ESR’s core buy-side service is our evaluation process for selecting sales training providers.  We are almost always called in by a senior sales executive from a client’s company.  Occasionally it’s the learning or sales ops organizations that contact us.  Every once in a while, we’re contacted by representatives from procurement or HR organizations, who believe ESR is a sales training company.  I’m not sure how they would think that unless they didn’t visit or read what’s on our website.

I had a good conversation with a savvy procurement guy from a big insurance company this week about what it takes to effectively evaluate sales training providers and the risks associated with making any of the most common mistakes.  I was encouraged by his intelligence, insight and openness to a different approach, but unfortunately his understanding of the challenges associated with sales trainer selection is rare among the procurement people we’ve dealt with.

If you’re a sales leader and are required to source a training provider through your corporation’s standard procurement process, the likelihood of you winding up with a company that will be a strategic partner and guide you through years of ever increasing sales effectiveness is minimal.  In literally every case in which we’ve been involved procurement didn’t have the knowledge or ability to get the job done with respect to sales training provider evaluation and selection.  Procurement does a good job in negotiating pricing, terms, and conditions, but of what use is a well-negotiated contract with a training provider whose capabilities don’t match the customer’s requirements?

What should you do?  At a minimum, manage the evaluation and selection process yourself.  If procurement needs to be involved, leverage their skills for final contract negotiations with your chosen provider.  Shortly ESR will publish an e-book on this subject with the key components of our 7-step approach.  Stay tuned.

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When I tell them that’s not a question I can easily answer, many offer to pay me just for providing them with “just one name.”

If they press me for an answer I take a deep breath and say…

I first need you to tell me just a bit about the company seeking the best sales training firm:”

• What do they sell?
• How do they sell it?
• How well do they sell it?
• Why do they win?
• Why do they lose?
• How long is their sales cycle?
• Is it a complex or transactional sale?
• Do they sell to committees or individual buyers?
• What resources are required to support a rep?
• How do their buyers buy?
• Who are their competitors?
• What’s their go-to-market strategy?
• How are leads generated?
• Where percent of market share do they own?
• What are their business goals and objectives for the coming quarter, year and three years out?
• How well is the sales team performing? What percentage of sales reps are at or above quota?
• What processes and tools do they currently have in place?
• What geographic territories do they cover? In what languages? With what local cultural requirements?
• How is the company structured?
• What about their sales channels?
• What compensation and incentive approach do they employ?
• How well do the first line managers manage?
• What gaps exist in management skills and capabilities?
• Do they coach effectively to a process?
• What analytic and measurement systems are in place?
• How well is sales integrated with other functions within the company especially marketing and service?
• What is their propensity to change?
• Are the corporate leaders ready for a business transformation?
• How much time, resources, and money are they willing to invest in it?
• Which vendors have already been engaged with this company?
• What learning mechanisms and tools are in place?
• How diverse are individuals within the sales team with respect to experience, skill, effectiveness, business savvy, age, learning preferences, etc.?
• What are the company’s annual revenues?
• How much are they willing to invest in a sales effectiveness initiative?
• What technology, if any, is currently supporting the sales function?
• Are they thinking about training strategically or tactically?
• Who is currently providing training?
• What do they think their biggest sales challenge is?
• What special skills, if any, are required for sales effectiveness?  This question alone requires discussions with many diverse stakeholders and is a critical component of ESR’s discovery process.

Do you get my point? No single sales performance improvement provider is right for every company’s requirements.  If you’re looking for the best one for your business, you’ve got to start with requirements. Skip that step and you just become another statistic.

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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.

1. We speak with sales training company executives directly through formal briefings, informal discussions (of which I have many), and podcasts.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. We speak with references training companies provide us.  Again, we seek facts rather than opinions.
6. 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.
7. 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.
  

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• 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.
  

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• 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.
  

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• 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.
  

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• 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.
  

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• 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.
  

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• 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.
  

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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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Sales trainers and sales training firms have a big challenge over the next year:  many customer training budgets have shrunk or been eliminated entirely; the trainers’ own revenues are significantly down—there has been plenty of downsizing; there are big changes in customer buying patterns; and sales training itself, due to advances in technology, is going through some of the biggest changes since the first commercially available recordings of sales trainers were produced.

Through our work with both the buy- and sell-sides of sales performance improvement and training solutions, these vendor-centric, short-term obstacles must be overcome for the industry to regain its foothold and start delivering real business value to a much more skeptical and savvy buyer.

1. More often than not, sales training is reactive on the part of buyers.  How can a sales training firm convince their customer that a funded, strategic approach is the way to go, not a two-day, check-the-box event at a Newark Airport Holiday Inn conference room?  Hint:  If the trainer doesn’t, they’ll put some cash in their pocket now, but contribute to the further demise of the sales training industry going forward.
   

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2. Some large percentage of salesreps (one in four) just aren’t suited for the job of selling.  Unfortunately, if you spend a lot of money training C players, they’ll still be C players.  With that in mind, are sales trainers willing to put a stake in the ground telling their customers that training C players is a waste of time and money?
   

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3. Many training companies really don’t understand their customers’ training requirements.  Any discovery they do is perfunctory.  They don’t take the time or have the experience to understand the deeper issues—some that their customers’ sales leaders may not even be aware of.   (An example would be the degree of business and financial knowledge necessary to sell certain products and services.  If the trainer doesn’t understand how important that may be to the client, how will that become part of the curriculum?)   As a result of insufficient discovery, too many trainers “customize” only by making a few changes in their course materials—Powerpoint for many—and next year wonder why the client has engaged with someone else.
   

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4. The customer doesn’t believe in process, asserting that any process is too restrictive.  (Any process can be too restrictive.  The best trainers build flexibility into their process models for individual and team creativity—the art of selling. )  The most effective sales training is the result of salesreps learning to, and practicing employing, a process.  If there is no process to train to, training is close to useless because the skills taught are disconnected from other skills and serve to provide only a tactical boost to performance in one small area.
   

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5. No measurement systems have been put in place.  If a pragmatic measurement system is installed, metrics will provide critical, relevant and timely information to sales management (before it’s too late).  Measuring only with lagging indicators (performance last month, quarter, year) doesn’t help a sales leader determine whether his people are doing the right things now to win business.  Few sales trainers really understand sales performance measurement and therefore don’t work on convincing their clients to adopt measurement as a required business process.  When companies do have a performance improvement measurement system in place, and the vendor has created value, new proposals for further improvement are welcomed by the customer.
   

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6. Dependence by both buyers and sellers only on traditional, live, instructor-led training.  The degree of heterogeneity within sales teams require sales leaders and trainers alike to move away from the old one-size-fits-all approach.  There should always be some live component of most training for outside sales reps.  Getting in front of customers is what they do for a living.  But stuffing 25 people in a room who come from different generations, have vast differences in experience, learn differently, and may come from different cultures is like dumping a smorgasbord table of delicious and varied food into a Cuisinart.  If you’re a sales trainer and you aren’t, at a minimum, already somewhat down the road re-engineering your content for an on-demand, self-paced, individualized delivery platform, you’re late.
   

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7. Learning reinforcement and coaching is often sacrificed.  Research proves that coaching is often the number one success factor in sustainable behavioral change, but sales trainers are often quick to give up the fight when customers balk at reinforcement costs in their proposals.
   

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8. The customers’ belief and hope that tips and tricks alone will get the job done.  They don’t and they won’t.
   

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If you’re a sales trainer and you’re thinking about waiting until the situation gets better—until it returns to normal, guess what?  This IS the new normal.

If you’re a buyer of sales training, understand that your favorite trainer may be out of business next month or be acquired by someone you may not like at all.  Or maybe you’ve made the right decision and they’re going to be driving unprecedented levels of customer value.  Speak with your trainer about these issues.  Make sure you’re comfortable with what they are doing about them.  The need the right answers and they need a plan.

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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.

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Here are some points to consider or debate (with me or among your team):

• Beginning in 2000, I heard sales leader after sales leader say that relationship selling was dead.  Not all of them said that, thankfully, but a lot did.  It wasn’t dead then, and it isn’t dead now.  The ability to leverage relationships between sellers and buyers for the benefit of the individuals’ and, more importantly, for their companies’ benefit thrives in many selling environments.  If you don’t think it does in yours, you might be mistaken.  We know that in some sectors, as perceived and real business risk has escalated, relationships with suppliers has become more important now than it was five years ago.
  

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• Again, sales leaders who believe there is little to no relationship component in their sales approach are often wrong.  Conversely, sales leaders who believe that relationships are a significant and critical component to their sales approach often sacrifice the value from other critical factors, such as industry and business knowledge, or competitive selling.  It’s not easy to get the balance right.  In fact, we sometimes find disagreements among regional managers in the same company.  “It’s a technical sell!”  “No, it’s a relationship sell!”  “No, it’s a business sell!” (It’s most often all three.)
  

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• Relationship selling isn’t just about building and maintaining relationships.  It’s about knowing whom to build relationships with, what to base the relationships on (trust is at the top of the list, right?), and how to leverage the relationships to both parties’ advantage.  For the salesperson, this requires the right personality traits, specific hard and soft skills, and a strategic view.  Skills?  Getting your hands on the customer’s organization chart (or reverse engineering it if one is not available) is just a first step.  Figuring out where leveragable influence lies in a customer organization is another.  Discerning and validating both the personal and business wins for that influencer requires even more skill and experience.  Envisioning how to accomplish that and then communicating it to the other person comes next.  Ultimately having an influencer or decision-maker convince themselves that being  your ally is right for their company and for them?   That’s how most of the biggest deals get won.
  

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• Some sales trainers and sales training companies understand these issues.  Many do not. That could be risky for you.  Let’s say a training company doesn’t really believe that recommenders, influencers, and decision-makers can informally impact the strictest, documented vendor evaluation process.  They think, for example, that when you sell in the public sector, you just have to follow the rules and that any policies prohibiting association with vendors overrides any possibility of relationship building.  If you yourself don’t know how to overcome that challenge (companies do it all the time!) and the vendor can’t lead you in the right direction, you’re sunk.
  

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• If relationship selling is a critical competency for selling your products and services, then it must be included in the hiring profile for whoever does the selling in your organization.  We’re amazed at how companies complain that their reps can’t build leveragable relationships and continue to hire people with the same deficiencies. (Remember, if they don’t have the right traits, training can rarely help.)

What’s your position and approach with respect to relationships?  Need an overhaul?  Don’t wait.

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• Sales training has been around for more than 100 years.  Yet every year, new approaches appear with the promise of being “The Silver Bullet.”  Old approaches—even those that are relevant to fixing the proble—are labeled “old-school,” and rejected.
• On Amazon.com there are 29, 469 books under the category of “How to Sell.”  In “Sales Techniques” there are 11, 194.
• I’m personally tracking 80 blogs about selling.  There are many more.  Dozens provide solid advice.
• There are several hundred sales training firms ESR is aware of, yet there is no single one or two that dominate, as you would see in any other industry.
• In 2008, U.S. corporations spent around $6 billion on sales performance improvement, yet sales productivity (pre-recession) was down.
• The number of free webinars focused on improving sales capabilities is at an all-time high, and increasing.  So are free articles, eBooks and white papers.
• Reports, statistics, surveys, research and opinion related to sales ineffectiveness are abound.  Here are just a few sources: CSO Insights, Forrester, Sirius Decisions, The Sales Executive Council, Selling Power, Sales and Marketing Management magazine, most of the major sales training companies, and of course, ESR.  You can find anything you need to know about the subject among these sources.
• There continue to be emerging movements with value propositions focused on sales performance improvement.  The latest is Sales 2.0.  Add the new online social media to the list.
• There is no shortage of associations and groups focused on sales performance: SMT (The Professional Society for Sales & Marketing Training), ASTD’s Sales Training Drivers, UPSA, SAMA (focused on Strategic Account Management, an advanced selling discipline), SMEI, The Sales Management Association, USEF (The University Sales Education Foundation), and a dozen or more groups on LinkedIn.

What’s my point?  The root causes of sales ineffectiveness are clear.   There is plenty of sound advice about how to fix the problem.   There is a proven path.  The answers are there for everyone to see.   There are companies you can read about and observe that have achieved sales excellence.

So, recession aside, why is sales as a profession and function, losing ground?

Let me know your thoughts, please.

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The Guide analyzes, compares, and contrasts 23 leading sales training providers across many areas including:

• Solutions Range
• Range of Target Companies
• Range of Target Audiences
• Range of Training Programs
• Adaptability
• Range of Instructional Aids & Tools
• Quality of Instructional Design
• Measurement Programs
• Post-training Reinforcement
• Supporting Technology
• Yield Growth
• Return-On-Training (ROT)
• Utilization among sales teams
• Ease of Learning/Adoption

The Guide weighs in at more than 150 pages with 40 graphs and charts.

Based upon pre-publication sales, I believe this edition of the Guide is going to be the most widely appreciated and used to date.

You can learn more and order here.

• How to get funding for sales training in a down economy.
• What comes first, CRM system, Sales 2.0, or sales methodology?
• Should you engage with a sales training provider, employ internal resources or wait until times get better?
• Why classroom-based training isn’t getting the job done anymore.
• How leading training companies are leveraging sales-enablement technology.
• The 2009 ESR/Arena™—what is it and what value does it bring to companies seeking sales training solutions?

Please join me for this event.

Dave Stein: You’ve been pretty strident on Twitter about companies not getting the messaging thing right these days. What’s your perspective on what they’re doing wrong?

Maureen Blandford: It seems the sales thought leadership community is pretty aligned that selling collaboratively is where sellers need to be. I’m a huge fan of sellers asking great questions, building relationships, uncovering pain AND holding their opinions and solutions until they’ve first uncovered and quantified pain.

But HQ folks are busy flooding the marketplace with a lot of noise. Corporate marketers have a tough time shaking the Brand—the Dog & Pony Show sell. They’re creating boatloads of copy for upfront in the sales cycle when prospects are least likely to be paying attention. They spend days talking about tactic aesthetics (color, shape, size, etc) that are meaningless to our prospects. Our prospects want a solution that can solve their pain for less than the pain is costing. And if they can work with someone they like and possibly even trust to implement that solution – all the better.

Marketing and sales support tools essentially need to be the feet on the street in place of salespeople. Our sales folks can’t be everywhere at once. So we really need our tangible tools to mimic what we want our sellers doing: Be cool, confident, savvy. Ask great questions. Don’t assume you know all the answers. Intrigue the prospect enough to want to talk to a rep. Think: questions, bullet points, phrases.

DS: Is this any different from how it’s been in the past?

MB: Here’s the thing. We’ve been selling the same way for, what,  thousands of years, right?  Show your product, do a song and dance, negotiate price, close or lose the deal. Classic dog and pony show. That type of selling is in our DNA. Relationship Selling has only really been around for probably between 15 & 20 years. So, even though we can all be fans of Relationship Selling, it’s still really hard for salespeople to make that transition.  If you get Jill Konrath’s newsletter, she just wrote about some classic mistakes she’s made just recently. And she’s a fabulous seller. So, again, it’s tough to get this great model right.

But Marketing hasn’t even begun to make this transition. They’re still in Dog & Pony Show + Branding glory days. Marketing must make the transition to supporting how we sell today. The problem with that for marketers is (sorry, marketers) they’ve always been more concerned about shooting that next commercial, or winning that next ad club award, than they have been about how to help sales move the ball down the field. It’s a new day. Sales organizations are the stars now and marketers need to be happy and find the honor in being the back stage crew.

DS: Can you give us an example of a company that recently made a change in this regard, what the symptoms were and how they are faring now?

MB: Wow. I wish I could. Most of the orgs that are really successful at this fly under the radar. (I guess they value success over a globally-recognized brand. Huh.) Remember that there are thousands of B2B companies in the US alone. The big ones (IBM, Microsoft) get a lot of attention. But there are so many good companies out there, with salespeople generating revenue that many of us will never know about.

The way I see B2Bs today is in a kind of suspended animation. Our sales organizations need help making the transition fully to the consultative sale model. But where’s the budget, Dave, for on-going, sustainable training, mentoring, and support? (I can see you shaking your head, Dave…) Those budgets have vanished. Meanwhile, we only need to read the national news to understand the silly ways corporate is spending the revenue that the sales folks generate.

DS: Other than what you just described, how would a sales leader know that it’s their messaging that may be part of a sales problem?

MB: Most salespeople and sales leadership have given up on getting help with bad messaging. A colleague of mine, a VP of sales at a very successful biotech company, was at a product launch for a truly breakthrough, efficacious cancer drug targeted toward premier oncologists around the country. The marketing folks modeled their product launch campaign after, get this, a popular laundry detergent campaign. Uh huh. You read that right. Cancer drug, laundry detergent. Sheesh.

If I’m ever strident (!) about these issues, it’s because it’s unbelievable to me what’s going on in B2Bs. How long are we going to starve our salesforces of the training and support they need when their marketing teams (most of whom have never carried a bag) have the keys to extraordinary budgets but are quite clueless about the tactics necessary to support a consultative sale.

DS: Without asking you to give the entire content of your book away, could you enlighten us on why branding doesn’t work in B2B?

MB: Branding is a great methodology for consumer marketing. The consumer buying process, however, is the polar opposite of the B2B buying process for big deals. Universities don’t teach the difference between marketing for Consumer v. marketing for B2B. It doesn’t make sense to take the methodology for one and try to apply it to a completely different model.

Great B2B marketers need to think much less about what color does X need to be? And more about the revenue targets, prospect and customer buying processes, how sales needs to sell to match the buying process, who influences the prospects, and what are the best support tools to land new accounts and grow existing accounts.

Trust. Confidence. Relationships. Deals. Branding can’t get us there. But our people can.

1. Please join me on April 8th when I present Nailing Your Sales Training—An Independent Expert’s View a complimentary webinar sponsored by The TAS Group.
2. On Tuesday, April 14, I’ll be joining a stellar panel of sales experts for The Top Sales Experts Kickoff Event: The Future of Professional Selling.

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