America’s hotel chains comfortably in the black. The $40-billion-plus industry was a mixture of situational role-playing and pep rally, epitomized by the famous Dale Carnegie course. Then, about a half-dozen years ago, sales training took a decided turn for the weird. Today, in the name of enlightenment, corporate training managers have their minions doing everything from playing tug of war over a sand pit to taking lessons in consensus-building from Kermit the Frog. (Really. Jim Henson Productions offers 11 separate “Muppet Meeting Films,” designed to touch many of the necessary bases through easygoing, animated humor.)

This passion for the untried-and-true is such that a novel training approach--almost irrespective of factors like logical foundation, track record or even safety--can catapult an unknown to instant gurudom and untold wealth. Witness 6-foot, 7-inch prodigy Anthony Robbins. Robbins built a motivational empire literally on the heels of the “fire-walk experience” he conceived as a training tool while still in his 20s. These days, he is best known for his ubiquitous, Fran Tarkenton-hosted infomercials, which offer such indispensable words of wisdom as, “The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.” (For Robbins, in 1992, the meeting of canny merchandising with corporate voracity generated the offspring he called $50 million in gross revenues.) His success persuaded even the old stalwarts to mix more shtick in with the standard training spiel.

But nothing has so captured the fancy of American sales strategists and their baby-boomer staffs as the Nikified, Just-Do-Itism of the “wilderness retreat” or “boot camp”--three to five days of structured eccentricity billed as a medium for professional soul-searching and corporate bonhomie. Consider the itinerary at author and life insurance-sales phenom Larry Wilson’s LEAP program. Amid the softly rolling verdancy of Santa Fe, you will be led, blindfolded, over a river and through the woods. Fall backward off a ledge or three. Stand alone, wind-buffeted, atop a 25-foot-high pole, on a platform the approximate size of a Hyundai hubcap. You’ll cap off your outdoor experience as Ken Taub did, by becoming a human ski lift. Beyond that, you will lay bare your innermost goals and fears before a roomful of co-workers and get used to the idea of being seen in various levels of personal dishevelment and compromising positions.

Similar derring-do is also available from Santa Cruz-based Catalyst Consulting Team. Or Project Excel’s “ropes course” at Ryebrook, N.Y., where participants tug at, hang from and balance on various ropes. Or Pro-Action Associates’ set-up at the Pajaro Dunes Conference Center in Watsonville, where nature itself provides the mise-en-scene . (“If you’ve never jumped out of a redwood, I invite you to do it,” says Pro-Action’s Randi Du Bois, a 17-year veteran of the movement. “It’s magnificent.”) The Association for Experiential Education, based in Boulder, Colo., maintains a roster of about 100 member firms that offer this quirky brand of training. The majority of these ventures did not exist a mere four years ago, and new members are coming on board all the time, says AEE executive director Babs Baker. Add to this a considerable body of free-lancers who have hung out shingles in the past two years and you have a veritable circus of sales.

Hard as it may be to picture Fortune 500 types sitting still (or rather, jumping around) for this, major adventure subscribers include AT&T;, Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak Co., Avon, Kraft General Foods and a host of other blue-chips. Nor is there any shortage of testimonials. Not content to describe rock climbing as “an experience I will never forget,” Richard Palmer, manager of Livermore Projects, the scientific computing division of Sandia National Laboratories, one of the largest research and development laboratories employed by the Department of Energy, said in a letter to Pro-Action: “It changed my personal outlook toward myself and others.”

Such professional turnabouts don’t come cheap. Wilson collects up to $2,500 per person for five days’ worth of accommodations and activities. According to a study quoted in a recent issue of the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, it costs upward of $650,000 to send a 500-person staff on a two-day adventure-based sabbatical--and that’s exclusive of the audiotapes, books and other ancillary items sold as adjuncts to the retreat curricula. Which, any self-respecting guru will tell you, you must have for regular doses of positive reinforcement, or else the training doesn’t “take.”

But corporate America apparently isn’t counting. Project Excel coordinator Michelle Powers says that in just the first quarter of this year, Project Excel trained as many people--600--as in all of 1992. LEAP revenues have grown by 15% per year over the last three years and now stand at $15 million. This at a time of global recession and massive corporate cutbacks. Indeed, the very fear of ending up on the ropes is what puts a lot of today’s sales firms, well, on the ropes. “Nobody wants the competition to get a leg up,” explains D. Forbes Ley, whose firm, the Sales Success Institute of Newport Beach, hails from the more traditional end of the training spectrum. “If company A does it, company B is going to do it, too.”

Wilson explains the phenomenon this way: “Companies realize this is not the time to skimp. If they cut back on training now, they’re only going to feel the pinch at the worst possible time: two or three years down the road, when the economy is in full recovery.”

PICTURE YOURSELF IN A tree, 40 feet above the ground. Stretched out before you is a log-like beam that extends to a second tree about 10 yards away. There, another member of your team is perched, his wide eyes a mirror into your own terrorized soul. The object is for the two of you to trade places by traversing the beam; alas, it is pretty much a one-person beam, so the coordinated use of ropes, pulleys and lots of very specific communication is necessary: “OK, I’m going to step slightly to my right, so you lean slightly to your right.” “Now I’m going to reach out and grab the rope alongside your left shoulder, so please stay still and keep ahold of my safety line.” Without such talk, one of you, or both of you, will end up beamless.

“Pushing the limits is part of it, but it’s also about teamwork,” says Du Bois, whose Pro-Action offers a number of customized variants on the above experience. The emphasis on teamwork is in line with the ascendancy of Total Quality Management as a corporate mantra. The quest for top-to-bottom cohesion and quality control--the organization as organism--has blurred the lines between departments, the belief being that all people in any given company need to understand their role in the overall sales effort. “Walls between what once were autonomous units need to be broken down,” says Wilson. Which is why, these days, major corporations are sending not only sales workers but all workers to motivational seminars.

Fine. But why cliffs? Why trees?

Partly, it has to do with the MTV syndrome. “In almost any learning environment, people today expect more than just a competent recital of facts,” observes Catalyst co-founder Sean Gerrity. “They want to be entertained.” To the modern, hip audience, the traditional drone-on, eight-hour, lecture-style seminars are just too insufferably boring. The beer-commercial quality of the boot camps is appealing, and swinging around on ropes can be, well, fun.

Mostly, though, it has to do with the history of sales training. For decades, sales personnel got by on that familiar shoeshine and a smile. Products were simple. The pitch was simple. The worst thing Electrolux salespeople ever had to worry about was that a power failure might occur right after they had dumped a bag of dirt on some startled homemaker’s carpet.

Then came the microchip. Industrial salespeople discovered that they couldn’t pitch six-figure marvels of integrated circuitry as if they were used Plymouths, and a Harvard MBA who could quote chapter and verse of Peter Drucker and William E. Deming was unlikely to be cowed by some benighted huckster’s insistence that “you better buy now because this price is no good after today.”

The ensuing two decades witnessed an explosion in sales training: Between 1975 and 1985, membership in the National Speakers Assn., the fraternal group to which most seminar speakers belong, surged from 50 to more than 3,000. At the time, no one gave much thought to the Catch-22 inherent in the mass exodus to hotel banquet halls: At some point, when nearly all sales reps at all major firms are well versed in the “alternative of choice” close (“So, would you prefer it in green or blue?”) or the “tie-down” (“This copier prints beautifully, doesn’t it?” Nod. Nod. Nod.), everyone is essentially back to Square One. By 1990, many in sales were virtual clones of their mentors--and each other. “Customers would stop us halfway through our presentation and say: ‘Wait, didn’t you forget to ask me such-and-such? That’s what the lady from IBM did.’ It was ridiculous,” recalls a former top Hewlett-Packard salesman.

Enter, at this point, the pop-psychology movement, which posited that individual creativity and personal fulfillment were to be found by getting in touch with one’s true being. If salespeople weren’t putting themselves across as effectively as their managers would have liked, well, maybe it was because they hadn’t come to grips with some inscrutable inner demon. Maybe there was something inhibiting their ability to form trust relationships, thus causing them to project cynicism in their dealings with customers. Maybe there was something sabotaging their ability to communicate freely, thus undermining the desired give-and-take between salesperson and customer. Maybe they were too “me-oriented” (thus preventing them from truly caring about the customer’s long-term best interests).

By addressing these and other issues, a shrewd trainer could achieve the ultimate sales coup: selling selling to the sellers.

“THESE ARE TOUGH times,” says 63-year-old Larry Wilson, once the youngest lifetime member of the insurance industry’s Million-Dollar Roundtable, who made the transition to training before his best-selling effort in self-evident sapience, “The One-Minute $ales Person.” “American business is hitting the wall,” Wilson continues. “And that’s hard to combat just through a lot of talk. You have to do. “

Wilson’s antidote to this malady sprawls across 2,000 acres of rural New Mexico, enfolded by dense underbrush and benign Indian spirits. Unveiled in 1985, the $10-million Pecos River Learning Center, home of LEAP, is an out-of-the-way setting for a training regimen that sounds even more out of the way--and yet makes cult-like converts of many who attend.

It helps that the compound itself is the epitome of Southwestern grand luxe--decidedly more Hyatt than homestead--complete with well-appointed adobe-style accommodations, hot tubs, pools, tennis courts and manicured trails. There are, after all, limits to what corporate America will endure.

As is typical of the experiential movement, Day One of LEAP begins with an ice-breaking rap session wherein participants are called upon to shed any trepidation they may have about being seen at their worst. Group hair mussing, roughhousing and general silliness is encouraged.

Such minor indignities are meant to serve as a metaphor for the emotional disarray to follow. “People worry about looking like fools less in a physical sense than in the sense of letting down their guard emotionally,” says John Mayberry, LEAP alumnus and president/CEO of Dofasco Inc., a $2-billion Canadian steel company. “But is revealing yourself as a human being ‘foolish’? Are you a fool because you’re gonna be helping someone whose ass you’ve been kicking for years back at the office?” The answer is obviously no, so the introductory session segues into activities of modest risk: say, helping each other across a rope bridge that wobbles and sways precariously over a roiling brook.

The next few days are a succession of incrementally greater risks: walking a tightrope, jumping from one rope to another while suspended 15 or 20 feet above the ground, falling off a ledge into the arms of comrades, climbing or dropping from assorted trees and poles. Eventually, the campers are ready for the piece de resistance . At LEAP, it’s the fabled zip line. At Catalyst, it’s a mountain climb where campers must employ teamwork and problem-solving skills to chart the proper course to the summit.

Each evening features a fireside or rec room recap of all that has transpired, the goal being to put outdoor events in their proper context. “You can’t do this outdoors without tying it back to the dynamics of the workplace,” says Catalyst’s Underwood. The objective is not to be judgmental; there are no final grades dispatched by trainers to the corporate home office. Rather, employees are guided to a higher plain of insight. “The goal is to get to the point where people have no qualms about raising an idea or a suggestion, even if it’s a lousy one, or if it ends up being rejected by everyone else,” says Du Bois. “That’s what this is all about, taking risks.”

A group leader’s ability to diagnose organizational maladies is vital. There is, for example, the ubiquitous case of the autocratic boss. Says Underwood: “You see this often; nobody will speak until the boss has spoken, and then everyone just rubber-stamps what the boss says.” The group leader’s goal is to gently nudge his flock toward a more open flow of ideas and to nudge the boss away from being so damned intimidating.

Powers admits that at Excel the sessions “can get pretty intense.”

“You’re holding back!” a group leader chides a camper who is quietly stewing over a teammate’s alibi for his poor performance in a timed wall-climbing exercise. “You’re being political. Tell him how you really feel about the way he handled himself out there.”

She does, and the target of her criticism, who happens to be a co-worker, is not pleased. “What are you talking about, ‘I’m copping out’? You know my ankle was hurt.”

“I don’t believe you, because I see the same patterns in so much of what you do when you’re prospecting for customers,” she blurts out. “You’re afraid to fail, so you don’t try. Or you make up some lame excuse. ‘They haven’t got the money now, so why bother.’ ‘My ankle hurts.’ It’s all the same thing.” Her voice softens. “It’s the way you do things, Jerry.”

Startled by his colleague’s intuitive grasp of his M.O., Jerry retreats, then, almost as if talking to himself, asks, “I do that?” And so it goes.

“Many sales organizations are hampered by a lot of mistrust and dishonesty about how people really view their functions,” Catalyst’s Underwood says. “Out here, people will tell the boss what they really think instead of what they think he wants to hear.”

One wonders what happens when the boss dons his suit again, returns to the office and begins mulling an unguarded remark made by some underling out in the woods. Not to worry; most major training programs provide after-care for as long as four years, generally for an additional consulting fee. While longtime LEAP trainer Linda Brown says she has never witnessed a truly biting confrontation at Pecos River, Wilson allows that “if change is to occur . . . . people have to push the envelope of personal comfort. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got,” he adds, voicing a hallmark Wilsonism.

That Wilson’s methods seem less like conventional sales training than preparation for joining Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey seems not to disturb his target audience. About 8,000 people traipsed through the Santa Fe complex last year, including repeat clients such as Upjohn and Polaroid. And Fortune 500 companies, including GM’s Saturn Corp., have built LEAP-like courses on their own premises.

In explaining their regimens, the gurus of the experiential movement invoke an all-star lineup of philosophers, futurists and pop-psych mavens. Wilson is apt to meander blithely through Peale, Malthus and Toffler in a single, unpunctuated paragraph. Still, the basic theory is rather, well, basic: Confront your fears and you conquer them. And thereby, through what psychologists call transference, future fears are diminished--and fear of rejection is the main obstacle to sales success.

“When you reach the bottom of that zip line,” says Wilson, “there’s tremendous exhilaration, but it’s so much deeper than that. There’s a realization that almost nothing is as bad as you fear it to be. Because make no mistake, everybody’s terrified at the top of that cliff. The idea is to get people to understand that groundless fear will prevent them from doing things that they know rationally are worthwhile.”

IT’S A BLUSTERY AFTERNOON in Santa Fe, and for Jennifer M., derring-do has become derring-don’t. She does not wish to climb the 25-foot pole.

“You’ll come down a more enabled person,” coaxes group leader Phil Bryson, who, by his own count, has put “several hundred thousand” people through this singular brand of angst .

‘I’ll come down with wet drawers,” she quips.

Finally, though, her teammates prevail and she begins climbing.

Ten minutes later she descends with dry pants and even offers a polite, I’m-a-good-sport smile. Later, though, in the group post-mortem, Jennifer confesses that she was not at all happy about the experience. She says she felt “abused,” bulldozed into doing something she would not normally have done save for the piercing eyes of her teammates and Phil’s nonstop pop-psych proselytizing.

“You see, that’s positive energy,” says team-member Eric, intent on putting an upbeat spin on things.

“No, that’s bull,” says Jennifer. “Pressure is pressure. That’s not me. this isn’t me. I’m not about this kind of”--she gropes for the right word, and comes up with “theatrics.”

They continue rehashing, with everybody trying to relate Jennifer’s ordeal to her workaday routine, but Jennifer isn’t buying. “Tell you what,” she proposes finally. “Next time I’m with a customer who asks me to climb a 25-foot pole and get blown around in gale-force winds, I’ll call all of you individually and admit you were right. Until then . . . .” Her voice trails sarcastically off.

Ever the optimist, Bryson rejects the notion that LEAP was a waste of time for Jennifer--even if, in the end, the course teaches her only that she may not be up to the emotional rigors of today’s brand of selling.”It was a positive experience,” he adds with a quick, oddly affirmative shake of the head. “Knowing what you’re not is as important as knowing what you are.”

RESULTS OF SALES TRAINING are notoriously hard to track, because there’s no way of controlling variables. How do you know how much of the change is due to the training itself, and how much is due to factors that cropped up after the training took place? The latter, in fact, is the standard alibi from trainers whenever their handiwork fails to yield measurable results: The company “didn’t follow through” or enacted policies that “undermined what we taught your people.”

Quantification becomes even trickier in the case of the experiential programs. Yes, many participants emerge with a sense of self-apotheosis. But like Ken Taub, they cannot articulate how they plan to translate what they’ve “learned” into a blueprint for action.

Some seemingly objective evidence of success does exist. In 1990, Du Pont Fibers took the bold step of putting most of its U.S.-based employees through LEAP; Fibers’ profits for 1991 exceeded those for 1990 in a lackluster economy. And after Kodak dispatched the sales managers from its Western Copier Division in Whittier to a Pro-Action shindig, the unit’s sales soared from last to first on the corporate totem pole.

Mostly, though, the testimonials are in the realm of I-just-know-it’s-working affirmations. Wilson himself maintains that it’s perfectly all right not to know the how so long as you know that it works. Dofasco’s Mayberry contends that the dividends go way beyond the usual bottom-line felicities. “I get letters from wives thanking me for improving their marriages,” he says. In fact, he says, one person said he wished he’d taken the course before his marriage broke up. The issue, though, is whether any of this closes sales. Purists point out that inspiration is not the same as training; cynics note that the more ambiguity in what is promised, the less one can be accused of failing to deliver.

Indeed, there are those who believe that raw jolts of inspiration, in the absence of specific tactical advice, may backfire. “If a company’s basic marketing philosophy is flawed, but you go out and fill all your people with fire and brimstone, you wind up with everybody running faster in the wrong direction,” says Jay Kurtz of The Kappa Group, an Orange County management-consulting firm.

Erin Anderson, associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, explains the subjective sense of euphoria and omnipotence felt by campers in terms of “the placebo effect.” “This feeling of ‘I made it through camp; therefore anything is possible’ can be professionally disastrous if it leads to reckless behaviors,” she says. “Anything is not possible--not for everybody, not in the absence of formalized training in the discipline.”

But Anderson’s questions are themselves naive; sales training has always been about style over substance. Just talk a good game and have the trappings--the Rolls, the Rolex, the right suits--and you’ll find an audience. Inspired or insipid, the program matters little. Eager acolytes will flock to the most remote of outposts and hang on your every word, or tree, or rope, hoping to be touched by some motivational Midas and rendered true believers themselves. In the sales training realm, conviction is its own best advertisement.