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.

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

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.

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.