Inside The Sales Training Industry (Part 1)
I finally got around to meeting my telephone and e-mail colleague, Tom Martin, face-to-face a few weeks ago. Tom is someone I hold in high regard for his experience, integrity and deep understanding of the sales training industry.
Tom is a 20-year veteran of the sales methodology and training industry, with a diverse set of global experience crossing sales (direct, indirect and inside), channel management, marketing, SFA/CRM, consulting, finance, legal, training, systems and operations. He is currently General Manager of Channels at Force Management, LLC. He’s got quite a background including full or part-time roles with Channel Enablers Pty Ltd., Think! Inc., OnTarget Inc./Siebel Sales Methodology Experts, and Miller Heiman, Inc., where Tom was President, North America.
Over the course of a few days in Orlando, Tom and I compared notes on a number of important issues germane to sales trainers, sales training companies, and buyers of sales training. The result is this “discussion” I’ve reconstructed with Tom’s help.
Dave Stein: On the subject of content and IP (Intellectual Property) licensing fees… I know you have worked on a large number of methodology licensing deals, especially while you were at OnTarget/Siebel. Do you think those deals were good for customers and for the training companies?
Tom Martin: A lot of training firms started to do license deals because customers asked for them without understanding the impact of some of their decisions. For example, most training firm standard licensing wording does not benefit the customer if they want to seamlessly integrate IP from multiple suppliers. License deals could become better deals for both the seller and buyer by expanding their thinking beyond simply price, volume and terms length.
DS: Almost every corporation we’ve worked with has an amalgam of methodologies, processes, terminology, tools, and coursework from multiple vendors. I suspect, according to the strict licensing wording in many vendors’ contracts, these companies are in violation of some contracts.
While we were talking after my keynote speech at the SMT conference you commented about how many veterans of the high-tech world don’t pay much attention to most sales training because they say they’ve heard it all before in a prior training class and have even heard the same “war stories” used by different training firms.
TM: To some extent, that’s true. Many training firms were founded by alumni of other firms and their courses often have substantial similarity to each other, while legally being new copyrightable works. Some trainers who have “adopted” others’ approaches would say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
DS: Of course if you’ve had your content pirated, as I have, you might not be in such a benevolent state-of-mind. I’ve got a folder with emails from vendors who accuse others of stealing their stuff. I know it goes on. More often that the general public knows or cares about.
TM: There are some great new elements, often from lesser known firms, but you and I agree that many (but not all) of the 20-year old selling concepts are still valuable to some salespeople.
DS: That’s why I founded ESR—to end the destructive cycle of selecting the wrong sales training companies for the wrong reasons.
TM: I should also mention that what I see differentiating competing training firms most often is not their core content but their implementation approaches – these vary far more widely.
DS: Some very successful sales leaders we’ve worked with don’t worry much about which sales methodology they use. They’re only focused on compliance, measurement, and ongoing process improvement.
TM: Then there is the all-to-common situation where new training initiatives are commenced by a VP Sales new in their job. Someone who wants to bring in “their” language and so they often force 200 people to learn something new as opposed to the VP learning something different—or being open to finding a way to blend the two.
DS: We see that a fair amount ourselves. When you think about the average tenure of a sales VP being less than two years, there may be a link here, or I should say, maybe a link needs to be broken. Too many sales training buyers pick a vendor based only upon comfort, past experience, whoever is “hot,” etc. It happens all the time
We also talked 2 weeks ago about how training firms can make it difficult for a past client to integrate their methodology with complementary methodologies from other firms. With the DealMaker Partner Network and WhiteSprings helping customers address this to some extent do you see a shift coming in the market?
TM: I could make the analogy between the cell phone market and training – now we’re able to keep the same phone number when we change carriers and in some cases we can take a phone from one carrier to another—all because consumers demanded more power in the relationship. I expect more and more mid-sized firms to be demanding licensing rights around derivative works and the ability to integrate multiple methodologies without being held hostage because their contract wasn’t set up with those rights. The largest firms have been doing this for the past five years so I think it will trickle down to smaller and smaller firms until it is a generally accepted standard in the market. Some training firms will fight this but it’s the right thing to do for clients.
DS: Yes, I think some of these restrictions are very one-sided—the vendor’s side. Some vendors collect big licensing fees each year for delivering no new value. Someone bought their stuff ten years ago, signed an agreement and they’re stuck. Some of ESR’s work with training and methodology buyers raises brings this issue into the light of day. We want vendors to make a profit and continue to invest in new products and services. On the other hand, there has to be value for the buyers’ investments. Paying royalties on the use of an irrelevant, decade-old training manual, a term, a word, or an outdated form doesn’t make sense from their perspective. Just today a large buyer of sales training invested in ESR’s Sales Training Vendor Guide as a first step in firing their current, well-known provider for precisely this reason.
What do you see out there with respect to integrating methodologies, Tom?
TM: There are some training firms that do a nice job as “methodology integrators” but I think too many customers allow themselves to be forced to treat every set of training IP as its own silo, which ends up minimizing the effectiveness of their sales people and especially their sales managers. The sales manager does a deal review and has to pull out pages with all the Opportunity Management methodology information, then another set of pages for the Negotiation element, then more pages about the Questioning program from a different vendor, and then when they are done they create a Sales Call Plan from a different vendor that is less useful because it doesn’t have all the right Opportunity Management and negotiation words—and can’t because no one has the legal right to create that amalgamation and it’s too much legal hassle to ask for it.
The result is that sales managers are burdened with 3-inch-thick, 3-ring binders that they rarely pick up because they’re simply not usable. What is more “sales-consumable,” in the words of Force Management’s Grant Wilson, is being able to manage your sales force with no more than 10 well-designed pages. I first saw the 10-page sales manager playbook when I attended Force Management’s “Command of the Plan” training and wished I could go back 10 years in time—I didn’t enjoy life as a front-line sales manager because I had a stack of 3-ring binders and wonder how much life would have changed with the elegant simplicity of a 10-page manager playbook.
Photo: © RTimages – Fotolia.com
Filed under: Buyers, Interview, Methodology, Opportunity Management, sales process, Sales Training Companies
I found your site on Google and read a few of your other entires. Nice Stuff. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dave Stein, Peter ODonoghue. Peter ODonoghue said: RT @davestei: Inside The Sales Training Industry (Part 1) http://ow.ly/zhbJ [...]
[...] Martin Many thanks to Dave Stein for his kind words and taking up so much space in his blog with this interview of [...]
Sorry Dave, but what is “IP” in this context?
In my 9 year tenure as a customer, and most recent 6 years as a provider of sales process and implementation services, there is not a more knowledgable person in the industry that I have met than Tom Martin.
There may be some with deeper knowledge in authorship and development in specific silos, but none who have a greater cross-functional and operational understanding of this market. His perspective is well founded from his usage and understanding of the marketplace we compete in, and I am glad to have him in my corner.
Good points and what is to be done about it? We all know that our client’s sales teams would be better off with one sales process and a common language that is taught to everyone. Sales management runs from one hot thing to the next instead of working to implement and reinforce the program, process or training they have. Most sales processes taught today will work if employed correctly and consistently. The problem with sales training is sales management. All of this presents a problem for integrators. What language shall we use on our funnel or pipeline? It doesn’t really matter as long as it is taught to everyone and used consistently. Pick something and stick with it if it works. integrate it, reinforce it and celebrate success when it works. It is so interesting to watch the things you have described above.
My fault, Santo. IP is Intellectual Property. That’s legalese for content developed by a person or entity, protected by certain laws, contracts, etc.
Thanks for featuring an interview with Tom. I had the chance to meet and have coffee with Tom a few weeks ago and he was so “abundant” (to use a Covey term) with his knowledge and ideas – very insightful and practical. Great interview with tons of practical information. Thanks!
Dave and Tom:
Good topic… would love to hear Tom’s thoughts on the subject that Alice brought up. There hasn’t been much progress in sales methodology over the last 10 years, and the best sales methodology successes I’ve had were centered around the sales management’s role in leading the initiative. Perhaps a follow up discussion?
[...] first installment of the discussion is an interview he did with Tom Martin talking in fairly general terms about [...]
Dave,
Great Blog posting on your time with Tom. I have had the great fortune of meeting with Tom and talking with him on several occasions. And will agree with Jill’s comment that he is abundant and very generous with his knowledge of this very interesting Sales Consulting industry we find ourselves in.
And agree with both of your perspectives on the need to improve methodology integration, in the industry. I believe the industry has hurt itself by being pretty inflexible in this area. This situation strikes me as almost an oxymoron because most of the methodologies that I have worked with, put the customer or the customer’s buying process first, and yet those same methodology shops, in an effort to protect their “IP” are not very flexible in selling the way the customer wants to buy. It is an interesting conundrum and one I hope to be involved with as the industry addresses this issue.
Thanks for a thoughtful and insightful posting. And thanks for posting the “fun” stuff on Martha’s Vineyard. I do miss that Island.
Thanks Steve. If you’re ever coming to the Vineyard, let me know.
Thanks John/Jill/Steve for the kind words.
To Kevin and Alice’s comments: A lot of well-meaning firms over the years have started to address the lack of training and other integration/adoption efforts focused on sales management only to sacrifice their principles to some extent to not lose the business. One rationale to that has been “even if they don’t do this right we are still leaving them better off than before.” In some cases that might be true but more often the trainer made a quick buck and the Hawthorne effect (and maybe not much more) helped them get a brief increase in results.
So, what to do… we could try the flywheel approach with the whole training industry (popularized by Jim Collins in Good to Great). By that I mean each of us pushes our clients (and training firms and associations like ASTD and SMT) to stop the madness of 1) not centering training and change on the management team, and 2) making it hard for clients to integrate their multiple investments together.
To help encourage others to put their shoulders to the flywheel we need to be better at showing and sharing results from these successes. Of course to do that more people in the training industry have to be willing and able to help clients measure their results. I’m sure Dave can weigh in on that idea!
Hyperlinks:
Hawthorne effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Good to Great: http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html
ASTD: http://www.astd.org/astd
SMT: http://www.smt.org
Measure results? You’re right, Tom. I will weigh in on that one.. First, here’s a previous blog post on the subject. ESR has accumulated a lot of expertise in that area.
I was on the phone yesterday with the VP of Learning for a $3 billion corporation who asked me which sales training providers will work with them on a risk/reward basis. The answer is only a few. I can see both the trainers’ and buyers’ sides. Trainers know that there are always insurmountable obstacles on the client side preventing full adoption and total success. Why should they be penalized for that? And buyers say the trainers should be willing to put their money where their mouths are, making such aggressive projections of performance improvement. After all, sharing risk and reward is a common approach in other professional services specialties.
Of course one of the issues that always comes up is measurement. How do we really know what the impact of the sales effectiveness intervention was? How to we isolate extraneous factors?
In fact, we’ve seen several vendors and their clients do a very good job with all this. Based on a foundation of trust, common purpose and attention to detail, measuring sales performance improvement (not just lagging indicators, but much more valuable leading ones) isn’t that hard. It just isn’t. But it does take (sales) organizational change, process, discipline, strong leadership and a trusted vendor/partner.
Dave and Tom,
Small world, gentlemen. I was fortunate to have connected with both of you on LinkedIn over the past few days. In a slower moment tonight, as I was perusing the links in Tom’s email signature, imagine the slow smile that came to my face when I noticed the link to this blog post. Birds of a feather, as they say.
As someone who has selected vendor programs when organizational constraints prohibited me from building ground-up, custom content, this post resonated with me.
It reminded me of a time when – to avoid event-based, ineffectual training – I worked diligently to integrate sales concepts into process workflow and systems at every turn. I tried hard to select just one vendor’s programs for purposes of semantics and integration, but there were a few departures where force-fitting things would have been a disservice to my employer and the sale force I served. For the reasons you cite and discuss here, it’s tricky water to navigate. Multiple programs customizations (to force alignment), licensing issues, paying to customize third-party technology systems (which need to be changed again if licensing isn’t renewed for any reason), and all the cultural change issues that go along with these changes, make it a challenging process, at best.
You might guess, and you’d be right, that I prefer to build from scratch. But even that is fraught with challenges. If you want to build a program that matches selling process with buying stage… how far from Porter Henry’s SalesAbility do you think you’ll get? Or if you’re teaching basic sales meeting skills, how far will you get from Open, Probe, Support and Close? Okay, I’m guilty of some hyperbole – but anyone who has been around the vendor block has a sense of what I mean.
I’ve worked around it as best I can, and with a strong sense of ethics, but it’s a thin line sometimes and can get uncomfortable. Not to mention the time you’ll waste with a thesaurus.
Over time, I’ve become less obsessed with the basic skills training (it’s communication), and more focused on process, fishing in the right pond, and creating aligned performance systems that are unique to the business I’m in. But the licensing and IP issues still linger, and like the music industry, we’re ripe for some disruptive innovation.
Here’s to the flywheel!
Mike Kunkle