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

The program is in its fourth year. I was also fortunate to have contributed to its predecessor, SalesSTAR, which went from 2003 through 2007. That was for technology CEOs and their VPs of sales.

Here is what I love about this program. Almost without exception, the participants, including the Managing Directors and CEOs, are hungry to learn, open to new ideas, intelligent, motivated, and willing to take a serious look at themselves. They want the truth.

How apropos was this sign I spotted on the side of a store in Letterfrack in the Connemara, in the western part of Ireland. I saw the sign and I thought about all the sales leaders and salespeople I’ve interviewed over the years who spend too much time looking outside themselves—at excuses, other peoples’ or departments’ shortcomings, product and service issues, the economy, and anything else they could blame their lack of performance on. They dream about a better day, a silver bullet, a quick fix, a better product, fewer competitors, an easier time.

Awakening is the word that best describes what to many of the participants in these two-day workshops experience. I don’t want to get philosophical, spiritual, or metaphysical here. What I’m talking about is many of the participants of the program getting deeper in their understanding that they are the ones who determine their own destiny with respect to building an international selling capability within their companies, and that any limitations are theirs and theirs alone.

The Irish economy is of course the elephant in the room in every session. What I tell the participants is this: “There are deals going down. There is money being spent. Yes, the pie has shrunk. Now it’s your job for your company to win a bigger piece of a smaller pie.”

Because professional selling as we know it (in the U.S. and as exported to other parts of the world by American companies) is less than a decade old in Ireland, we talk about who these sales and business leaders need to be and how they need to change their way of thinking for their companies to compete more effectively.

What I really love is that they get it. And the sales performance improvement results of the program’s participants year after year bears that out.

On top of the research we perform on Imparta as a component of our vendor coverage, ESR had an opportunity to see Imparta in action twice:  First, we were an active participant, along with about 15 other people, in a half-day seminar on coaching salespeople.  In addition, as a task related to our work with a large client where we were guiding them through a sales training vendor evaluation, we sat in on a presentation in response to the client’s RFP.  We were able to view their learning and reinforcement technologies first-hand.  In both instances we were impressed.

I thought that it would be interesting for you hear what Richard Barkey, Imparta’s CEO, thinks about a number of subjects related to sales effectiveness.

Dave Stein: What buying trends are your clients experiencing with their customers as we slowly escape from the recent global recession?

Richard Barkey: For most of our clients, this recession was very different from the last downturn in 2001.  Business customers were more careful in the way they cut costs, ring-fencing areas where clear value was being delivered, and then working to increase that value as far as possible.  This focus on value has continued as the economy has started to pick up, but we have started to see a slight relaxation in the way it’s measured.  During 2009 we were often helping clients to quantify the benefits of their offerings for buyers wanting a 3-6 month payback period, and that is beginning to return to a more normal timeframe.

In particular, strong companies see significant opportunities as the world staggers away from recession, so they are looking at longer-term investments again, but risk management is still very much the order of the day.  What does this mean for business developers?  The good news is that they can start rebuilding their longer-term pipelines if they focus on companies with a strong forward-planning culture, but they will have to be ready to demonstrate tangible value, and bring professional risk-alleviation skills to the table.

DS: Imparta has proven capabilities in a number of areas that ESR sees as critical for sales performance improvement going into 2010.  Those include technology-enabled learning, and coaching.  Can you take me through them one at a time with respect to your philosophy and an example of how you’ve helped a client?

RB: First of all, technology certainly plays a major part in our vision for performance improvement (and I’m glad you call it that rather than training!).  In fact, it’s a critical enabler of the whole process.

• At the needs analysis stage, we use online 180 degree assessments and a comprehensive sales competency model to identify where the skill gaps are, and provide a benchmark against which to measure improvement;
• At the learning stage, we use animated pre-work so that we can focus the classroom time on experiential learning.  We’re also a leader in computer-based sales simulations, which provide that experiential learning around the strategic elements of a sale.  (I’m still a believer in good old role-plays, but they’re best used to “simulate” a single interaction);
• Back in the field, e-learning is used for reinforcement and – critically – as-needed task support. We’ve also developed a new e-learning approach called Sales-Enabled Product Training (SEPT™) that allows rapid development of… well, what it says!
• In the application space, you’ve reported on a number of companies who have made progress during 2009 in integrating their tools into a range of CRM systems.  This is an important development, and we will be releasing our own CRM-integrated tools during 2010;
• Technology is also critical at the measurement stage.  We use our i-Coach tool to deliver learning, but also to capture and process a wide range of information across all four Kirkpatrick levels, from coaching activities and results, to competency assessments, business impact assessments, and actual salesperson performance. It sits at the heart of our Sales Performance System™, and includes a very powerful reporting system that helps to keep the whole process on track.

Second, coaching.  It’s pretty well documented that the quality of sales coaching will make or break any sales performance initiative.  As a result, we probably spend as much time getting sales leaders and managers to understand how to coach consultative selling, as we do working with the salespeople and account managers themselves.

To take Telefonica O2 as an example, we train sales managers how to coach, of course, but we also provide them with coaching toolkits, and assign them an Academy Coach who offers “coach the coach” sessions.  These involve watching the manager coach a team member, assessing them against a coaching competency framework, and then providing coaching to improve their coaching.  Confusing, but it works!

We’ve also found during the recession that we have been asked far more to get involved in direct coaching of deal or account teams.  These “deal clinics” are incredibly effective as a way of opening up accounts or putting together winning pitches, and we’re willing to run them a success fee basis.

DS: I know Imparta has a presence in the U.S.  How are your expansion plans progressing?

RB: Yes, I’m delighted that we have a strong U.S. client base, including GE, HP, the WPP Group and Intelsat.  I lived here for a few years and have an MBA from Harvard, so I have a great deal of interest in the U.S. and spend quite a bit of my time here (as you talk to me I’m actually in Washington DC).  We have been steadily growing our presence in this market despite the difficult economy, and we have significant plans for expansion in 2010/11 – as indeed we have across the world.  I have appointed a senior executive to oversee our expansion plans, and while in some countries we will be seeking partnerships to drive our presence, in the US we are more likely to continue expanding our existing Imparta account management and delivery team.  We are also looking at possible acquisitions here to help accelerate our growth.  Despite 2009 being a difficult year for many sales training companies, I see this as an exciting market, and one to which we are culturally much aligned.

DS: I understand you’ve just acquired a company in the field of service excellence.  How does that fit with your strategy?

RB: The Procter Consultancy has a great reputation for delivering service improvement, and the acquisition is designed to reinforce Imparta’s ability to add value to the whole of our clients’ customer-facing organizations.

There are plenty of sales training companies around, but very few who combine Sales and Marketing as we do.  A big part of our work with our sales clients already involves getting Marketing lined up behind the sales initiatives – for example, producing product training that doesn’t just explain what a product does, but also how to sell it.

Once you add in the service element, you can really start to align all the customer-facing elements of a company, ensuring that the product delivery reinforces the brand and the sales philosophy, and provides a strong input to the “team sell.”

We think this breadth of coverage is fairly unique, and it’s especially important now, because customers are increasingly unforgiving, and quick to share their experiences online. For private and public sector organizations alike, it is critical to ensure that the customer experience delivers on the promises made by sales and marketing.

DS: Thanks, Richard.

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.

Photo Credit: Igor Karon – Fotolia.com

There is a lot going on in the sales training industry, but a lot of it isn’t sales training.  As they continue to see the demand for traditional classroom-based training falling off the cliff, some training firms are scrambling to get their content online.  Some are taking shortcuts.  Others  are going about it the right way. Even during these challenging times.

We know of several very large corporations that have announced internally that they will offer no more classroom sales training.  Numbers of other large and mid-size buyers of sales training are moving in this direction. I don’t have to spell out what that means for training company owners that have been drawing tons of cash out of their companies during the past number of years instead of investing in new content and new delivery media.  Can they make up for lost time?  Some will and some won’t.  We’re predicting the acquisition or demise of several of the 23 training companies we cover.   In fact, numbers of training companies, large and small, are in a bad situation right now.  Names you’d recognize.  For many of them, it’s going to get worse before it gets better—if it gets better.

On the subject of shortcuts, it’s disappointing to see that “free” sales tips, tricks, and silver bullets continue to appear in dozens of blogs and websites every day.  The very salesreps and managers that seek out these tips are the ones that are hurt most by them.  They need structure and a strategic approach for selling their products and services to their customers.  When you think about it, these sales tips aren’t really free at all.  They cost money.  A lot of it, in the form of lost business opportunity—deals those reps will never win because they are seeking shortcuts and shortcuts don’t work in sales.

In addition to the free sales tips promising to help your reps win, there are other distractions as well.  Social media is one.  ESR published some research on that last quarter.  We know that for some companies, social media, integrated within an overall internal and external communications approach can be very powerful.  It can build awareness, drive business, and improve customer and employee satisfaction.  As with sales tips though, a tactical, seat-of-the-pants approach takes salespeople and their managers’ eyes off the ball.  For many, the promise of social media is an little more than mirage.  When you finally get there, you’re thirstier than when you started.

Sales 2.0 is another area of potential risk for sales leaders seeking quick solutions and shortcuts to their selling challenges.  Sales 2.0-like, vendor- and press-driven “new, more efficient and more effective ways of doing business” have a way of attracting those seeking shortcuts.  In fact, some of the marketing messages I’ve seen specifically target the ever-hopeful, quick-solution-seeking sales leader.  Again, I’ve got no complaints with companies that are marketing legitimate Sales 2.0 tools and approaches and are sharing with their customers the truth about what those applications will and will not do and the proven path to get results.  I’m offended by the tidal wave of hype advanced by some who would drive a sales-challenged company in the wrong direction just to make a sale.   SiriusDecisions’ Joe Galvin shared a piece he did on the subject of Sales 2.0.  If you can get a copy, it’s well worth the read.  With his background at Gartner, and a deep understanding of sales leadership, Joe’s got a terrific perspective on the subject.

I want to hear about more companies that are making forward progress doing the right things.  There are a lot of others out there who can use some additional encouragement.

• 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.

Photo credit: © dragon_fang – Fotolia.com

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Brought to you by The Customer Collective and Oracle CRM. Welcome to the conversation.

I cover three of the most critical processes for building an effective sales capability: qualification, hiring and planning.  Sales process itself is covered in another module.

Timeline to disaster

One of the big challenges here is similar to that in the U.S.—selecting a sales VP (or director) who can get the job done. Considering the average tenure of sales VPs these days—less than two years—I created a pro-forma timeline for the newly-hired sales VP who isn’t going to work out long-term:

• Months 1-3: On-boarding. VP learns about the company, salespeople, colleagues in marketing, services, customers, competitors, etc. Asks a lot of questions.  Generates excitement and hope.
• Months 4-6: VP makes changes in approach, terminology, territories, business partners, marketing materials, routine (sales meetings, forecast calls, etc.) VP may bring in former salespeople that worked for them in the past.
• Months 7-9: Little to no performance improvement realized. VP says that new mechanisms haven’t “gained traction.” Or that their new reps “need a little more time.” VP suggests that there have been changes in the market/economy/environment since they joined. Assures the executive team a little more time will do the trick.
• Months 10-12: An occasional success! The heat is off for a time, until the CEO realizes that “one big win does not a trend make.” (Dave Hathaway, partner, now retired, from prestigious VC firm Venrock Associates said that to me in a board meeting when I was an inexperienced VP of sales and bragged about a big deal we had just won.)
• Month 13: Consultant or board member or expert is brought in to assess the situation. Meetings, reports, discussions, back and forth
• Months 14-16: VP and CEO see the handwriting on the wall, but keep it to themselves, hoping that the situation will magically approve.
• Months 17-20: CEO covertly searches for new VP. VP covertly taps into his/her network while updating their resume with the appropriate spin on this latest position.
• Month 21 (or The New Month 1): New VP of sales arrives… On-boarding…  It’s Groundhog Day!

Who is responsible?

You might wonder who are responsible for this all-too-common situation.  It’s the people who continue to hire the wrong VPs of sales or promote their best salesrep to the job.

What is the root cause?

The profiles for a Sales VP and a salesperson are, by definition, different.  Granted, most successful sales VPs have a sales background.  But promoting a successful salesperson into a management role doesn’t work unless that person has the skills and traits required for that job.  Here are a few generic sales leader skills:  management (!), team building, conflict resolution, strategic planning, coaching, hiring, and motivating.  There are numbers of additional skills required for success in each unique sales leadership position.  Plus there are a list of traits, too, many of which even top-performing salesreps just don’t possess.  Process orientation is just one.

Wait, wait!!!

If you’re about to hire a sales VP, director, or sales manager (or are about to promote a rep into one of those positions) and you don’t have a profile for that position specifying the skills and traits required for success with your company’s sales people selling your products to your customers against your competitors, STOP.

The four of us had an email exchange today after some comments to one of Jonathan’s posts.  The comments sounded like sweeping indictments of “old school,” and the four of us as well.

What’s really worth considering, as Dave Brock pointed out in the email thread, is that people are attacking the four of us for being old school, when we’re all entrenched in the new social media: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, virtual meetings, and much of the rest.  Are they attacking our not being immersed in the new social media, which you would think might be their mission? No.  They’re attacking us for the opinions we voice about the social media from within the social media environment.² We’re not outside observers.

Here is an edited slice of my thoughts on the subject of social media zealotry and “old school” from that thread:

ESR has studied the issue of inter-generational selling. It’s a big challenge for companies and for consultants and trainers. It will become even more challenging. How do we “experts” stay relevant to younger salespeople, managers and CEOs is one question. The bigger question is how will younger salespeople become relevant to serious corporate buyers?

Here are a few more questions: The Millennials (Y’ers) show considerably less willingness to follow convention (read process) than those who are older—a generalization, I admit. Salespeople in general have less discipline and process-orientation than professionals, which compounds the problem. B2B customer buying patterns and practices are getting tougher, requiring more discipline, process, strategy, etc. on the part of those who sell to them. So how will the Millennials, many of whom are rejecting much of what has come before, wind up selling though this capability gap? Answer: Many will not! Companies will have to tighten up their profile for B2B salespeople and a boatload of soft skills with little else won’t be a desired characteristic—not in the kind of serious B2B selling that drives the economy. So the pure social media types will have that to play with that in their spare time, or lock on to a subset of buyers in corporations who may be open to that stuff.

A client of ours went into a very tough negotiation with a well-known company yesterday.  Big, big bucks! They were meeting with a senior strategic procurement executive. Facebook? Twitter? Blogs? Virtual or online anything?  No. Weeks of research, customer profiling, political positioning, testing approaches, strategizing, number crunching, competitive positioning, collaborative brainstorming and one very, very important face-to-face meeting. Is that model going to change in the next few years? Sure, in some sales environments, but not in mission critical areas of most companies over $200 million in sales.

With all this being said, with respect to the business side of my life, I’ll listen to and consider anyone’s opinion on any subject, so long as they can express their opinion clearly and succinctly and don’t resort to manipulation, games, or personal attacks.  I believe passion is good.  So is being a zealot, if your goal is benevolent as well as your means of getting there.  I confess:  I’m a sales effectiveness zealot.

Notes:

1. Jonathan Farrington is hosting the kick-off event for the Top Sales Experts Roundtable:  The Future of Professional Selling on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 1.00 pm EDT.  I’ll be a panel member.  With Jonathan in charge, it’ll be worth your investment.
2. ESR will be publishing the findings from our recent survey on the new social media’s role in B2B selling next week.  If you’d like to be notified of the publication of this report, subscribe to this blog or the ESR/Alert^TM.

Photo credit: © Carsten Reisinger – Fotolia.com

I wrote Here’s What’s Going On two weeks ago.  There has been lots of activity (and some productivity, as well!) since then.

Here are some points, observations, and opinions I’ve taken from my activities over the past few weeks:

1. I read all the news.  I understand the economic situation.  But deals are getting done.  Four of ESR’s clients I spoke with yesterday are cautiously optimistic about their Q1 numbers. They’re winning business.  A few others are struggling.  But the point is, there is still business going on.
   

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2. At the moment, ESR believes sales training will be down twenty or more percent in 2009.  If we don’t hit bottom and come out the other end of this situation soon, that number could go down much further.  That’s bad news for a lot of reasons.
   

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3. As a result of the slowdown in training, many of the sales training companies we cover have been hit hard.  They’ve significantly reduced their staffs and slowed or stopped development.  If you’re engaging with a sales training company, you really need to understand their current financial situation.  ESR isn’t interested in advertising which firms are having trouble.  But we do guide our clients in the right direction, helping them figure out how to mitigate any associated risks.
   

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4. We’ve convinced a number of our clients to redeploy salespeople who aren’t suited for the sales positions they hold.  By that I mean performing a comprehensive assessment of their past and current performance, their skills, traits and behaviors against what is required to comply with and execute their selling process.  Relative to that, I recently did a briefing call with DDI.  They’re a leader in the talent management and assessment area.  I’ve written about PIWorldwide as well.  HR Chally is another solid alternative.  Now, more than ever, every company, even the smallest, needs to have a talent management/assessment firm partner with a sales specialty.
   

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5. Under Brian Lambert’s leadership, ASTD is making significant progress in the sales training discipline.  Brian has a lot to offer the industry. I sit on the ASTD sales training committee along with a number of very experienced and professional consultants, trainers and practitioners.  (Al Case, ESR’s Principal Analyst, and I will be presenting at ASTD’s Conference in June.  The subject:  How to Measure Sales Performance Improvement.)
   

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6. We’ve had a record number of inquiries come in during the past month from people charged with driving sales training initiatives within their companies.  The common theme is that they have to “get it right this time. “  They can’t waste any more money on ineffective training and, with this economy, they’ve got to get their salespeople bringing in as much business as possible.  Even with overall sales training down, this is encouraging.  Several of those people are charged with moving their companies from positions of commodity to value providers.  A bit late for that, but better late than never.
   

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7. With the last point in mind, Irish sales trainer, coach and consultant Niall Devitt wrote a post this week that describes precisely how sales leaders go about buying sales training the wrong way.  The post, entitled Need Sales Training? Let’s Sit Down and Talk About It is well worth reading.   Niall sets an example for sales trainers as well.  I commend him on his understanding of how sales performance improvement should be approached and his integrity for not folding, even with money on the table during these tough times.
   

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8. Louise Leonard, program manager for The Dublin Institute of Technology and Enterprise Ireland’s International Selling Programme, sent me a list of sales-related concerns expressed by the sales executives and CEOs who are participating in the program.  I’ll be addressing many of them during upcoming two-week, five-seminar trip to Ireland.  Although Ireland is plowing through their own set of economy-related challenges, the International Selling Programme has  a record number of participants this year.  Better attendance at each of the sessions as well.  This program is a seriously good place for Irish companies to be investing their money.

Photo: © 2004 Dave Stein — MacGregor Powering Through a Summer Day