Dave Stein's Blog for Sales Leaders

How Sales Trainers & Sales Training Companies Differentiate Themselves

Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Dave Stein

For those of you new to this blog, my firm, ES Research Group, evaluates sales training companies. We deliver our findings in the form of reports, which we sell on our website, and through consultations with companies evaluating sales training providers.

First a bit of background.

For us, gathering data about sales training companies falls into seven categories. As you can imagine, the quality and quantity of the data varies significantly among each.

We speak with sales training company executives directly through formal briefings, informal discussions (of which I have many), and podcasts.
We read through trainers’ marketing materials, articles, blog posts, press releases, white papers, and other publicly available sources of information. We use this subjective information more to understand how the provider positions themselves than what their strengths and weaknesses are.
We have a network of sales training buyers, successful salespeople and executives, consultants, former sales training company employees, journalists, and other experts whom we speak with regarding the real capabilities of a training company or trainer.
We speak with other trainers to get their perspectives. We focus on separating fact versus opinion, since competitive emotions run very high in this business.
We speak with references training companies provide us. Again, we seek facts rather than opinions.
We provide advice to some sales trainers (individuals to the largest firms). Although we would never disclose anything proprietary, we do get a very deep understanding of those trainers’ businesses and offerings.
We are the recipient of responses to RFPs that we write and distribute to long lists of vendors for our clients. We read every response completely and assess a vendor’s capabilities against our client’s specific requirements. From those responses we can also see how a vendor positions their strengths, minimizes their weaknesses, and generally positions themselves.

In the broadest sense, we compare trainers by looking at two top-level criteria: (1) Breadth and Depth of Solution and (2) Solution Effectiveness. You can see that the first measurement applies only to what we refer to as “full-service” sales trainers—those who provide consulting, training, and reinforcement across many different skill sets—from negotiation to strategic account management to financial acumen. Niche players (see below) can’t be ranked in this category. Solution Effectiveness, on the other hand, applies to every training company and trainer we either formally cover or informally watch.

Almost two dozen lower-level criteria and measurements roll up to those two top-level ratings. (I’m happy to provide you with more information if you’re interested. Just send me an email.)

Positioning.

As industry observers, it’s always interesting for us to see how trainers and training companies position themselves. They may not think of themselves in this way, but to ESR, they fall into these categories:

The Brand Equity Players. The primary positioning of these companies is based upon their reputation, longevity and/or very large base of “graduates.” This not only applies to the big guys, but individual trainers as well. The positive is you generally know what you’re going to be getting. Our clients tell us that a negative can be no competitive advantage since hundreds of thousands of salespeople may well be using that approach.
The Niche Players. Companies or individuals with a very specific and focused appeal. The niche can be a market, such as companies with strategic account management functions, or skill sets, such as negotiation or business acumen. The positive is often high-value content. The negative can be seamless integration with the rest of the company’s sales approach.
The Innovators. These companies or individuals really do have a new and unique approach to overcoming certain sales challenges. There are far fewer of them than those in that group would have you believe.
The Laggards. Little has changed in terms of content and delivery with these firms/trainers for a dozen years or more. They’ll tell you what they’ve done for 20 years still works. That selling is selling. And that the basics still apply. The fact is procurement strategies and tactics have come light-years since then. It’s a different world.
The Silver-Bullet Players. These are companies and individuals that count on sales leaders in crisis, who are searching for a quick fix. Most often their content is recycled (without attribution or license fees) and their marketing materials and messages are strewn with hype.
The One-Size-Fits-All Players. Buy their shrink-wrapped methodology and training and your sales team will achieve greatness. It’s proven. It works, they say. More often than not, it doesn’t. Not in tough sales environments.
The “We’re Your Everything” Players. Programs, products, technology, content a mile wide and a mile deep. Not really. Most only pretend that that’s the case. There are only a handful of players that can do it all well.

Why Is Positioning Important?

If you’re a buyer of sales training, it’s critical that you know all your requirements first, then do everything imaginable to understand the capabilities of a potential sales training partner against those requirements. How they position themselves and what they are really capable of in terms of contributing, long term, to the effectiveness of your team may be two entirely different things. Believe me. We see it all the time.

If you’re a sales trainer, you’ll want to be sure that the way you want to be perceived matches the requirements of your target market. We’ve seen real innovators attempting to sell to very conservative, old-school sellers and fail. We’ve seen good trainers with ineffective positioning miss out on opportunity after opportunity.

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