We have a strong view at ESR about this subject.   With the right approach, time, and support, you might be able to get a B player to an A level.  But you won’t get a C player past the C level.

How can I say that?  It’s a matter of defining the terms. We know that the best approach for recruiting and selecting, as well as ongoing sales force development, is through a foundation of job profiling and competency mapping.  We also know that salespeople can, under the right circumstances, improve their skills significantly. On the other hand, the personal traits with which they are born are, for all intents and purposes, immutable.  You can’t train or coach someone whose DNA prevents it to be intelligent, analytical, resilient, driven, charismatic, courageous, passionate, curious, goal orientated, or have any other of the many traits required for success in B2B selling today (depending on the specific job).

Sure, you can support C players with resources, such as special attention and extra time from management, but empowering them to own and manage their territory and drive maximum profitable revenue from it will forever be a challenge.

What then is the difference between an A player and a B player?

In general terms, the A player has more of the skills, behaviors and traits required for consistent performance than the B player, and their numbers support that fact.  On the other hand, the B player may have all the traits of an A player, but not the all the skills or behaviors.  (That’s where training and reinforcement comes in.)  Or they may have many of the required traits, but are deficient in some ancillary ones, or perhaps their required traits aren’t to the level of the A player.  Therefore some B players can become A’s and some are just not able to.

What does all this mean to you?

First, you’re going to have to figure out what skills, traits, and behaviors are required for success in each job category within your sales organization and map your existing personnel against that list, so you can formulate the appropriate development plan going forward. Second, you’ll want to redeploy your C players into some other role inside (or outside) your company, over time.  Third, you’ll vow to never to hire another C player, because if you do, you’ll be stuck with them.

Photo Credit: © Jim Barber – Fotolia.com

Can you imagine:

• Half of your company’s products break within one day of initial use by a customer?
• 50% of the financial reports your company produces every quarter have mathematical errors?
• Every day, half of the deliveries your company makes wind up at the wrong location?
• IT so badly manages your company’s systems that your computer is down all day, every other day?
• Every other week, your paycheck is wrong?
• Your company is in danger of going out of business because purchasing regularly orders only half the amount of raw material inventory that is required?
• Your most important customers are looking for other suppliers because your billing is incorrect 50% of the time?
• People calling into your company get routed to the wrong person half the time?
• Your company’s website is down literally every other day?

But somehow in sales, 50% effectiveness is acceptable.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  It shouldn’t be that way.

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, learn from, and emulate.

So, why is sales still last on line in your company?  And what are you going to do about it?

Let me know your thoughts, please.

Photo credit: © dragon_fang – Fotolia.com

Every day there is more bad advice posted on the Internet about what’s required for sales success, and it’s getting worse.  I’m on dozens of sales trainers’ mailing lists. Among those emails, Google Alerts, my Twitter feed (“sales training” is one stream I track), reading plenty of blogs, and getting numbers of new books on sales sent to me on a regular basis, I get to see a lot of what’s really, really dangerous about this industry.

These are among the many risks associated with investing time and money with someone who just hangs up a shingle (puts up a website) and calls themselves a sales trainer, guru, coach, consultant, or expert:

• They don’t really understand your customers, your business, your people, your market, and your real selling challenges nor are they capable or willing to learn.
• They pre-prescribe what’s wrong with your team or approach based only on their area of knowledge or comfort rather than what you really need.
• Their training content consists of what they personally did when (and if) they sold, rather than a content based on a foundation of research, analysis, development, and experience.
• They have no credibility in front of your sales team, resulting in a loss of credibility for you as well.
• They have no measurement approach and are unwilling to be held accountable for results.
• They have no understanding of the behavioral and business change required for sustainable sales performance improvement and certainly don’t have the ability to support that change.
• They steer you toward tactical, event-based classroom training since that’s where they can make the most money.
• They have no technology platform for the delivery and measurement of ongoing learning, reinforcement, and integration with your company’s CRM system.
• They’re not concerned about talent management, especially recruitment and selection. Some are happy when salespeople that leave your organization—they get to train the replacements next year.
• They’ve worked in only one or perhaps two industries leaving them with little perspective on yours, even though they’ll tell you, “selling is selling.”
• They have little interest in methods and process, but a host of tricks, tips, shortcuts, and silver bullets.
• They are more focused on increasing activity rather than productivity among your salespeople.
• They don’t employ adult learning strategies and approaches in their programs.
• Motivation and entertainment play a significantly bigger role than it should in their training classes.

You may think that there is nothing wrong with bringing in someone, just for a day, who appears to have a new approach, a hot book with a catchy title, or a really cool website.  If those are your only three buying criteria, take my advice: Don’t do it.  Why you shouldn’t do it will be the subject of a post for another day.

One more thing.  There are terrific sales trainers whom you’ve never heard of.  They deliver significant value to their customers and really understand how to effect improvement in their client’s sales organizations.  It isn’t these people about which I am writing about. I’ll continue to do what I can to help them get noticed and grow their businesses.

In the meantime, Let the Sales Training Buyer Beware!

Photo source: Fotolia.com

Here is a continuation of the previous blog post, Part 1, beginning with step seven of the thirteen-step process:

7. Train your reference. Whether he’s the ally you recruited and trained to sell on your behalf, or someone you met after the contract was signed, you have to train him if you want him to be a good reference. He should know and be able to talk knowledgeably about
   1. your company’s messages
   2. how and why your company was selected
   3. your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
   4. issues his company had with you and how those were favorably resolved
   5. instances where your company, and you in particular, went the extra mile to meet his company’s requirements
   6. the standard sales objections your company faces, and responses to those objections.

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8. Keep your reference informed about anything material going on with your company. Don’t ever let him be surprised by information about you during a reference call. In fact, don’t allow them to be surprised at all. It’s not good business to put your reference, coach or ally in a potentially embarrassing or precarious position.
   

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9. Before they are called by a prospect, brief your contact just as you would any other member of your virtual sales team.  Tell him
   1. with whom he will be speaking, their title, and responsibility in the evaluation
   2. what that person’s company does
   3. where the company is in its evaluation process
   4. what the prospect’s decision criteria are
   5. what the prospect likes and dislikes about your offering
   6. who your competitors are, and how you want him to position you against those competitors
   7. which subjects he should defer to you
   8. which subjects he should raise with the prospect

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10. Keep up your relationships with others in your reference account as well. If you’ve invested a lot of time in developing your reference and have learned to use him well, what would you do if he disappeared tomorrow? Is there someone who could step into his place?
    

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11. Make sure your company takes care of your references. Without usurping the authority or responsibility of the post-sales team, make sure your reference receives special treatment — fast access to customer care, free tickets to your company’s annual customer conference, or perhaps a regular round of golf with you and your company’s CEO.
    

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12. Use the reference regularly. Don’t let months go by without making her feel useful. References grow stale through lack of use.
    

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13. Make sure your reference is believable. My friend Olin Thompson used to remind sales reps that if their reference’s story sounds too perfect, credibility goes out the window. It’s good, not bad, for a reference to say, “There are two small issues that remain with this supplier. They’ve done everything they promised, but these two things came up which they’ve been working diligently to resolve. . . .”
    

    ---

One final note: While winning you new business, your reference may begin to wonder whether his own success will hurt him. Will he lose resources? Will he receive less attention from you or your company? Will someone else usurp his favored-reference spot? Bring the subject into the open from time to time. Reassure him that his success as a reference will only make him more valuable in your eyes.

Excerpted from How Winners Sell © Dave Stein — All Rights Reserved

Photo credit: Fotolia.com

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to coach and mentor many talented sales professionals, sales leaders, and other executives around the general subject of effective selling within their organizations. I provided them with support, contacts, insights, my experience, expertise, opinions and balanced and honest feedback.  I never charged a fee for being a mentor, although there is a definite balance of value for a mentor/protégé relationship to work.  In other words, there has to be something in it for the mentor.  For that reason, I selected protégés very carefully.

From my perspective, coaching is more task oriented and process-driven as compared to mentoring, which is related to supporting more strategic changes in behavior, capabilities and attitudes.

Here are some considerations relating to mentoring:

1.     Do you need a mentor?

The answer is probably yes.  There are times that most of us just aren’t able to gain the wisdom and knowledge necessary to move to the next level in our jobs or careers.  Some challenge may seem insurmountable, and without the ability to engineer and effectively execute a dramatic break-through by ourselves, we are stuck.  An effective mentor can provide honest assessment, insight, the objective perspective and the tools required for ongoing success, especially during these challenging times.

2.     What qualities should a mentor have?

For a relationship with a mentor to be effective for you the mentor must be willing to take the time to work with you, be a good communicator, have a basic understanding of psychology, and be knowledgeable about the subject(s) in which you seek guidance.  They must be discreet, caring, and enthusiastic about helping people overcome challenges.

3.     Where do you find a mentor?

Due to political risks, I always recommend that you recruit a mentor outside your company.  It certainly shouldn’t be your current boss. With that in mind, consider some or all of the following:  a former boss from another company, a known expert in the domain in which you are seeking knowledge, someone in your business (or even personal) network, or a recommendation from someone you respect in the area in which you are seeking improvement.

4.     What are your responsibilities?

For a mentor/protégé relationship to work, you must be willing to work hard at improvement.  That means defining and accepting your shortcomings and being open to changing or forming new habits through adopting new strategies and tactics. You must be willing to be responsible for executing what you and your mentor decide is the best course of action.  You have to be honest, objective, appreciative, motivated and have the courage to change.  Be certain you have the motivation and time to do what it takes to progress to that next level in each area of improvement you choose before you recruit your mentor.

5.     What’s in it for the mentor?

What I get out of mentoring is the satisfaction of helping someone who needs and wants my assistance.  In addition, I get to improve my own coaching, leadership, communication, and management skills.  I often get new ideas and insights from my protégés.  And my protégés provide me with an expansion of my business and professional network.

6.     How should you proceed once you have recruited a mentor?

Devise a plan, together.  Jointly assess your situation: where you feel you are presently; the issues or problems that may be limiting your professional growth and advancement; what has worked for  you in the past and what has not.  Next talk about your goal—what you want to achieve and by when.  Then you and your mentor can discuss various options or strategies and related tasks/tactics to achieve those goals.  If you have put appropriate metrics in place related to the goal, there will be no question at all when you have achieved it.

7.  What should you not do?

There is one last point I feel obliged to make: Don’t confuse mentoring with picking someone’s brain. Experts tell me it’s insulting and has nothing whatsoever to do with a mutually beneficial professional mentor/protégé relationship.

Photo credit: Sandy Jones-Kaminski

The story

My wife and I are back home in Massachusetts after spending five weeks in Florida.  Regretfully this wasn’t a vacation, but rather a temporary (and evidently yearly) relocation of ES Research Group’s headquarters to a considerably warmer place.

This year we decided to fly our plane down. There were two reasons:  First, it’s been a while since I flew this distance.  I certainly enjoy the short hops to visit family and friends here in the Northeast, but to fly again from the top to the bottom of the U.S., along the coast, is a special treat. The second reason was more practical. I head off to Ireland on business next week and didn’t want to spend too much time before I leave in a car driving nearly 1,500 miles.  Doing 750, or even 500 mile days isn’t an option due to all that’s going on at ESR and my need to take care of business during business hours. So, it would have been a four-day drive.

The flight down was uneventful.  We landed at Fernandina Beach airport on Amelia Island on the second day and spent six days at a friend’s ocean-front condo before heading down to Naples, a two-hour flight.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the weather and the significant preparation and planning the flight home would require.

Moonwalking with Einstein

While I was in Florida, I read a fascinating book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Joshua Foer), about how memory experts remember things. It’s always been a subject of interest for me.

What prompted me to again think deeply about mastery (memory, flying and selling) begins on page 171.  The author discusses how experts tend to “engage in a very directed, highly focused routine…deliberate practice.”  Top achievers develop strategies for staying out of (pardon…) autopilot mode. “They force themselves to stay in the ‘cognitive [learning] phase.’”

I love this one:  “The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.”

And, this one as well. “…To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.”  What the author was describing was how to become a memory master, but the parallel to increasing, rather than merely maintaining, my flying skills resonated with me through every word of those several pages—in fact, the entire book.  I highly recommend it. (You too can learn how to remember Pi to the 10,000th decimal place.)

Mastery

In previous posts I’ve discussed mastery and I’ve discussed how the FAA requires pilots to comply with certain reviews and standards, depending on their rating.  As a private pilot, I must complete a flight review every two years with an instructor, which includes discussion and questioning on the ground and a series of maneuvers in the air.  This is at least a two-hour session.  In addition, as a single-engine instrument-rated pilot, I must have executed six instrument approaches, entered and flew a holding patterns, and intercepted a virtual course in the sky (an airway or signal from a navigation broadcasting station on the ground, for example) during the previous six months. (Wouldn’t the profession of selling be different if there were any standards at all.)

Part of my ongoing personal learning and reinforcement plan includes at least two hours in an FAA-approved flight simulator every spring.  This is not required by the FAA to maintain my rating, but I find that the time in the simulator returns significant value for me.  The fine instructors with whom I consult provide me with challenges that just wouldn’t work for a practice session in an airplane: failing the engine, disabling critical instruments at critical moments, simulating difficult weather conditions, such as an un-forecasted 30-knot wind across the runway on short final approach.

So I spent that time on a simulator with an instructor prior to the trip.  Although I’ve logged nearly 1,700 hours, for about half the session I felt like a beginner. I left the simulator exhausted, having been stretched, tricked, manipulated, and pushed past my limits.  But I sure nailed those last few instrument approaches.

The flight home

Among all the other skills pilots must master, understanding the weather is one.  We were dealing with unstable weather in Florida and an impending cold front across the mid-Atlantic states. Wet weather is no problem for a single-engine Cessna when its warm, but at 6,000 feet, where it’s more than twenty degrees colder than on the ground, moisture freezes on surfaces that don’t have anti-icing protection as larger planes do.  I spent at least three hours during each of three days in advance of the trip home reading weather maps and forecasts, and consulting with Lockheed Martin’s Flight Service for pilots trying to figure out the best game plan. Planning this trip reminded me of the sales opportunities I coached sales teams on how to win over the years. Assess, determine an objective, devise a strategy and layer in the tactics.

What was supposed to be a two-day trip, Naples, FL to Wilmington, NC, then on to Martha’s Vineyard the next day, would have to be done in one day to beat the weather—but only if it was safe. My planning included backup contingencies. Land and rent a car anywhere along the route, drive home (with our two dogs that wouldn’t do well at all in the cargo hold of a commercial airliner), go to Ireland, then fly back to wherever I had parked the plane once I returned home to the States. I wasn’t into taking chances, although some might say flying a plane from Florida to Massachusetts is a risky thing to begin with.

We left Naples at 9:00 am on the 29th. We flew three legs averaging three hours each, IFR (instrument flight rules) all the way.  First, Naples to Savannah for refueling and a nature break for people and dogs, checking conditions ahead, and filing the next flight plan. Savannah to Norfolk, VA. Same routine. At Norfolk I checked weather one last time to see whether we might stay in the area overnight, but wet weather was coming in along with 43 degree temperature on the ground first thing the next morning.  If that happened we’d be stuck there for a few days or have to resort to Plan B. We decided to fly the final leg home. (The three screen shots are actual FAA radar tracks of the flights, available on FlightAware.com. Click the graphics for full size.)

After we landed, I realized I had accomplished the most competent and precise flying I had ever done. Safe, focused, and, as pilots say, ahead of the plane, predicting what would happen and having options and alternatives if they didn’t. Why? The instruction, practice on the simulator, all the time analyzing the weather, making sure the plane was in perfect working order (I had to replace a broken radio in Florida), the contingency planning, and just flying the plane with a greater degree of precision than what I had accomplished previously.

Here’s the question for you.

Have you invested in what it takes for your sales people to achieve mastery in selling?  The infrastructure, the tools, the methods and processes, the learning, the reinforcement, the coaching, the metrics, and the rewards?  Or are they just winging it?

Hi Dave,

I have read your book, “How Winners Sell” and have found it to be one of the best sales mentoring books available. I have also followed you blogs and tweets over the years.

The best business books are those that you read and then review over time by going to the yellow highlight sections. My copy of “Winners” has served as a reference source for about 7 years.

I am a 20 plus year software sales veteran who spends the last 2 weeks of every July at a house in Katama with my family.

As a result, I would love to meet you and perhaps get a cup of coffee or an early evening drink in Edgartown, Oak Bluffs (or just coffee in Vineyard Haven).

I will be on the island from July 18^th to August 1^st and would be pleased to meet you, should schedules permit.

BTW – loved the aerial shot of Tisbury Pond.  [He's referring to the photo in the header of this page.]  Bill & Susan [...] have been family friends for many years and I have seen some wonderful island views from Bill’s helicopter.

Regards,

Chris [...]

How could I pass up this opportunity?

I didn’t.  We had breakfast at the Planeview Restaurant at the Martha’s Vineyard airport this morning.  (Lots of locals do business there.)

At one point, Chris asked me this question:  In your experience, what three things do top performing salespeople have in common?  Here’s my list:

1. A realistic, objective view of themselves, their customers, and their sales opportunities.  Ability to seek and handle the truth and do the right things with that knowledge.
2. An orientation toward order and process.  That includes planning.  Having ten or twenty deals in your portfolio and knowing what the next steps are for each one.  Not saying, “I’ll figure out what to do after the next meeting.”
3. The ability (and willingness) to really understand the customer.   Being driven to research the company and the person with whom they are meeting to the point that they can grab and maintain credibility and differentiation, not to mention knowing enough to begin building a foundation for meaningful business collaboration.  (See Dave Brock’s post today about that subject.)

Are these my final answers?  No.  There are numbers of other common strengths, behaviors, skills, and traits among top performers, depending on the demands of the sales jobs they hold.  For example, what a strategic account manager needs to be successful is different from a territory rep.  But those three are a heck of a good place to start.

With that in mind, what are your top three?

Photo source:  © 2010 Dave Stein — Lambert’s Cove Beach, West Tisbury, MA.

When Mark Dorosz, whom I’ve know for a number of years, recently contacted me about his work with a major corporation around storytelling and sales culture development, he had my interest.  He’s the director at KnowledgeScreen.  Here is some of our conversation.

Dave Stein: Why are authentic sales stories so important to shaping sales culture?

Mark Dorosz: For years sales professionals have understood the value of storytelling in building client relationships but what we often forgot is how these same stories shape our own internal sales culture. Few dialogues generate more passion and commitment than a successful sales peer explaining how she closed a key deal, over a cup of coffee.

For businesses to grow—from on-boarding new sales reps to keeping the current ones continuously developing—we need to find a way to share these success stories across global sales organizations while retaining their unscripted authenticity.

DS: Tell me about when you had your “aha” moment with this mode of learning intervention?

MD: I have been fortunate enough to sit in on numerous sales training programs from luxury retailers to America’s largest financial advisory firms. While the class demographic, sales process, and products always changed, what struck me was how similar the learners’ aspirations were.  Beyond the role plays, product drills, and process training, the learners all wanted to hear from the company’s top sales performers, in their own words.

I realized if these formal sales training programs could be complemented by real life success stories from the field, their impact would be so much greater.

DS: So you started a business.  Nice.  Why does your approach work?

MD: We built a process for capturing sales stories that is quick, repeatable, and doesn’t compromise authenticity.

Our first principle is to build on the natural enthusiasm of an organization’s top sales talent to share their story. We do this by making sure every interviewee look great on camera and that they’re personally proud of their module before releasing it to the sales organization.

Secondly, we encourage the participant to share success in their own words taking as much time as they need, confident that any miscues (or cursing!) can be edited afterward as we compile the interview into 5-10 minutes of their most powerful insights.

Finally we make it easy for the training department to sponsor the initiative by delivering the finished story within five days as either an Articulate module, podcast, or web friendly video for about the same cost as a seat at a public sales training seminar.

DS: Any tips you could share with readers who are looking to try this approach on their own?

MD: Don’t be afraid of letting your top performers speak in their own words. These success stories complement, not replace, your formal sales training. If you give a global voice to your best sales talent that captures their passion and how they employ your team’s sales approach to win business, you’ll be amazed by the impact on your sales culture.

Now that I’m thinking back in time as I write this post, I remember the television show Who Do You Trust? Perhaps the show should have been entitled Who Is Lying and Who Is Not? That’s what I was left with each time I watched it. I never was entertained.  I always felt uncomfortable.  It was my own lack of confidence in being able to identify someone telling the truth from someone who lied.  I’ve gotten much better at that over the years.

I was a Boy Scout: “Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrift, brave, clean, and reverent.”  At the time that Boy Scout Law gave us plenty of food for thought, discussion and learning—especially with respect to trust.  Things are different now with a lot of young people.

And, of course, there is a lifetime of personal relationships.  In some there was trust.  In others not.  On both sides.   Trust equaled comfort and security.  The lack thereof, hurt.   That hasn’t changed over the years for me.

I became an instrument-rated pilot 15 years ago.  I learned that the imperative “Always Trust Your Instruments” could save your life.  I think about that every time I fly, especially in foul weather when I can’t see anything out the window of the airplane.

So here I am hosting Carnival of Trust, and honored at being asked.  Thanks Charlie.

I met Charles Green a while back when we were both speaking at a conference.  From him and his writings, I learned what trust really means in business.  And since I’m on the sales side of things—where there is more often than not a trust vacuum—I’ve been especially attentive. It certainly has paid off for me.

With that quick history on the word trust as a backdrop, here are ten pieces on that subject for your consideration:

I think she has nailed the basics, hasn’t she?

From the official website/blog of the UK Prime Minister’s Office, a five-minute video, PM focused on recession and restoring trust.  Speaking at a press conference in Downing Street, Prime Minister Brown said he had appointed a Cabinet of “character, strength, experience and resilience” that is committed to serving the nation.  Politicians have got a long way to go in the U.K.  As they do here in the U.S.

In my experience, rebuilding trust is so much harder than building it in the first place.

The blogger includes a no-BS,  eight-step approach to creating a culture of candor created by James O’Toole and Warren Bennis.

Can you accept that challenge in your company?  Take a look.

Steven Andersen, blogging for Insight Counsel, wrote in Foul Play: After Ted Stevens Debacle, DOJ Sends Prosecutors a Sharp Message, “A certain segment of society turns a jaundiced eye toward government to begin with, so news about prosecutors willing to compromise rules and ethics to get a conviction merely confirms their darkest suspicions.  ‘When you can show that the government forgot the rules because it was so intent on winning, that’s a powerful defense before a jury,’ Collins [Patrick Collins, a partner at Perkins Coie and a former U.S. attorney in Chicago] says. ‘One of the easiest hats for me to wear is that of a righteously indignant lawyer who sees government misconduct.’”

Again, to me this flavor or breach of trust is nasty abuse of power.  There are no shortage of historical examples of where that can lead.

Personally, all ESR’s phone lines are on the appropriate Do Not Call Lists and we still get barraged with calls (with phony caller IDs) from “Shareholder Services” and fear-mongering car warranty companies.

Numbers of elderly people where I live were recently scammed as well.  I got the calls mentioned in the article.  Trust?  At your own peril!

Will we always have to look in our spam folders for the occasional real message rather than in our inbox for the occasional spam?

I wonder where sales ranks in this study.  I know that I work very hard in earning my clients’ trust.  I also know that many salespeople don’t.

I’m lucky.  I’m healthy, I have a doctor, and I trust her.  I’m not sure of what I would do if I were not in this position.

When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.

Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.

Chris had some good questions to ask, including, “Why have so few Harvard MBA students signed on?”  My question is what can we do to remedy the deeper problem for which we need a pledge in the first place?

Chris is a straight-up, honorable guy.  I really like this post, because it serves to alert all of us on the differences between bloggers and journalists with respect to earning our trust.

Is the difference between bloggers and journalists important to you?

• In many companies, corporate training has a long way to go to be seen as valuable by their sales organizations.  On the other hand, when left to their own devices, many sales organizations continue to get very little long-term benefit from their tactical approach to sales training.  There is a big gap that needs to be closed.
• Brian Lambert’s Sales Training Drivers unit of ASTD is making great strides.  I sit on a committee with some very dedicated and knowledgeable sales training professionals.  Sales Training Drivers is an organization to watch.
• Brian, Tim Ohai and Eric Kerkhoff’s new book World Class Selling has been published.  It’s a groundbreaking foundation for building an effective sales function within any company.
• There are overn 5,000 attendees at this conference.  The amount of Twittering from the conference is minimal.  I tweeted: 

 davestei With thousands of attendees at #ASTD, how come so few tweets? What does this say about trainers?

One reply I received:

TrDev @davestei Re: trainers and tweeting. Maybe too busy doing live things. Learning, talking, enjoying people. Where’s the joy of tweeting?

• There was an interesting panel this morning including Howard Stevens (CEO of HR Chally), Neil Rackham, Dave Roberts (formerly of OnTarget, now on the faculty of UNC), and Brian Lambert.  The main subject was raising the level of professionalism of selling.
• Sandi Edwards from the American Management Association said, “Generic sales training doesn’t work. It must be relevant to their jobs.”
• Dave Roberts, “We need salespeople who can sell business value.”
• Howard Stevens, “There are no (zero) people in the world with a Ph.D in sales.”
• Neil Rackham, “IBM Global Services spends $480k to pursue an opportunity whether they win or lose.”
• Howard Stevens, “Sales hasn’t professionalized.” There are no minimum standards for sales people.”
• Howard Stevens, “50% of graduating BA’s will become salespeople.”