It was an hour full of valuable intelligence and insight for sales training companies and sales trainers in corporate L&D organizations.

Here are some of the points I made during the event. First, a quick review of 2011. (A look at 2012 and beyond will follow in Part 2.)

• Sales training spend was up during the first half of 2011, then down during the second.
  

  ---

• 63% of companies ESR surveyed during 2011 spend less than $3,000 per sales rep per year.
  

  ---

• More and more companies cut back on travel, requiring virtual sales training alternatives.
  

  ---

• We saw some strategic acquisitions:
• Mercuri International acquired the business simulation company, Celemi.
• Miller Heiman acquired channel management specialists Channel Enablers.
• The TAS Group acquired sales performance improvement provider InfoMentis.
  

  ---

• We found larger sales training companies going broader in solution scope, adding capabilities in many areas, such as ROI, business acumen, talent management and more.
  

  ---

• Many smaller sales training providers consolidated their offerings going more niche.  Smart move during a challenging economy.
  

  ---

• In general, our opinion that sales training companies make lousy marketers was proven yet again.  There are notable exceptions, such as Miller Heiman, Richardson, and RAIN Group.
  

  ---

• Training companies need sales leads as much as companies in any other sector.
  

  ---

• During 2011, ESR saw increased demand for process and sales training content in coaching (for sales management) and selling to the corporate procurement function.
  

  ---

• Our sales training buyer community still has a tough time differentiating one sales training provider from another. (That’s why they come to ESR.)
  

  ---

• Here is what generated some buzz during 2011:
• Jeffrey Gitomer is writing the ASTD Sales Training Drivers blog.
• Tom Searcy, author of RFPs Suck, took over Geoffrey James’s blog (formerly Sales Machine) and is now writing for CBS.
• Geoffrey James, who recently published How to Say It: Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies from the World’s Top Sales Experts, now writes for Inc.com.
• A few good books were published, including The Challenger Sale.
• The TAS Group released their Dealmaker Index.
• Some sales experts invested time and effort in social media—CustomerThink, Focus.com, Quora, LinkedIn Groups, and Twitter among others. The question is, will it pay off?

Be sure to catch Part 2, where I will share with you which companies ESR believes are leaders in numbers of different areas. Don’t want to miss it? Then subscribe to this blog:

Subscribe in a reader

Finally, join me this Wednesday, January 18, when I’m a guest for The TAS Group Webinar: The Evolution of Sales—2012 Vision.

Photo source: Endostock/Fotolia.com

Beginning in January, 2011, I will be moderating four new, unscripted, unedited panel discussions on today’s hot button sales issues. Join me online to listen, ask questions, and get valuable insights from 16 industry sales training industry leaders.

• Registration is free and easy
• Each expert panel lasts one hour
• 4 expert panelists per session
• No scripts, no PowerPoints, no posturing, positioning, or promoting.

Can’t attend the one(s) you’d like?  Register for the event(s), and as a no-show, we’ll send you instructions for downloading the MP3 archive.

Measuring the Impact of Sales Training: How to Document the Quantitative Impact

Wednesday, January 11, 2012 – 12:00 ET / 9:00 PT / 1800 GMT

Panelists:

Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Corporate Visions Dave Christofaro, Senior Program Manager, Sales Performance International LaVon Koerner, Chief Revenue Officer, RevenueStorm Bruce Wedderburn, EVP of Channel & Enablement, Huthwaite

Sales Leadership Strategies in a Virtual, Mobile, and Social World

Wednesday, January 25, 2011 – 12:00 ET / 9:00 PT / 1800 GMT

Panelists:

Dave Kurlan, CEO, Kurlan Associates Jim Brodo, VP Marketing, Richardson Beverly Lock, Principal, 3g Selling Donal Daly, CEO, The TAS Group

What Sales Management Needs to Know Today About Inside Sales and Cold Calling

Wednesday, February 8, 2012 – 12:00 ET / 9:00 PT / 1800 GMT

Panelists:

Gary Walker, EVP Channel Sales & Operations, CustomerCentric Selling Ron LaVine, Principal, Accelerated Sales Training Sharon Daniels, CEO, AchieveGlobal Leigh Hooker, COO, Miller Heiman

Enhancing Customer Relationships Through the Integration of Sales and Service

Wednesday,  February 22, 2012 – 12:00 ET / 9:00 PT / 1800 GMT

Panelists:

Sharon Daniels, CEO, AchieveGlobal Bob Branson, Principal, TACK-USA John Holland, Chief Content Officer, CustomerCentric Selling Jo Thompson, Procter (an Imparta Company)

Note: Other than an introduction of each participant and sponsor, there will be no promotion by panelists during the discussions.  In addition, questions from the audience will be answered live, via audio, by the panelists.

You will need a computer with Internet access and a telephone or VoIP capabilities to participate.

Call us at +1 (508) 313-9585 for details.

Photo Source: © Ivan Hafizov – Fotolia.com

Strategic procurement/buying/sourcing isn’t a new trend. It’s been around for years.  Although they didn’t invent it, I look at Walmart as the organization that drove execution of the strategic sourcing model to new levels in the 90′s.

Desperate to reduce expenses beginning in late 2008, executive leadership in many corporations looked at the Walmart model and tweaked or entirely revamped how they would deal with suppliers going forward.

So now, as a result of a glut of information available to buyers, salespeople enter into the customer buying cycle much later, then have to deal with a buying organization that may have little regard for their customer, or, and this is the troublesome part, the business unit acquiring the product or service.  ESR has been on the sell side of this process, and it isn’t fun.

As the fourth in our Sales Thought-Leader Series, I’ve invited four experts in the area of dealing with strategic sourcing.  We’ll be having a conversation on that subject Wednesday.  No PowerPoints, no scripts, no rehearsed responses, no B.S.  Plus live questions by phone from the audience.  If you’re interested in the archived panels we’ve had, you can find them on this Sales Thought-Leader Panel Series page.

Selling To and Negotiating With Today’s Tougher, Strategic Procurers/Buyers/Sourcers

This panel has already taken place.

Panelists:

One more thing:

ESR is offering a complimentary webinar for sales training and sales performance improvement providers only on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 12:00 ET.  You can find more information and registration about the  sales trainer-only webinar here.

Photo source: Fotolia.com

Three flights over and three back from Martha’s Vineyard were a haul, although Turkish Airlines’s reputation as the best carrier in Europe is well-deserved, especially in luxurious business class. What service. What food. What reclining seats!

My wonderful hosts, the ever-thinking Dr. Ayhan Artar and a future CLO in-the-making, Ílhan Çağlar, from the Türk Telekom Akademi, are real thought-leaders; smart, insightful, knowledgeable, open to new ideas, and as gracious as you could imagine. I felt like an Agha. Many thanks to you both.

Turkey is on a roll.* Manufacturing is up, exports are up, tourism is up, employment is up, the economy is growing, and debt is down.  That’s in a world (and more relevantly for them, Europe) of economic recession, currency problems, and increasing unemployment. This isn’t by accident.  If you’re interested, as I was, read up on what they’re doing.  Pretty smart people.

With that said, things are far from perfect there. I presented to sales training, marketing, customer relations, and product managers and executives from 111 companies, and even with all the good news on the economic front, they are faced with many of the same issues we are in North America and the rest of Europe: tougher buyers on the B2B and B2C side, commoditization, diminishing customer loyalty leading to more attrition, getting the right people in the right selling jobs, and the need for more effectiveness and efficiency among selling organizations.

As you can see if you click on the photo, my keynote covered ESR’s strategic approach to learning. My hosts told me there was a lot of discussion about that content during the rest of the one-day summit. Regretfully, it’s hard to measure the business value of a single keynote speech, but to have so many people excited and actively deliberating what I spoke about is encouraging.

I ran a 90-minute workshop in the afternoon for directors from customer relationship management, sales, and marketing relating to how better understand the real needs of their customers and to meet those needs.  That’s a subject about which I am very passionate.

I studied up on doing business in Turkey before I left.  That’s part of my process for doing business internationally.  I’ve made some serious blunders over the years and am not interested in repeating them or falling into new traps.  All it takes is an hour or so on some credible websites.

I’m off to Ireland the week after next for another keynote.  Then back to Europe in late November for yet another.  Want to carry my bags?

* For my English speaking friends,”turkey is on a roll” is a (bad) pun intended.  For my Turkish friends, please don’t take offense. The alternative interpretation, “Turkey is on a roll,” means as a country, you are doing very well, and it is something you deserve to be proud of. You are on a roll.  We wish we all were, as well.

Photo source: Ílhan Çağlar

Actually there are two levels to consider: your Customers, meaning that set of businesses to which you would sell your products or services, and an individual customer. (For this post I’ll use the following convention: Uppercase “C” for all your customers and lowercase “c” for a single customer.)

At ESR, again and again we see sales and marketing leaders who don’t deeply understand these, among other characteristics of their Customers:

• Their buying preferences and tendencies
• Pressures and trends within their markets
• Alternative strategies to overcome challenges or leverage opportunities
• Business justification required for a purchase
• Influencers—both inside and outside the Customers’ organizations

With respect to customers, many sales people don’t have the skills, tools, and support to discern, among other things:

• Their buying preferences and tendencies
• Pressures and trends within their markets
• Alternative strategies to overcome challenges or leverage opportunities
• Business justification required for a purchase
• Influencers—both inside and outside the customer’s organization

What’s the difference, you ask.  It’s the same list except for the last bullet.

The difference is this. In building your sales methodology with the requisite processes, tools, learning, reinforcement, supporting infrastructure, etc., you must take into account how your Customers really buy, looking at them not as you see them, but as they really are.  Then, and only then, will you have a framework within which your salespeople can be empowered and have the flexibility to sell effectively to their individual and unique customers.

This comprehensive and objective view of your Customers isn’t an easy thing to accomplish. But it’s required to achieve any forward progress in your mission to significantly improve the performance of your sales team.

Photo source: © lightpoet – Fotolia.com

1. First we look at inhibitors to winning the individual deal.

• Can’t compete at the lowest price
• Don’t really understand the customer’s buying process
• Don’t have a competitive product
• Don’t understand/can’t control deal timing
• Don’t meet all customer requirements
• Don’t sell to a qualified prospect in our sweet spot
• Our salespeople don’t have the skills required to manage and win an opportunity
• Our salespeople aren’t consultative enough

2. Next we look at the sales infrastructure level.

• We don’t have the right tools: messages, ROI models, collateral, website, etc.
• We don’t have enough qualified sales support people, e.g. engineers
• There are imbalanced territory assignments and/or sales channels. Hunters versus farmers, inside versus outside, etc.
• 20 percent of our reps delivering 80% of the revenue
• We’re not employing the right (or any?) sales enablement technologies
• We don’t have enough qualified leads
• We don’t have a methodology/process
• Our compensation and incentive structures don’t work
• Our people need sales training
• Our forecasts are way, way off

3. At the company level:

• Our reputation, financial viability, brand awareness insufficient or challenged
• Our company’s culture doesn’t support the sales function
• We have customer satisfaction problems
• There are weaknesses in the senior management team
• Our cost base relative to competition prevents competitiveness
• We can’t produce/deliver what we sell
• We are challenged by internal communications
• Difficulty maintaining margins

4. At the external/systemic level/the outside environment

• A challenging economy
• Industry buying trends led by powerful procurement strategies
• What the competition is doing
• Public sector bid requirements/restrictions
• Localization for multi-national corporations

My questions to you are these:

1. Have you done a similar exercise?
2. Do you know, specifically, what the inhibitors are that prevent effective selling in your company?
3. What’s your plan to overcome your selling challenges?

©2011 – Dave Stein/ES Research Group, Inc. – All Rights Reserved

I’ve facilitated seven days of programmes with just one left to go.  We’ve discussed sales effectiveness-building processes and strategies for building a sales infrastructure within your companies, and you’ve done a great job in the discussions and workshops.  So, here are some tactics to consider building into your sales plans.  Consider them a bonus for a job well done.

As we discussed in the Programme, every sales process must have methods and tools  for 1) assessing the customer situation, 2) determining a sales objective, 3) devising one or more strategies, and 4) building the tactical plan that will support strategy execution.

A well-conceived strategy should be the foundation of every sales campaign.  In its simplest form, the strategy is the completion of this sentence: “The customer will buy from me because _______.”   But all of us know that once the competitive battle is on, it is the tactics we devise and execute that often make the difference between winning and losing.

Here are some of the tactics I collected over the years that have enabled sales reps at all levels in all industries to outsell the competition. But remember, these tactics need to be embedded into your overall sales plan.

1. Speak with a key buyer in an account where you have won business. Ask him specifically what, if anything, your competition did to try to upset your victory after you were selected. Chances are the competitor will try that again in another opportunity.
2. Don’t negative sell.  Ask well-planned questions that will enable your prospect to figure those weaknesses out themselves.
3. Always have at least three qualification questions ready to ask your prospect. Ask the same ones again and again to assure yourself that nothing has changed, such as the budget for your solution being reallocated to some other project.
4. Differentiate yourself through your questions. What is the best question you could ask the real buyer the first time you meet that would make them sit up and take notice?  Hint:  “What keeps you up at night?” isn’t the answer.
5. Determine where, by how much, and when your solution will impact your customer’s financial position. If you can’t do it yourself, get some help.
6. Every week learn something you didn’t know before about the industry into which you are selling. Figure out how to use that information to your advantage.
7. Introduce a sales prospect to an existing customer of yours before they ask for a reference.
8. Practice simple math tricks that will enable you to figure numbers quickly. It’s a valuable skill.
9. After getting their permission, send your prospects high-value emails containing articles, press releases, etc.  These should be personalized (not blind copied on a distribution list), with a brief, relevant comment as an introduction.
10. If you work for a large company and are competing against a smaller one, get things done immediately so you appear nimble to your prospect.
11. If you work for a small company, learn precisely how to use that to your advantage.  You can be certain your bigger competitors will attempt to portray your company’s size as a weakness. If you are competitively savvy you can discredit their strengths without negative selling.
12. Answer questions truthfully, especially when the answer is “no.”  Executives will test your integrity by asking a question to which they know (or suspect) the answer. You must pass the first time.
13. Don’t start selling until you understand what your customer thinks they need to buy. Only then can you effectively influence their vision of a solution.
14. If your prospect asks for something from you, make sure you get something in return, such as information or access to a decision maker. Admittedly that’s harder these days than ever before.
15. Closing should never be a surprise nor contentious. Make sure your prospect knows what to expect when you schedule that meeting. Solicit any objections in advance.
16. Test your final proposal with your coach in the account first, before submitting it to the real buyer.
17. If you have to depend on a lower-level person for presenting your proposal to the real buyer, make sure you have trained them to sell it upstairs.  That includes handling objections, competitive positioning, and cost justification.
18. If you don’t want to get trapped, don’t do what your competition thinks you are going to do.
19. Consider showing your executive-level coach in the account your sales plan. Under the right circumstances, it will impress them and differentiate you.
20. If you are doing a web-based presentation or demo, email the slides to your prospect 5 minutes before the meeting is scheduled, just in case the technology fails.
21. If you are going to be meeting or presenting to a prospect, call as many of the attendees in advance as possible.  Introduce yourself and find out what their expectations and issues are. When you then meet them face-to-face, the ice will already be melted.
22. Don’t invite executives and lower-level people to the same meeting or presentation.  It is nearly impossible to meet the needs of both constituencies.  Most times you’ll alienate one of the two groups.  Schedule two meetings instead.
23. List three reasons you might lose the deal. Make sure none of those happen.
24. Protect yourself against no-shows. Make sure you know who will be attending a meeting. If there’s someone in particular you want to attend, negotiate it well in advance. If that person is not available, offer to reschedule. Important: Get your prospect’s word that if a key person who has agreed to be there does not show up, you will meet with that person later. Your negotiating position is stronger before the meeting takes place.
25. Ask people in your prospect’s company how they bought the last product or service that is comparable to yours.  That will often yield insights into their buying and decision process.
26. Convert your prospect’s organization chart into a political map to see who else may be involved in the decision.
27. Is your competitor effective at selling? Find out whether the salesperson on the other side made quota last year. If not, why? If so, why?
28. Begin searching early for someone in the account who you can coach and train to help you win.
29. Perform a formal debriefing with everyone who participates in a customer meeting.  Collect observations, action items, objections.
30. When someone else on your team is presenting, face the audience if you can.  That way you can observe their reactions to what is being said.
31. Invest in a book on body language.  It will help you understand what your customer is not saying.
32. Require a formal account briefing with everyone who will participate in a customer meeting, even your CEO. Coach everyone on their role.  Prepare your team with objections and issues that might be raised during the meeting and the customized value statement/proposition to be delivered to each person, if appropriate.
33. Ask your customer what will happen if they don’t buy when they say they will. If they don’t have a good answer, the deal may not close when you think.
34. Learn how your customer competes in their market. Is it on price? Innovation? Service? Technology? Reliability?  What’s important to your customer’s customers is probably important to your customer.

If you feel that none of these is appropriate due t0 the fact that you sell through reverse auctions, RFPs, or third-party consultants all of which prevent you from having any control or even direct contact with the customer, stay tuned for a future post…

(c) 2011 – Dave Stein – All Rights Reserved.

One of the areas I covered was customer lists and the indiscriminate use of corporate logos and brands.

Our clients ask ESR why the same corporate names are offered up by so many providers.  Those buyers become inured to those representations and ironically, the providers who list all those marquee brands wind up losing credibility rather than enhancing it.

A simple question like, “I see you have HP listed as a customer.  Describe in detail the nature of your involvement with HP,” can lead to a very embarrassing disclosure, especially if the honest answer is, “We delivered a half-day presentation skills class to ten sales reps in Oslo four years ago, and that was the extent of it.”

In a case like that we suggest reconsidering using HP’s name, or putting them in a new category entitled “Tactical Projects” or even “Tactical Accomplishments” if the result was documented, measurable improvement.

What buyers really want to know is this: In which accounts have you earned the position of preferred (or sole) supplier, with a documented track record of success?

One more observation

Another practice that raises questions is the annoying use of…

When documents or website copy becomes difficult to read and the customer can’t figure out what the highly-stylized product and service names actually represent, things have gone too far.  Way too far.

The project went well. PRN selected Miller Heiman after as thorough an evaluation as we have been part of.  Bob is smart, disciplined, and understands what sales effectiveness is—and how to achieve it.  Miller Heiman was the right fit for PRN, based on their unique requirements.

Bob was kind enough to give me permission to republish his first internal PRN blog post kicking off the new sales performance improvement initiative.  This is what executive-level ownership and sales leadership is all about:

While there will always be a certain art to selling, research clearly shows that companies who take a more scientific approach to selling create a significant competitive advantage.  However, why would a company want to instill a methodology into the “art of selling?”

I have personally experienced the benefits of using a sales methodology.  Revenue increased due to win percentage and average deal size growth.  I witnessed an organization benefit from using a common selling vocabulary.  Selling behavior changed as sales executives engaged in a different type of conversation more directed around customer concepts and needs.  Sales management learned new ways to coach and provide deal strategy feedback that helped progress opportunities along in the sales cycle.  In general, the organization was more synchronized around priority deals and resources needed to hit revenue goals.

A sales methodology provides a consistent and objective way to evaluate the status of every deal to help you more quickly identify which opportunities present the highest potential for closing. It will help you assess your progress at every step in the sales cycle, and, if necessary, provide the insight required to ask hard questions before it is too late. Furthermore, when a common approach is utilized everyone benefits, as you are able to gain knowledge from other sales executives’ experience that will further inform and refine your selling approach. A sales methodology will provide a consistent and disciplined approach to assess progress and to address unforeseen problems, questions, and risks immediately as they arise. With your new skill set, you are now more informed of how to adjust your selling activities as needed to ensure the opportunity stays on track.  It will enable the art or relationship component of selling to flourish based upon sound information that will guide your actions.

Today, buyers are more informed than ever and are more apt to control a sales cycle.  Therefore, a sales executive must work harder than ever to ensure that their proposed solution will align to the client buying process.  A sales methodology will inform you at every step of the way and ensure you are taking the right steps, or corrective action to achieve success.  Miller Heiman’s sales methodology is world-class, so let’s all look forward to improved win rates, deal size growth, and greater focus on our ideal customer profile.

Happy Selling!!

Bob Seiler

Here they are:

1. Coaching Will Surge.

In the past, coaching was one of the first items stripped from sales training budgets, if it was even included in the first place.  Many sales leaders who appreciated the value of coaching with respect to the sports teams they root for, didn’t really understand what effective coaching is, and the impact it will have on their team’s performance. Coaching is a skill. It can be learned and measured. Effective coaching supports sales people in the adoption of and compliance with the behavioral change required to follow a (new) sales process. Coming into 2011, sales trainers have a new focus on coaching. More good news is that many sales training buyers are no longer willing to automatically cut coaching from their overall approach to sales effectiveness. So you’ll see a lot more attention to coaching in the form of articles, new service offerings from providers, and, on the buy-side, the willingness to spend money on process, training, and measurement around coaching.

2. The Focus on Negotiation Capabilities Will Increase.

Procurers and buyers are far ahead of sellers in terms of strategy, skills, tactics, and outcomes.  I recently wrote a post entitled, Right Now, Your Customer Is Learning How to Kick Your Butt. It’s worth a read.  We saw in 2010 that negotiation has become a primary requirement for nearly every ESR client. That being the case, we’ve found few companies with a documented strategic negotiation process.  The good news is that providers like Huthwaite, Think! Inc., and BayGroup International have solid strategic negotiation offerings and are making substantial progress in this area. During the webinar, I offered a basic five-step process for sales leaders to begin to regain any momentum that has been lost with respect to their negotiating capabilities and outcomes:

1. Analyze closed (or lost in the final stage) 2010 deals for:

- Personnel and skills on both sides of the negotiating table;
- Strategies on both sides (timing factors, tier negotiating, etc.);
- Expected versus actual outcomes; and
- Process gaps, mistakes, unplanned and damaging concessions.

2. Define requirements for 2011 based upon deficiencies (see above);

3. Build or buy appropriate process and tools to fully integrate into your overall sales methodology;

4. Train, reinforce, coach; then

5. Measure and adjust.

Granted, this is overly simplified, but hopefully get you thinking in a strategic (and analytical) way about your present situation.

3. Formal Social Media and Technology Strategies Will Broaden B2B Sales Impact.

Apart from all the hype around sales and selling technologies, we see:

• LinkedIn and Facebook increasing in use for finding and building professional relationships;
• Twitter, Chatter (Salesforce.com) and other micro-blogs usage will increase as well;
• YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, blogs, and other thought-leadership publishing tools will increase in usage.
• Technology-enabled learning will expand with companies like Richardson, The TAS Group, The Brooks Group, 3G Selling, Miller Heiman, and Imparta leading the way; and
• Technology-enabled selling (sales process automation, and Sales 2.0) will gain in user adoption through products from Cloud 9, InsideView, ZoomInfo, The TAS Group, and many others.

4. New and Expanding Sales Training Providers Will Gain in Market Share.

I didn’t discuss this prediction on the webinar.  We’ve been briefed by four companies that have recently either entered the sales training space, or who are expanding their offerings.  You can expect to see Corporate Visions, The Bay Group, The Rain Group, and The Sales Executive Council’s SEC Solutions all make substantial progress in 2011.  They’re doing many of the right things in the right way.

Photo credit: Kaj Gardemeister / Fotolia