Perspective on Sales Training | Special Edition 2016

SPECIAL EDITION I SALES TRAINING

BUSINESS

PERSPECTIVES

ON

MANAGING

WORLD-CLASS

TRAINING

CONGRATULATIONS

TOP 20 SALES TRAINING COMPANIES

Check Out Our 2016 Sales Training Watch List The Top 20 Sales Training Companies are a service provided by Training Industry, Inc. Due to the diversity of services offered, no attempt is made to rank the “Top 20s.”

PERSPECTIVES ON

SALES TRAINING - K E N TAY LO R

One of my favorite segments of corporate learning is the sales training and coaching space. At Training Industry, we watch this section of the market carefully for trends, as the proximity to tangible outcomes and measurability of the impact of sales training programs has long been the easiest to measure and study. The reason this is important to all of us in learning and development, is that this segment of the market affords the opportunity for innovation and is often where new approaches and tools are introduced.

WE WATCH THE SALES TRAINING MARKET CAREFULLY FOR TRENDS AND INNOVATION.

The technology support infrastructure (such as a CRM) for the sales team gives us line of sight into data that helps us better understand performance improvement. We see that best-in-class initiatives in this space are disaggregating from the course or event, introducing microlearning, video, learning and reinforcement at the time of need, mobile learning, and the use of e-readers and knowledge repositories to create personal learning environments supported by sales. The sales team must have access to the best and most current information when they need it, wherever they are.

At Training Industry, we have been publishing the findings of our annual review of the top companies in sales training for more than nine years now, with our 2016 Top 20 Sales Training Companies list publishing in February of this year. These companies

are selected based on a thorough review of a detailed submission they make to our selection committee. One of the areas of focus in that review is innovation. We asked the best companies in the space to share innovative approaches they use to support the development of excellent sales professionals.

This special edition of Training Industry Magazine is a collection of perspectives on where sales training is heading and some of the challenges associated with improving the impact, or should I say performance, of our salespeople and sales management.

This issue covers concepts from making the business case for sales training to leveraging big data to focus learning. We hope you will use this magazine to uncover a few ideas that can change or reinforce your thinking with regards to your sales training programs.

The quality of the perspectives shared in this issue should provide you with some direction that will make a lasting impact on the performance of your company.

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts about the point of views shared in the magazine and any feedback you have on the new special edition format.

Ken Taylor is editor in chief of Training Industry Magazine and president of Training Industry, Inc. Email Ken.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS F E AT U R E S

14 28

08 10 12

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THE SALESPERSON’S MOST VALUABLE PORTFOLIO: ALIGNING WITH WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOUR CUSTOMER

By Steve Andersen & Craig Jones | Performance Methods Inc. Focusing on the customer’s pursuit of success should be top-of-mind for savvy salespeople.

MODERN SALES MANAGEMENT

By Richard Barkey | Imparta Organizations must focus on strengthening the skillset of sales managers to maximize performance.

FOUR WAYS TO INCREASE THE IMPACT OF SALES COACHING

By Mike Wirth | Forum

SALES TRAINING: IS IT WORTH IT?

By Jim Dickie | MHI Global

TRUST IS DEAD. LONG LIVE TRUST!

By Mark Marone | Dale Carnegie Training

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GREAT SELLING TODAY: NAVIGATING CHANGE

20

BIG DATA-DRIVEN SALES TRAINING

22

DESIGNING AN EFFECTIVE SALES TRAINING PROGRAM

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PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE?

By Lou Schachter & Rick Cheatham | BTS

By Duane Sparks | The Sales Board

By Dave Mattson | Sandler Training

By John Holland & Frank Visgatis | CustomerCentric Selling

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HELPING SALES AND MARKETING MARCH TOGETHER

32

HOW LEARN-ABLEMENT MAKES SALES TRAINING WORK

34

WHAT SETS HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS APART

36

FOUR KEYS TO RAPID BEHAVIOR CHANGE

38

DO YOUR SALESPEOPLE KNOW WHERE THEY’RE STRUGGLING?

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BANISH THE OTHER FOUR LETTERED F-WORD

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By Paul Bilodeau | The Brooks Group

By James Touchstone | Sales Performance International

By Julie Thomas | ValueSelling Associates

By Mark Bashrum | Richardson

By Tim Riesterer | Corporate Visions

By Edward G. Brown | Cohen Brown Management Group

THE SECRET OF SALES ENABLEMENT

By Ken Valla and Ed Emde | Wilson Learning

SALES TRAINING SPECIAL EDITION

INFO EXCHANGE SUBSCRIBE TODAY

03 I PERSPECTIVES ON SALES TRAINING

The sales training market embraces new tools to transform business.

06 I INFOGRAPHIC

The sales training market saw significant consolidation in 2015.

44 I WHAT’S ONLINE

Find additional articles and information available only at TrainingIndustry.com.

45 I COMPANY NEWS

Training Industry Magazine offers free electronic subscriptions to learning and development professionals.

It connects you with thought leaders, best practices and the resources and solutions you need to manage the business of learning.

Keep up with the latest in the training industry by reviewing pressing news releases.

SUBSCRIPTIONS ELECTRONIC: Sign up at TrainingIndustry.com to receive notification of each new electronic issue.

OUR TEAM STAFF CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

EDITOR

Doug Harward dharward@trainingindustry.com

Taryn Oesch toesch@trainingindustry.com

EDITOR IN CHIEF & PRESIDENT

DESIGNER

Ken Taylor ktaylor@trainingindustry.com

Heather Schwendner hschwendner@trainingindustry.com

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

ADVERTISING SALES

Michelle Eggleston meggleston@trainingindustry.com EDITOR

Shina Neo sneo@trainingindustry.com

PRINT: Print copies are available for purchase for $24.95.

For questions regarding subscriptions of hard copies, please contact editor@trainingindustry.com.

ARTICLE REPRINTS: To order reprints of articles, please contact Training Industry at editor@trainingindustry.com.

sales@trainingindustry.com East: Dan Weller dweller@trainingindustry.com West: Kristin Bolduc kbolduc@trainingindustry.com

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PUBLISHER Training Industry Magazine is published by: Training Industry, Inc. 6601 Six Forks Rd #120 Raleigh, NC 27615 Phone: 1.866.298.4203 Website: TrainingIndustry.com

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FOUR WAYS TO INCREASE

THE IMPACT OF SALES COACHING

BY MIKE WIRTH

Susan is one of the best salespeople in her company. Late last year, she discovered her fourth quarter numbers were short and she needed to nail down one more sale in order to meet her quota and, more importantly, help the company achieve its financial goals. Her last opportunity was far from a slam dunk: The chief decision maker had a relationship with a competitor and had been tepid to Susan.

Fortunately, before she left for her presentation, she reached out to a trusted executive, who helped her with the final presentation and delivery. The coaching helped – Susan closed the deal and made her numbers.

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Everybody needs a coach – from the newly hired sales associates all the way up to the top sellers. For companies to succeed, their sales teams need to be at the top of their game, and that means getting the training and guidance they need.

In many organizations, sales coaching is an important tactic among sales effectiveness leaders to help improve performance and achieve business goals. In fact, many managers rate sales coaching as one of the highest-impact activities related to sales effectiveness. Not only is sales coaching a helpful tool in terms of talent development, but it also has a major impact on business performance.

Despite high praise for sales coaching from managers, the most significant obstacles to

coaching are manager-related. The challenges include managers who: » D on’t prioritize coaching or make time to coach. » L ack the skills needed to be an effective sales coach. » A re not accountable for coaching their teams.

While sales professionals at all levels can benefit from coaching, most coaching efforts are used to help poor performers or those asking for help. Coaching sessions are focused on informal feedback rather than actionable guidance. They address specific opportunities rather than strengthening sales skills across the board.

WHEN SALES COACHING IS CONSISTENTLY APPLIED, IT IS PROVEN TO IMPROVE SALES PERFORMANCE, ENGAGEMENT AND MORE. efforts. These initiatives lack the necessary programmatic elements that many less impactful initiatives utilize.

Focus coaching efforts on specific behaviors, competencies and performance objectives.

Informal coaching can be useful, but only if it is combined with coaching focused on specific performance outcomes. Organizations should prioritize these outcomes based on competencies considered essential to each sales role. These should include activities most closely connected with a favorable sales outcome, such as obtaining a skill in pitching a program in order to secure customer commitment. Coaching should also focus on activities farther upstream, such as building the sales pipeline, knowing how to identify and nurture quality leads or crafting solutions that are in demand.

Many of these programs are fraught with lack of measurement, accountability and objectives, and are therefore unsuccessful.

Despite all the challenges that sales coaching can introduce, when it is consistently applied, it is proven to improve sales performance, salesperson engagement and more. So, how do organizations ensure their sales coaching programs are most beneficial to the sales team and the organization as a whole? Here are a few tips to consider when constructing an effective sales coaching effort: Set expectations.

To create an effective sales coaching program, the sales team and coaches need to be provided with a clear definition of what sales coaching is and what the organization’s

expectations are for all those involved in the program. That can include anything from a positive impact on business performance to the development of the soft skills that sales professionals need. In addition, it is vital to consider the program’s relevance to other performance management activities.

Treat coaching like other sales change initiatives.

Sales organizations implement major change initiatives, and they do so by securing stakeholder buy-in and endorsement from the leadership team.

Sales change initiatives also include established measures of success, provide appropriate training for all involved, and track performance. Unfortunately, the same cannot typically be said for sales coaching

Invest in managers, not just salespeople.

While it is important to train salespeople, many firms forget that it is just as important to train managers. High-performing firms’ coaching programs include manager training, formal coaching objectives and appraisals of coaching effectiveness.

When senior leaders provide coaching to managers, who will then in turn coach salespeople, it is one of the most important activities an organization can undertake to support effective sales coaching.

Sales coaching is a valuable resource that, when applied correctly, can play an integral role in achieving business results. Both the participants and organization need to understand the goals for the program, as well as what success looks like, in order to achieve optimal results.

Mike Wirth is the managing director of North America at Forum, a TwentyEighty Company.

Email Mike.

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SALES TRAINING: IS IT WORTH IT ?

By Jim Dickie

“Money,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.” Sales leaders can’t stop to smell the roses, though – they’re too busy balancing priorities to make limited budgets cover a wide range of purposes and needs.

Sales performance improvement is always a top priority. A pattern we see repeated year after year, in companies of all shapes and sizes, is that salespeople or sales teams who didn’t make their quotas last year are still given higher quotas this year. And that gives rise to both a lot of soul searching and an entire performance improvement industry: How does an individual, a team, a sales organization, get better at selling?

Many of the questions that we hear from clients boil down to this: How do we get the biggest bang for our buck? What are the investments most likely to pay off in terms of finding more opportunities, winning more deals, and retaining existing customers?

Sales training, especially skills training, is an issue of particular concern.

FIGURE 1

Our sales performance optimization studies have examined the multiple types of educational programs companies may offer their sales teams, including training on product or services, the customer’s marketplace, CRM system utilization, and sales skills. Let’s concentrate for a moment on “sales skills” and exactly what that means.

During a sales cycle, there are many specific skills salespeople need to use to transform a prospect into a customer. These include prospecting, call planning, relationship building, needs analysis and prioritization, objection handling, purchase justification, consensus building, and negotiations.

A popular saying among researchers in many fields is W. Edward Demming’s remark,

In one study, we included a question that asked participants to rate the quality of their company’s sales skills training program. We found that 10.7 percent of the programs “exceeded expectations,” 42.5 percent “met expectations,” and 43.5 percent “needed improvement.”

What the data clearly showed is that effective sales training has a higher cost attached.

Companies with sales skills training programs that exceeded expectations averaged

PERCENTAGE OF REPS MAKING QUOTA

69.4%

SALES SKILLS EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS 10

“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” It seems intuitive, even obvious, that skills training will improve skills, and better skills will result in better performance. That’s a logical proposition, but it’s still just an opinion until the data is collected and analyzed.

64.8%

SALES SKILLS MEETS EXPECTATIONS

60.5%

SALES SKILLS NEEDS IMPROVEMENT

spending $2,870 per salesperson, compared to $2,196 per salesperson for companies with sales skills training programs that met expectations, and $1,815 per salesperson with sales skills training programs that needed improvement.

Remember, the question today is, “Is sales training worth it?” When we talk about “worth,” what we really mean is “return on investment.” As the above figures show, a higher investment per salesperson results in a higher level of satisfaction with the training within the organization. What we need to know next is, “Does a higher level of satisfaction with the training correlate with higher levels of performance?”

One objective way to answer that question is to look at the percentage of salespeople achieving or exceeding quota. Figure 1 on page 10 shows the differences in results when we segmented the study data based on sales skills training program ratings.

The research shows an increase in salespeople achieving quota related to higher sales-skills-training-program ratings.

How was that increase in quota achievement accomplished? Through better performance on three metrics.

1| WIN RATES

Survey respondents who said their organizations’ sales training exceeded expectations had an average 54 percent

A HIGHER INVESTMENT PER SALESPERSON RESULTS IN A HIGHER LEVEL OF SATISFACTION WITH THE TRAINING WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION. of forecast deals won, compared to 44 percent in the needs-improvement group.

difference: 80.3 percent versus 51.5 percent in the “needs improvement” category.

2| DEALS LOST

Participants in highest-ranked training programs reported about 5 percent fewer losses than their counterparts in the lowest-ranked programs.

The ability of salespeople to align their solutions to the customer’s needs.

If differentiation is what keeps the win from going to a competitor, alignment is often the element that keeps the deal from sinking into the swamp of no decision.

And as with differentiation, the research shows a difference of about 30 percent between the top-ranked and bottom-ranked training programs.

3| DEALS ENDING IN “NO DECISION”

Here again, effective training made a significant difference – 20.5 percent of deals ending in no decision in the top group, contrasting with 26 percent of deals ending in no decision in the bottom group.

Quota achievement and deal outcomes make a strong argument, not just for sales skills training, but also for choosing an effective training program. We can also examine the research data from two other aspects of B2B selling: The ability of salespeople to differentiate their offerings from those of the competition.

The saddest story in sales is, “We had a better solution for this customer, but the other guys told a better story.” Competitive differentiation is an area where sales training that “exceeds expectations” makes a huge

There is a lot more to this story. Consider the difference between a 54 percent win rate and a 44 percent win rate. Think about the size of your deals, the number of your salespeople, and the cost-per-salesperson of effective skills training. The math isn’t hard, and the results should be clear and unequivocal: sales training is an excellent investment, and Ralph Waldo Emerson would approve.

Jim Dickie is a research fellow of CSO Insights and has more than 29 years of sales and marketing management experience. Email Jim.

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TRUST IS DEAD

LONG LIVE

TRUST!

WHY EVEN THE BEST SALES MODELS CAN FAIL TO DELIVER LONGTERM CUSTOMER LOYALTY AND THE REVENUES THAT GO WITH IT.

BY MARK MARONE, PH.D.

We’ve all seen the array of “new” sales methodologies and approaches in recent years – from uncovering hidden needs and adapting to the way modern customers buy, to assuming the role of a business partner, consultant or even teacher.

Many of these strategies suggest they can deliver the highly-sought-after, long-term loyalty from customers that results in lower acquisition costs and increased revenues.

Every model has adherents and salespeople who claim success with it, and yet every model also fails to produce the stellar results promised for some of those who use it. Why? Because some salespeople have developed the critical underlying attributes and interpersonal skills to build the trust and relationships needed to effectively execute the models, and others haven’t.

IT’S STILL ALL ABOUT TRUST AND RELATIONSHIPS Given the changing nature of selling interactions, some have said that “relationship selling” is dead. Indeed, with

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the commoditization of products and heightened customer sophistication, along with the increase in price transparency and online reviews, companies are being forced to be more strategic in the way they engage their customers. At the same time, trust is known to be an important driver for satisfaction and loyalty to a company, and certainly, trust plays an essential role in any relationship, no less within an economic one.

To most consumers, trusting their salesperson is more important than getting the lowest price. In a survey by Dale Carnegie Training of more than 1,000 consumers

MORE THAN THREEQUARTERS OF CUSTOMERS (77%) SAID THEY WOULD BE “SOMEWHAT” OR “VERY LIKELY” TO TRUST THE COMPANY IF THEY TRUSTED THEIR SALESPERSON.

worldwide, 63 percent of respondents said they would rather have a salesperson they “completely trusted” than one that gave them the “best price.”

How common is it to trust a salesperson?

More than a third (35 percent) of our survey respondents said they trusted their salesperson most or all of the time during their interactions in the past year. But there is room for improvement, as nearly one in five customers said they rarely or never trusted their salesperson.

Without some level of trust, salespeople can’t hope to establish positive relationships.

As a relationship develops, it provides opportunities to reinforce trust and, in turn, positive relationships create personal commitment since the more trusting a relationship becomes, the higher the value a customer places on it. Research has long confirmed that in the long term, the customer is more likely to maintain trusting relationships than risk the uncertainty of building new ones.

Confusing the issue, however, is that, in general, when you ask customers directly how important “relationships” are with their salesperson, they aren’t likely to rate it very highly compared with other more tangible attributes. For example, only 23 percent of customers in our survey chose “relationship” as one of the top three attributes describing their ideal salesperson. Yet most customers place a high value on tangible attributes that they say lead to positive relationships; respondents said “listening to me to understand needs” (87 percent), “respecting my time” (84 percent) and “being able to trust them” (78 percent) were all very or extremely important.

Consumers in our study were divided as to how often they had a great relationship with their salesperson in the past year. About a quarter (24 percent) said they had great relationships with their salesperson most of the time, but the same number reported they rarely do.

Of course, salespeople don’t directly create trusting relationships, instead they exhibit behaviors and attitudes that can foster them. Approaching each interaction with a set of skills and attitudes that drive the right behaviors, when repeated over time, is what creates and strengthens trusted relationships. So which skills, attitudes and

behaviors directly influence the emergence of trust and positive relationships?

KEY DRIVERS OF TRUST AND RELATIONSHIPS: INDIVIDUAL ATTITUDES, SKILLS AND BEHAVIORS Clearly, a salesperson has to be competent, both socially, in their ability to interact effectively with others, and professionally, by developing the intellectual or knowledge-based competence specific to their products and industry. Ninety-one percent of our respondents confirmed that a “knowledgeable salesperson” is very or extremely important for building trust.

Research consistently finds that effective communication is directly and positively linked to trust and that it has a strong positive effect on commitment. As any salesperson knows, it’s certainly vital for being able to understand needs and convey value to customers.

At the same time, a salesperson’s competency is closely-linked with the personal attributes of self-confidence and positive attitude.

Research shows that both communication and learning (becoming knowledgeable and competent) are facilitated when individuals have self-confidence and positive attitudes and, as competency progresses, individuals feel more confident and positive.

In our survey, customers overwhelming feel that having a salesperson who is “positive” (81 percent) and “confident” (76 percent) is very or extremely important for building trust. “You gather your trust from salespeople,” said one respondent, “by their confidence in the product and their confidence in their ability.”

TRUST + RELATIONSHIPS = LOYALTY So, what’s the pay-off? The impact of trusted relationships on customer loyalty reveals itself in both attitudes and behaviors.

Customers’ likelihood to do further business with a supplier, recommend it to others, and the probability that they would pay a premium for the firm’s products are also shown to be positively influenced by their relationship with the salesperson.

Our survey also found customers are 4.5 times more likely to forgive a single bad experience when they trust their salesperson or have a great relationship with them than when they distrust or dislike their salesperson.

CUSTOMERS ARE 4.5 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO FORGIVE A SINGLE BAD EXPERIENCE WHEN THEY TRUST THEIR SALESPERSON OR HAVE A GREAT RELATIONSHIP WITH THEM THAN WHEN THEY DISTRUST OR DISLIKE THEIR SALESPERSON. In the end, while marketplaces and the world around them are constantly changing, humans remain human, and research continues to confirm that attributes of interpersonal processes, and the trusted relationships that can result, have a greater influence on customer satisfaction and loyalty than the attributes of the product itself.

As critical as building trust and relationships are, sales organizations cannot teach them directly. Rather, these concepts are an outcome of each salesperson having the right individual attributes, skills and behaviors in place. It stands to reason that companies that focus on developing these interpersonal assets within their sales force, independent of which sales model they use, will be more successful in today’s hyper-competitive, customerdriven marketplace.

Mark Marone, Ph.D., currently consults with Dale Carnegie Training to provide research and thought leadership around trends in the sales process and effective selling skills. He is the coauthor of two books: “Secrets of Top Performing Salespeople” and “Strategies that Win Sales.”

Email Mark.

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BY STEVE ANDERSEN AND CRAIG JONES

THE SALESPERSON’S MOS ALIGNING WITH WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOUR CUSTOMER

Struggling to differentiate themselves in today’s crowded and hurried markets, many salespeople and account managers rely too much on products and pricing and too little on what matters most to their customers. But top performers in industry-leading companies take a different, more deliberate approach; they engage around value and on their customer’s pursuit of success, rather than focusing just on closing the deal.

In the current business environment, as product development cycle times become progressively shorter, trying to distinguish the features and benefits of one product over another has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, in some markets. Today, there’s a more effective way to differentiate yourself: your value portfolio.

CHANGE THE DYNAMICS

BY ENGAGING DIFFERENTLY

Buying has changed dramatically in recent years, and this is because the perspective of the buyer has evolved. New technologies, the pace of business, an ever-changing competitive landscape, and empowered procurement organizations threaten traditionally understood best practices that many in sales have depended upon for decades. Enlightened and demanding buyers don’t care about the salesperson’s forms, tips, tricks and veiled attempts to control or manipulate them. What they do care about is being successful, which is something they have in common with the seller.

When salespeople consider customer engagement through the lens of their offerings, their perspective tends to become skewed by how they believe the customer feels about their product or service. It is entirely possible that you may be trying to appeal to your customer with a product or service that your customer isn’t even thinking about, and possibly doesn’t care much about — at least not yet.

Customers consistently contend that they want to work with salespeople and

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organizations that understand their business, their needs, and their unique requirements. As a result, attempts by salespeople to push product, solutions or any other offerings on a customer that isn’t yet interested can be detrimental, perhaps even fatal. But despite the risk, most salespeople have done this at some point in their sales careers. An alternate approach that’s likely to be more successful requires looking at your products and services through the lens of the customer, rather than looking at the customer through the lens of what you want them to care about.

ALIGN WITH WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOUR CUSTOMER

Customers want sellers to engage and focus on them. To the extent that you can do this, you will distinguish yourself from your competitors by capturing early mindshare, and potentially creating value when your buyer’s evaluation has only just begun. Or, even better, before it has started. But how can you achieve this, when conventional sales wisdom says to push products, close deals and exceed quotas, as if your guest of honor — the customer — doesn’t have a seat at the table?

ST VALUABLE PORTFOLIO When you have a new customer, consider using comparable organizations where you do have past proven value — in the same industry or region, or with similar business objectives or requirements — as examples.

The frenetic pace that drives the businesses of most customers makes them feel stressed and pressured enough, not to mention any risks that they associate with the opportunity they may be discussing with you. Your past proven value can reduce the risk that customers (new or existing) perceive, should they elect to do business with you.

Reducing customer stress, pressure and risk should always be top-of-mind for the savvy salesperson.

DRIVE GREATER COLLABORATION BY DEVELOPING NEW OPPORTUNITIES WITH YOUR CUSTOMER

Where are you currently engaging and collaborating with your customer to create and co-create value, and how will you be successful together when you do so?

REDUCING CUSTOMER STRESS, PRESSURE AND RISK SHOULD ALWAYS BE TOP-OF-MIND FOR THE SAVVY SALESPERSON. When you can help your customer develop a vision of success with you that exceeds that of your competitors and you can explain the core elements of value that you’ll use to advance and accelerate their vision, you take a giant step toward achieving something that many salespeople struggle to accomplish. You align yourself, your organization and your offerings with what matters most to your customer. Your buyer wants to be successful as much as you do. But, most well-trained and wellread salespeople will agree that their pathways to sales success are different, and will vary widely based on which training methodology they ascribe to, or which book they most recently read.

Contemporary customers and buyers look at their suppliers, salespeople and account managers through a set of six lenses: products, resources, expertise, services, industry experience, and brand/reputation.

(See sidebar on page 16.) The organizations that are most effective in aligning customer needs and requirements with these components of

value are also the most successful, because the process of making these connections enables their customers to develop a vision of success — and the organization doing the selling becomes part of it.

GAIN SALES MOMENTUM BY LEVERAGING YOUR PAST PROVEN VALUE

If you’re in an existing customer relationship, think about where you have created value with them in the past. Hopefully, your history has been positive and your success, mutual.

In these cases, a discussion of past proven value is an opportunity to acknowledge how you and your customer have created and co-created value together, a likely door-opener for conversations about future success. But if your customer’s experience hasn’t been what they had hoped, you can’t escape or ignore the impact of perceived poor performance. Sometimes your past proven value is realizing what you and your organization can do better for your customer the next time around.

Consider the active opportunities for value creation and co-creation that you are pursuing with your customer. How will these “potential sales” translate into value that is realizable, measurable and sustainable for your customer? Customers understand that salespeople and account managers are responsible for delivering revenues to their organizations, and sometimes they even express an interest in helping their suppliers be successful. But this is far more likely to happen if you and your customer have a history of past proven value creation together. Your ability to discuss and answer these four questions collaboratively with your customer is likely to have a profound impact on your success going forward: 1. W hat’s going on in your business, and

what are you trying to do?

2. W hy is it challenging and why do you

need help?

3. H ow can we help you resolve challenges

and find a solution?

4. W here is our value different and why

should you partner with us?

The responses will expand your value portfolio to include opportunities for value creation and co-creation in the present, and the momentum from your past proven

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value, as well as your current opportunities, will allow you to peek into the “crystal ball” of future potential value with your customer.

LEVERAGE THE PAST AND THE PRESENT TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL FUTURE WITH YOUR CUSTOMER

SIX COMPONENTS

OF CUSTOMER VALUE ONE

Products = Value

When the customer believes your products are superior to your competitor’s products.

TWO

Resources = Value

When the customer believes your resources will enable their success.

THREE

Expertise = Value

When the customer believes your people will provide expertise/best practices.

FOUR

Services = Value

When the customer believes your service levels are higher and more proactive.

FIVE

Industry Experience = Value When the customer believes your experience with similar customers reduces risk.

SIX

Brand/Reputation = Value When the customer believes in your reputation for quality, service and product excellence, and your organization derives competitive advantage as a result.

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The vast majority of buyers and sellers prefer to do business with someone that they currently have a relationship with, especially a trust-based relationship. This is great news, because combined, the value that you have created in the past and the value that you are creating in the present position you with relationships that will enable you to vision a successful future for and with your customer. When this happens, you’ve earned the right to explore future potential value together.

Think of how you feel when you see or hear something familiar, something you’ve seen or experienced previously. Unless your original experience was negative, you’re likely to feel a sense of satisfaction because you’ve been there before. This is precisely how your customer feels when they believe that you can create value again because you’ve been there before— together. The momentum gained from past and present value-creation efforts tends to be accrued by only a few competitors in any given opportunity (sometimes only one), and it can powerfully propel forward the salespeople and account managers that harness it effectively.

The savvy customer understands that their likelihood of future success is much greater with a provider that has delivered value in the past and is doing so today. Your value portfolio provides you both with a unique and powerful platform for collaboration, which is extremely challenging, if not impossible, for a new competitor to replicate—but you have to use it and share it with your customer in order to fully benefit from it.

BUILD A PORTFOLIO OF PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE CUSTOMER VALUE

As you consider taking a more deliberate approach to engaging your customer around value and focusing more on making their customers successful, rather than on just closing the deal, assess yourself against the following best practices and see how you compare.

• Engaging differently with your customer per the changing dynamics of today’s buyers Have you given your customer reasons to engage and explore possibilities of value creation with you? If so, what are they?

• Aligning with what matters most to your customer

Do you understand what your customer cares most about, how these things translate into value for them, and why they are so important? Please elaborate.

• Gaining sales momentum by leveraging your past proven value

Does your customer understand and acknowledge the value that you have created with them in the past, and see this as a predictor of potential success in the future? If so, how can you validate this?

• Driving greater collaboration in developing new opportunities with your customer Were you able to elevate your conversation beyond price and product and toward value while collaborating with your customer? If so, how have you done so?

• Leveraging the past and the present to build a successful future with your customer Have you determined how you will measure and validate your value creation efforts with your customer moving forward, and are these measures important to both organizations? Please elaborate.

• Building a portfolio of past, present and future value Does your customer have a view of your value that includes what you have created, what you are creating, and perhaps even what you might be able to create with them in the future? If so, how do they feel about your value portfolio?

Customers expect more from their suppliers than products, prices, promises and sales pitches. The salesperson or account manager who aligns with what matters most to the buyer is well-positioned for future success. Value creation and co-creation with customers transcends time, and can be your most powerful differentiator in today’s frenzied and commoditized world. And when your customer sees you as a valuable component of their past and present success, it’s only natural that they will want to discuss opportunities for future potential value creation with you — first.

Steve Andersen is president and founder and Craig Jones is managing partner of the Atlantabased consultancy Performance Methods Inc. Email Steve and Craig.

B2B buying has changed.

Salespeople must adapt, or risk being left behind!

Advance Praise for Beyond the Sales Process: It’s easy to say that trust is critically important to your customer relationships—but the proof is in the doing. Beyond the Sales Process lays out in very practical terms how to make it happen. . . . A must-buy.

—Charles H. Green, co-author of The Trusted Advisor, author of TrustBased Selling, and founder/CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates, LLC

You can sit back and wait for the next RFP, or you can read Beyond the Sales Process and join the next generation of highly effective B2B sales professionals.

—Paul Merrild, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Sales, athenahealth

• Extend Your Sales Success by Going Beyond the Traditional Sales Process • Give Customers New and Powerful Reasons to Engage with You • Align with Customers; Position and Differentiate Your Unique Value • Drive Success After the Sale Through Value Realization and Relationship Growth Please visit BeyondTheSalesProcess.com for more details about this book.

THE BOOK PUBLISHING DIVISION OF AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

About the Authors STEVE ANDERSEN is President and Founder of Performance Methods, Inc., a sales performance and strategic account management consultancy, whose clients include industry leaders and many of the world’s top companies. He lives in Alpharetta, Georgia.

DAVE STEIN is a sales consultant and strategist whose expertise has been featured in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Forbes, and an advisor to Sales and Marketing Management magazine. He lives in West Tisbury, Massachusetts.

Single Copies: Available at your favorite online retailer or bookstore.

Bulk Copies: Contact 800-CEO-READ or visit their website www.800ceoread.com

Print ISBN# 978-0-8144-3715-5 Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8144-3716-2 Hardcover: US $27.95

Constant change and uncertainty have exhausted buyers. The global economy has made every major purchasing decision seem like life or death. Customers today are trying to keep up with changing marketplace dynamics by innovating and taking their company from its current state (X) into the future (Y). They need salespeople to help reduce complexity and guide them through the chaos of this transformation. This presents an opportunity for training professionals because while industry insights and product knowledge quickly become outdated, causing them to struggle to keep up with change on their own, salespeople will continue to need to help their customers manage change for at least the medium term.

Much has been written in recent years about the need for salespeople to provoke or challenge their customers to drive change through insights. There’s a lot of truth to that within the trusted advisor concept, particularly when it’s done with genuine humility and curiosity rather than arrogance and condescension. While this relationship requires trust, trust alone isn’t enough. Customers want help narrowing down the options and making the right buying decision. Customers now expect salespeople to be navigators.

Customers have a destination in mind.

Typically, that destination (the vision for Y) is defined by the business goals they want to achieve and the targets they need to hit, as well as the dynamics of their industry.

They may or may not know the best path to take, but they will engage with someone they believe will guide them toward that destination. Navigating the sales journey with a customer is a three-step process, and it has little to do with intrinsic personality traits; it is a set of coachable actions that can be designed into training and made into habits through on-the-job tools.

GREAT SELLING TODAY:

NAVIGATING CHANGE

By Lou Schachter & Rick Cheatham

That destination can be thought of as the customer’s desired result and can be communicated by the customer in multiple ways, including vision of success, goals and metrics.

Becoming an expert on the customer’s desired result means asking the right questions and having sufficient business acumen to understand the answers and know what to do next. By showing customers that you understand their destination and starting point holistically and by making it clear that you are genuinely interested in their results, you begin to earn the right to provide the customer with navigation assistance.

In an environment of customer change, applying navigation skills requires you to fully understand the customer’s vision of their destination. Once you figure out what the customer’s destination is, you must deeply understand the customer’s vision for achieving it. That takes, in part, familiarity with the metrics that the customer will use to measure the success of reaching the destination.

NAVIGATION STEP 1: IDENTIFY THE DESTINATION

NAVIGATION STEP 2: CLARIFY THE PATH

First, you have to gain a full understanding of the customer’s intended destination.

The second step for salespeople who want to use navigation skills is to offer expertise

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along the journey to the destination. That, too, begins with questions. Few customers are standing still, waiting for their journey to begin. Most have already begun the process. So the salesperson must ask questions about what they have done so far and where they have been. This includes topics such as current strategic initiatives, marketplace trends they are leveraging, and innovations and improvements they are making.

Applying navigation techniques also means understanding how the customer organization views the X starting point.

There is no path without both X and Y. Some of the greatest value that salespeople offer is something that most salespeople don’t even recognize: their awareness of how other similar companies are executing.

Providing expertise on the journey involves sharing insights and examples about what other companies have discovered along the way.

This is also the time to challenge traditional thinking and offer insights. Many times, great salespeople can highlight what the customer sees as constraints but are actually self-imposed limitations. The salesperson can recommend alternative paths to success that the customer, who is just too close to

Photo By Aleksandr K

the day-to-day realities, cannot see. The key to doing this in a way that the customer will appreciate is to be humble: ask questions, offer hypotheses and show empathy.

Next, the salesperson has to advise the customer on the path from X to Y. The recommendations should incorporate what the company is already doing and include the steps it should take to get to its results faster. This is when the salesperson begins to talk about products and services. In complex sales, we often recommend that no products or services be discussed in the first two interactions. The first interaction is all about understanding the customer’s desired destination. The second is about the route options. In the third, the salesperson can offer recommendations for the path — a proposal.

The proposal should lay out the way that the seller’s offerings contribute to the X XY Y journey and should include options. It should document the value of defining the XY space and how that will actually accelerate progress toward the Y destination. Typically, the benefits of defining XY are: » Creates a short-term picture of success » Represents a smaller, more manageable increment of change » Reduces resistance to change

» Reduces risk » Maintains the commitment to achieving Y in the same time horizon

NAVIGATION STEP 3: MEASURE PROGRESS Our research tells us that customers today will buy more and at higher prices if by doing so they will genuinely accelerate the achievement of their desired business results. What salespeople often fail to do is to demonstrate progress on the metrics that customers care about. So the journey must include a way of measuring progress on those metrics. More specifically, it must incorporate performance metrics that will be used to measure the purchaser’s contributions to X, to Y, and to XY. In many situations, the salespeople disappear once the sale is closed, handing off the “service” aspect to others in their company. And while the implementation of the purchase almost inevitably requires such a handoff, the best salespeople do not disappear. As customer navigators, they know they must be present at key points throughout the implementation process.

Their main role during this stage is to help the customer interpret the progress being made, as well as ensure that any obstacles impeding progress are removed. When

WHEN A SALESPERSON USES NAVIGATION SKILLS, EVERYONE BENEFITS. progress against the metrics is measured consistently and the original promises from the sales process are being met, salespeople are setting up their next sales.

When a salesperson uses navigation skills, everyone benefits: The customer gets to the desired destination (or results) faster. The selling company gets paid not only for its products or services, but both for the added value its salesperson provides by guiding the customer through the implementation process and for demonstrable, clearly measured results. In turn, the salesperson benefits by deepening the relationship with the customer and becoming an essential partner on the customer’s journey.

Lou Schachter and Rick Cheatham lead the sales practice at BTS, a global professional services firm supporting world leading businesses.

They are the co-authors of “SELLING VISION: The X XY Y Formula for Driving Results by Selling Change.” Email Lou and Rick.

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BIG DATA-DRIVEN SALES TRAINING

BY DUANE SPARKS

Every company wants to grow sales, and using sales training to achieve that goal is certainly plausible. Unfortunately, whether the programs are developed internally or purchased from a supplier, most sales training initiatives fail to produce truly worthwhile results, such as increased revenue, higher margins or expanded market share.

Thought leaders in the sales training industry cite a thousand reasons why the dogs don’t eat the chow. Frequently blamed culprits include the program’s content (it’s poor or wrong), inadequate reinforcement, lack of buy-in from learners, lack of accountability for learning – and the list goes on.

After decades of arguing about what causes sales training to flop, it’s about time for those of us in the training business to gather factual data on what does and doesn’t work and to chart a course that ensures success. But what kinds of data are truly persuasive?

THE LOWDOWN ON RESEARCH Typical research, even by folks in the research business, is based on surveys. We’ve all participated in these SurveyMonkey questionnaires. And we’ve all probably stretched the truth; at the very least, we’ve made honest errors and omissions.

For example, a survey might ask individual salespeople (or their managers) to rank their effectiveness at planning sales calls. So everyone provides an opinion. When enough opinions are gathered, the survey somehow translates those opinions into facts.

Is it possible that this type of data is biased – or maybe downright useless? After all, who 20

wants to look bad or make someone else look bad?

HOW ABOUT SOME VALIDATED DATA? In my opinion, survey data cannot be regarded as validated data when it comes to measuring mental capabilities and processes. Therefore, survey data should not form the basis for developing factbased, data-driven solutions.

Validated data come from validated assessments. Validated assessments are developed by credible professionals in the business of psychometrics (the science of design, administration and interpretation of quantitative tests for the measurement of mental capabilities and processes).

Validation further requires that these psychometry tools are administered to a statistically significant number of people: a whole lot of people.

SELF-GRADE INFLATION When salespeople are asked to rank themselves in certain critical selling skills, and these rankings are then compared to hard data from validated assessments, the data show only 60 percent congruence.

What does that mean? It means that for skills such as sales call planning, questioning and closing, salespeople perceive themselves to

be far more skillful than they actually are. If you use surveys as the basis for sales training decisions, you are 40 percent wrong coming out of the starting block.

WHICH SALES SKILLS WILL YOU MEASURE? You can’t teach salespeople a hundred different skills and expect their performance to improve in a significant or consistent way.

When designing sales training, it makes sense to start by identifying a handful of measurable and trainable skills to teach. But who cares whether you can measure sales skills in a validated way unless the skills you’re measuring are, in fact, the ones most critical to real-world sales success?

Based on our research, here are the five selling skills that offer the greatest leverage for performance improvement in real sales environments: Buyer/Seller Relationship: When sellers understand the incremental buying decisions that every customer makes, they can improve their use of an effective sales process to succeed at each incremental decision.

Sales Call Planning: Data show that 99 percent of salespeople fail to consistently establish the right type of objective for every sales call. This error is the most common mistake in selling.

SALESPEOPLE PERCEIVE THEMSELVES TO BE FAR MORE SKILLFUL THAN THEY ACTUALLY ARE. Questioning/Listening Skills: Two-thirds of salespeople need significant help in this area. As a consequence, they sell themselves poorly and present unimportant capabilities to their prospect when they describe their solutions.

have measured more than 400,000 salespeople before and after training, using validated skills assessments that measure gains in both knowledge and application. Here are just a few findings from this study.

Presentation Skills: Even though salespeople generally know what they ought to do, they apply best-in-class skills at a miserable rate.

SALES CALL PLANNING

Gaining Commitment (Closing): Salespeople (and their managers) agree that closing is their weakest skill. This problem presents the greatest opportunity when it is fixed.

BIG DATA’S BIG QUESTIONS Once you’ve defined the critical skills – and you have accumulated a large number of validated assessments of those skills, before and after training – you can answer some interesting questions about your sales training: • Which skills are most deficient in a particular sales team?

• How much can training improve the skills of sales teams in any particular industry?

• What do the data say about knowledge gains in training courses versus gains in skill application back on the job?

• Which skills, when improved, produce the greatest ROI for salespeople and their companies?

THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG: DATA MINING FOR SALES SKILLS The big data we’ve been discussing for the sales training world now exist.

Over the past 20 years, 3,500 companies

• Salespeople have a reasonable amount of knowledge (64 percent), but the ability to apply sales call planning skills is surprisingly low (37 percent).

• A post-training application score of 82 percent shows that salespeople are using nearly all of the new knowledge (83 percent) they acquire in training.

• A 121-percent skill gain in application suggests that sales call planning is the most important skill on which to focus.

PRESENTATION SKILLS • We expect salespeople to be great presenters, so it was surprising to learn that they were only applying 37 percent of what they knew before training.

With a 111-percent skill gain, it is the most surprising skill development opportunity turned up by the study.

• This skill had the biggest pre-training gap between knowledge and application (30 points). Training dramatically closed the gap to eight points.

GAINING COMMITMENT • Salespeople and sales managers admit that this skill represents their greatest weakness. With pre-training knowledge and application scores of 56 percent and 36 percent, respectively, the study agrees with their assessment.

• Since gaining commitment from buyers is the principal duty of all salespeople, this skill gap is a huge problem. After training, salespeople improve by 119 percent – a big win for everyone.

WHAT’S NEXT? More studies are in the works using this treasure trove of data. With 78 million data points and 20 years of history, the analytics opportunities are endless. Some topics currently under investigation include, sorting data by industry, which provides remarkable insights into the uniqueness that exists within each industry’s sales challenges. Learning trends are being measured to gauge the effects of sales training innovations such as e-learning and different reinforcement techniques.

Additionally, tribal learning (in which all customer contact employees receive sales training) is being compared to situations in which only the sales force is trained.

SUMMARY Thanks to this mountain of validated skill measurements, sales training ought to evolve at a rapid pace going forward. With more than two decades of historical data, we’ll quickly be able to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Until this big data became available, the sales training world had only hunches based on opinion, not solid knowledge based on facts. We couldn’t know whether or how sales training would produce reliable gains in job performance. Now we can.

Duane Sparks is chairman of The Sales Board and creator of Action Selling. Email Duane.

FREE BIG DATA-DRIVEN SALES TRAINING REPORT FOR YOUR INDUSTRY

• See what your peers/competitors achieve by developing Critical Sales Skills.

• What are the 5 Critical Sales Skills that impact performance?

• Learn how sales training is making a difference in your industry.

LEARN MORE

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FOUR STEPS TO DESIGNING

AN EFFECTIVE SALES TR AINING PROGRAM

BY DAVE MATTSON

START

When thinking about creating a new sales training program, there is almost an infinite number of considerations. Hot trends in adult learning models, teaching methods, delivery methods and multimedia can be confusing. Are you going to try microlearning for the millennials? Or instructional design for the behaviorists?

Designing an effective sales training program really boils down to one question: Does it create long-term change in the behavior of the salespeople, leading to positive results?

Whether you are creating your own training program or hiring an outsourced training company, you are going to be judged on those results. And changing adult behavior can be very difficult. The path to a new behavior is a long and winding road.

That road starts with an awareness of a new and better possibility. Then the participants must actually gain the required knowledge and skills. Next, they have to apply those skills for the first time in a real-life situation.

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Then they have to apply them frequently enough over a short period of time to create a habit, integrating the new behavior into their everyday routine. Finally, they practice the new behavior often enough that they become masters of the new technique and can teach it to others. The path from awareness to mastery can take years.

Now, let’s think about some of those options for your sales training. Do you think a two-day boot camp in Las Vegas will lead to that lasting change? Do you think listening to a sales coach on a two-hour webinar will make it happen?

What about your current sales training program? Are there places for discovery, learning, practice and reinforcement?

FOUR KEY PHASES OF EFFECTIVE SALES TRAINING PROGRAMS 1 | EVALUATION

To design an effective sales training program, you need to know three things: where your team is now, where you want it to be and how you are going to bridge the gap. To obtain that knowledge, start with an accurate assessment of your current reality.

The evaluation phase should include self-assessment by the participants; a 360-degree assessment by peers, managers, subordinates and clients; and an objective

assessment by a third party or online evaluation tool. Once you have an accurate picture of your team, you can begin to benchmark it against top performers and ideal behaviors.

positions, it is easy for accountability sessions to fall through the cracks. If you design a program with at least two partners for each person, there is a good chance the participant will stick to the plan.

2 | IMPACT TRAINING

These partners can meet in person or by phone or web conference; the important part is maintaining communication and good habits. The accountability phase should begin right after the impact training and have no end date.

The next phase is quick-hitting impact training for immediate awareness and baseline knowledge. Typically, this phase is a boot camp-style training in which you can bring everyone onto the same page very quickly. Depending on your situation, it can be a virtual; live, instructor-led; or recorded online course.

The goals are the same regardless of format. You will want to make your team aware of what is expected of them and to build the foundations of knowledge that will help them learn and execute the new behavior. Impact training is great for short-term motivation, building consensus, and communicating best practices and processes. It normally takes place during the first 60 to 90 days of the training program.

3 | REINFORCEMENT

Impact training rarely creates lasting success without reinforcement. It is now time for your participants to apply the strategy and tactics discussed in the impact phase and challenge their current status quo. This phase is the most crucial; it’s where the participants must reach outside of their comfort zones to try something different and then apply it until it becomes a new habit.

The reinforcement phase also usually requires some live coaching, because participants will have questions and challenges as they implement skills for the first time. Reinforcement is the key to any training’s long-term impact. It is neverending, because lasting results require lifelong learning, but a solid reinforcement plan should have curricula spanning 18 months to three years.

4 | ACCOUNTABILITY

The final component involves more coaching than training for participants to move from application to ownership and mastery. New sales habits are not easy to maintain. Sales managers, trainers and peer accountability partners play a crucial role in helping the participants stay on track.

REPEATING THE CYCLE The path to sales mastery never ends, and neither should your sales training. Once you have completed some version of all four phases, it will be time to start back at evaluation. Take a look at your progress, set new benchmarks, and critique what is working and what is not.

Then, hold another impact training session to reset expectations and remind the team of its common goals. Reinforcement and accountability must be ongoing. As you repeat these phases, remember to create a system of continuous improvement for your training and your people.

A research study nicknamed “Change or Die” followed people who were medically required to change a behavior like overeating, smoking and lack of exercise, or they would likely die very soon. The study found that within a year, only 10 percent of participants had maintained the change and their new lifestyle. About 90 percent went back to their old habits, even though doing so meant an increased probability of an earlier death.

THE PATH TO SALES MASTERY NEVER ENDS, AND NEITHER SHOULD YOUR SALES TRAINING.

Change is hard, and changing habits via a two-hour or even a two-day seminar is virtually impossible. Invest the time, money and resources to design an effective sales training process with evaluation, impact, reinforcement and accountability. It is the only way to create long-term change and guarantee that more salespeople will reach and exceed quota.

David Mattson is the CEO and president of Sandler Training, the worldwide leader in sales, management and customer service training. He is also a best-selling author and public speaker.

Email David.

Usually, two or more accountability partners yield the best results. If one partner goes on vacation, is preoccupied or changes TRAINING INDUSTRY MAGAZINE - SALES 2016 I SPECIAL EDITION I WWW.TRAININGINDUSTRY.COM/MAGAZINE

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PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE?

By John Holland & Frank Visgatis

WHEN ASKED TO DEFINE “SELLING,” BUYERS AND SELLERS OFTEN USE WORDS LIKE “CONVINCING,” “PERSUADING” AND “OVERCOMING OBJECTIONS,” AND FEW COMPANIES RECOGNIZE THAT PEOPLE WOULD RATHER BUY THAN BE SOLD TO. MANY ORGANIZATIONS CLAIM THEY ARE CUSTOMER-CENTRIC YET LOOK INWARD RATHER THAN OUTWARD WHEN DEVELOPING NEW OFFERINGS. Taking this approach decreases the chances of bringing offerings to market that people want to buy. It’s time to take a fresh look at how products are developed.

Consider a startup company whose founder has a brilliant idea for a new offering. Everyone joining the company is laser-focused on product development. The most compelling slides in investor presentations are founders’ descriptions of their offerings, sounding like proud parents.

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The weakest part is the description of monetization. Industry statistics cite the total potential market, and pie charts illustrate increasing slices of market share over time. What isn’t clear is why customers will buy.

After raising money, the company remains focused on the new offering. When ready for a beta site, the founder will find or be found by early adopters who recognize the product’s value. Early buyers accept the risks of doing business with fledgling companies.

Helping beta clients achieve measureable results is a significant milestone. These clients will serve as references for future prospects. At this point, founders have a long overdue epiphany: They must hire sales organizations to learn how to sell the new offering to the masses.

GROWTH AND SUCCESS PROVIDE NEW CHALLENGES If successful, fledgling companies increase staff as they enhance existing offerings and develop new ones. Ad hoc “staff meetings” over lunches are no longer an option. As startups grow, four distinct, independent and interrelated silos emerge: (1) product development, (2) product marketing, (3) marketing and (4) sales. Ironically, the creators of new offerings are furthest from prospects and customers.

CEOs expect silos to collaborate and cooperate, but there are many challenges: • The silo heads are peers; nobody reports to anybody.

• All silos have a role in revenue generation.

• The silos’ interaction is largely undefined.

• With the exception of sales, which can calculate percentage of quota, it’s difficult to assess silo effectiveness and establish silo accountability.

Over time, many silo executives and staff develop silo blinders. Each head believes his or her group is doing a great job, but none takes an enterprise view. If silo heads independently and concurrently make changes they feel will help, what will be the overall outcome? My guess is that there is about an equal chance of improving or degrading results, because nobody sees the big picture.

Friction develops among silos over time.

Finger pointing is common when top-line

THE BEST SALES MANAGERS ARE ABLE TO CONNECT PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS WITH TEAM GOALS.

revenues aren’t made. Product development resembles a scull without a coxswain: four people using different oars and rowing at different cadences. They can’t see the destination, yet they are expected to win races.

Most companies determine how they will sell offerings after they develop them.

Product development, with minimal input from customer-facing staff, creates a new offering and passes the specifications to product marketing, which determines what segments have the most potential.

Marketing then creates collateral and goto-market campaigns before the sales organization determines how to sell the product, hoping that sales will be able to deliver the revenue promised to investors.

The better product marketing addresses buyer needs, the easier the other three silos’ jobs are. Unfortunately, the converse is also true. While most product launches employ “push” strategies to sell to people, companies that correctly read market requirements can enjoy market “pull,” because people want to buy their offerings. A “build it and they will buy” approach is a dangerous way to develop new offerings. Missing market requirements can be disastrous.

STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND I’d like to suggest an alternative: In the initial stages of product development, representatives from each silo collaborate to identify potential vertical markets. For each market, the group lists the titles that would comprise typical buying committees and brainstorms a menu of desired business outcomes for each title.

This exercise amounts to determining who would buy the offering and the potential value they could realize that would justify the expenditure. If the company can’t identify the product’s potential business outcomes, it may need to return to the drawing board or scrap the idea altogether.

Deciding who would buy and why allows organizations to decide early how to sell their offerings. It also allows sellers to interview those titles within the company’s client base to validate their assumptions and projections. By its nature, this exercise helps participants take an outside-in view

by focusing on potential customer needs before spending money on development.

Marketing can better align with sales, because it can target its lead generation programs to specific titles and business outcomes. In fact, a “lead” can be defined as someone with one of the identified titles who is interested in talking about one or more of the outcomes.

After product training, many sellers make “spray and pray” product pitches to people who can’t authorize expenditures. If and when they call on higher levels, those buyers don’t want to be educated about offerings. Sellers must first earn mindshare by encouraging buyers to share the business outcomes they want to achieve with the new offerings.

Organizations can help sellers position offerings for specific titles by teaching them to make each goal a conversation. Once the company has developed a new offering, members from each of the silos can identify the specific features that will help a specific title achieve a specific goal.

This approach allows sellers to understand that buying cycles begin if and when buyers share those goals and are willing to spend money to achieve them. Once the goals are shared, sellers should ask diagnostic questions to determine which capabilities the buyer will need to achieve the desired outcome.

CONCLUSION Buyers prefer to buy rather than be sold to. In fact, they resent push strategies: attempts to sell offerings that don’t address their needs. Vendors that provide a framework and common vocabulary to allow collaboration among silos can better align themselves with buyer needs.

This framework can provide a sustainable competitive advantage. The jobs of product marketing, marketing and sales are easier when offerings address buyer needs.

John Holland is chief content officer of CustomerCentric Selling.® Frank Visgatis is president and chief operating officer of CustomerCentric Selling.® Email John and Frank.

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SALES & MARKETING MARCHING TOGETHER

By Paul Bilodeau

IT USED TO BE THAT THE MARKETING DEPARTMENT LIVED IN THE WORLD OF BRANDING AND BROCHURES, AND THE SALES DEPARTMENT OPERATED IN A SILO WITH LITTLE TO NO CONTACT WITH MARKETING. HOWEVER, THINGS HAVE CHANGED. Prospects and customers with limitless access to information are more in control of the sale than ever before, and that increased level of buyer sophistication requires a tight alignment between the sales and marketing departments. According to a 2013 study by Marketo, when sales and marketing teams are in sync, companies increase closed deals by 67 percent.

Alignment can be an ambiguous term, but the bottom line is that if you have a sales process and you’re not ensuring that your marketing efforts are linked with that process, you’re letting valuable opportunities pass you by.

While every business is different, most follow a progression with comparable sales stages.

Here’s how to get sales and marketing in sync at every stage of the sales process.

STAGE 1 | PRE-SALES CALL The first question to answer is whom your sales team is targeting. It may sound 26

obvious, but this crucial starting point is often overlooked. For instance, a sales team may be putting its efforts into targeting CFOs, because that’s where the real opportunities lie, while marketing is focused on lead generation to help salespeople meet accountants.

Once both teams agree on who their prospects are, you can begin to identify the target market’s specific wants and needs and how to acknowledge them through marketing. Marketing can research the drivers and challenges of the ideal customer and develop content that resonates with the right people.

STAGE 2 | EARLY DISCUSSIONS A salesperson’s personal positioning can actually supersede the positioning of an organization in the eyes of a prospect, so the marketing team should place a heavy emphasis on how salespeople are perceived.

When salespeople are positioned as strategic

advisors, prospects see them as valuable resources contributing essential expertise.

The marketing team can assist with this positioning by writing blog posts for salespeople, helping them craft questions that will act as a catalyst for meaningful business dialogue and developing resources to support sales reps in this probing stage.

STAGE 3 | BUILDING VALUE It’s common for marketing to arm sales with plenty of product information that communicates to the buyer, “Here’s our product, and here are the reasons why it’s great!” But an effective marketing department that is in line with the buyer’s needs and the sales process will produce collateral that demonstrates how a product or service will solve a buyer’s challenges (and how it has solved similar challenges for similar buyers in the past). That type of information is enormously valuable for building credibility, not only because it’s

Photo By William Warby

meaningful to the prospect but also because it’s not simply a self-serving promotion.

Marketing should help sellers credentialize and build value with thought-provoking articles, case studies and success stories.

STAGE 4 | CLOSING THE DEAL Sellers can justify price to prospects by thoroughly articulating value. Marketing can further assist with those efforts by designing uniquely bundled packages and crafting warranties and guarantees that are meaningful and present a lower risk to the buyer.

Case studies are a great way to strengthen confidence levels in the late stages of the sales process. If marketing has relationships

WHEN SALESPEOPLE ARE POSITIONED AS STRATEGIC ADVISORS, PROSPECTS SEE THEM AS VALUABLE RESOURCES.

with third-party regulatory bodies and research firms, they can lower prospects’ decision-making risk by validating the claims sales reps make about the solutions.

Finally, if a marketing department understands which stages of the sales process present a challenge or create a bottleneck, it can work with the sales department to expedite those stages.

Maybe the solution to stalled deal signing, for example, is providing the option of electronic signatures or presenting a proposal in a cloud format, allowing for sharing within the purchasing committee (and the salesperson to see activity around the proposal).

and making sure they are aligned to the sales process.

Marketing and sales want to work in tandem – after all, they’re after the same goal – but too often, a lack of communication holds them back. If both teams are well versed in the sales process, everyone can start speaking the same language efficiently and marching together in the same direction.

Paul Bilodeau is the vice president of marketing and sales at The Brooks Group. As an entrepreneur, facilitator, sales leader and speaker, Paul has a passion for developing sales leaders and creating customer-focused cultures within professional organizations. Email Paul.

SHARING A COMMON LANGUAGE Marketing plays a fundamental role in any organization’s sales effectiveness, so it only makes sense to expose that department to the sales process and consistently use it to drive sales efforts. But you can’t simply send marketers a training manual and expect real results. It’s important to be strategic and intentional in cultivating alignment, perhaps by doing some handson training with current marketing projects

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M

O

D

SALES MANAGEMENT Sales managers are arguably the critical success factor in most sales organizations:

• They drive and motivate their teams.

• They provide direction and coaching to salespeople and account managers.

• They provide feedback and leading indicators to the company on both the team and the market.

• They are a point of leverage: You can work with a few people to reach many.

Yet sales managers are also a hugely underdeveloped talent pool in most

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companies. They are all too often promoted from the ranks of excellent salespeople and then left to their own devices. Not surprisingly, they gravitate back to their comfort zone by selling, or at best telling their salespeople what to do.

Sales managers are rarely trained in the full set of skills they need to drive team performance. Sales training companies and internal training departments see sales managers as a way to embed new sales skills but also as too diverse, difficult and relatively unprofitable to train in the unique and varied

E

R

N

BY RICHARD BARKEY

set of competencies that underpin modern sales management.

day functioning of the team and don’t step back to shape and lead the team.

Developing your sales managers represents a huge opportunity to change the performance of your sales team as a whole.

You can find out if this situation is happening at your organization by asking a sample of your sales managers how they split their time among three types of activities:

HOW DO YOUR MANAGERS SPEND THEIR TIME? Sales managers, like any managers, need to spend time working on their team as well as working in it. Yet many sales managers spend much of their time working on specific tasks and firefighting as part of the day-to-

• Leading: working on team strategy and developing, communicating and inspiring people • Managing: reviewing, coaching and performance managing

• Doing: working on specific tasks within the sales team (e.g., selling or firefighting) Once you have that data, you can ask where those percentages should be.

What, then, should sales managers do with their reallocated time? In our work with global sales teams over the last 18 years, we have found a hierarchy of skills that sales managers need to master in order to maximize sales performance. (See Figure 1 on page 30.) Let’s take a look at those six skills.

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SIX ESSENTIAL SALES SKILLS

LEAD THE FUNCTION LEAD THE TEAM MANAGE THE TEAM BUILD THE TEAM COACH THE TEAM SELL

SELLING The question of whether sales managers should have a direct role in selling is a common one. Certainly, they need to be able to sell to give them credibility and an understanding of the environment in which their teams are working. Specifically, they must be able to execute four main sales processes: lead generation, opportunity management, account management and margin management.

However, it is not generally advisable for sales managers to carry a quota, despite the large number of companies trying to compromise with “player managers.” People gravitate to the tasks that they know how to do and from which they gain satisfaction – and that generate commission for them.

In other words, player managers end up selling to meet their quota rather than working toward the far larger number that their team needs to deliver.

COACHING Closely linked to this problem, though dealing with a distinct skill set, is the importance of the ability to coach team members. Coaching is widely recognized as a vital way to drive the skills and performance of salespeople and account managers. Our own research and experience supports the correlation between the coaching skill (and frequency) of a manager and the performance of his or her team.

That said, coaching is a difficult skill to build in individuals and, even more so, into an 30

FIGURE 1 organization’s culture. According to the Institute of Leadership and Management: “The current generation of graduates want to be coached rather than controlled and directed: 56% of graduates want their manager to be their coach. But while three quarters of managers believe they are a coach, only one quarter of graduates agree.”

Once again, the challenge is that sales managers are good salespeople, so the temptation to tell the coachee what to do is very strong. The best sales managers are flexible but tend to work at the more non-directive, coachee-centered end of the spectrum. The specific competencies involved in coaching include providing feedback, identifying the skill/will gap, coaching process, coaching skills and handling resistance to coaching.

However, training managers in coaching tends to show a poor return unless you also measure the quality and quantity of coaching to support what is sometimes seen as a “nice to have” activity. Coaching as a skill itself benefits greatly from coaching, whether by an internal master coach or an external one.

BUILDING THE TEAM As important as coaching is, the ability to build a team goes beyond coaching to encompass wider issues, such as selection and assessment, team motivation, talent management, and fostering collaboration.

If I have learned one thing in 18 years as a CEO, it is that the single most important task

of a manager is choosing and cultivating the right team. This is never truer than in a sales team, yet even bad salespeople can be good at selling themselves in an interview.

Our research shows that the full cost of hiring salespeople in their first year is at least 2.5 to three times their base salary, once you include the time and cost involved in hiring, inducting and training them; any guaranteed commission; and the opportunity cost of the ones who don’t work out.

SALES MANAGERS NEED TO SPEND TIME WORKING ON THEIR TEAM AS WELL AS WORKING IN IT. There are some fairly obvious good practices in selecting and assessing salespeople, such as a thorough walkthrough of their CVs/ resumes, deep-dive interviews on specific competencies and taking references.

But you really must observe salespeople in action, whether that’s in a roleplay, simulation or assessment center, to judge how well they will sell for you.

MANAGING THE TEAM The next skill level is team management, and it is perhaps the area in which most experienced sales managers feel comfortable. The specific skills required

CALCULATING EFFECTIVE SALES TIME

30%

70%

40%

8%

% TIME ACTIVELY SELLING VS. OTHER TASKS

% SELLING TIME WITH THE RIGHT ACCOUNTS

% SELLING TIME DOING THE RIGHT THINGS

% EFFECTIVE SALES TIME

FIGURE 2 include performance management, increasing active selling time, forecasting and managing disciplined sales execution.

However, many sales managers – not least because they are often busy with dayto-day work – tend to be reactive in their management style, rather than proactive.

One area where we see a particular opportunity to be proactive is the percentage of time that salespeople spend actively selling, in the right way, to the right customers.

Figure 2 shows the typical figures that we see for a sales organization as a whole.

In this case, “doing the right things” includes identifying needs and decision processes, building momentum with the customer, managing decision criteria and alleviating risks rather than activities such as meetings and social events that don’t seize opportunities.

This figure will be different for each organization, of course, but because these factors multiply, it will, in most cases, be a small number. Therefore, there is a huge opportunity to increase your effective sales capacity by helping your managers think proactively about how their teams are spending their time.

LEADING THE TEAM As sales managers begin to master team management, their ability to lead the team becomes more important. Leading the team will allow them to instill vision and values and deploy other skills to

shape team performance. The crucial team leadership competencies include pipeline management, leading through vision and values, communication, emotional intelligence, and creative problem solving.

Pipeline management could be considered part of team management, but it should be a more strategic activity than a simple pipeline review. Analyzing the team’s pipeline is a powerful way to set its overall direction: Size Where are we compared to our plan?

What’s the trend?

Shape Do we have enough prospects at each stage?

Must-win deals How are they going? Do we have a plan?

Leakage Where are we losing deals? What are the conversion rates between stages?

Mix Are we selling the right business?

Velocity How quickly are deals running through the pipeline?

LEADING THE FUNCTION Finally, as sales managers become more senior, they need a more strategic skill set as they begin to lead the sales function rather than just a team. This skill set involves competencies such as understanding the strategic context, defining the sales strategy,

designing the sales organization, adapting the sales strategy and decision making.

Strategy is a much-abused term, but one simple and powerful way to express a sales strategy is “where and how to compete.”

Your decisions about where and how to compete must complement each other; the best competitive positions for a salesforce are attractive in their own right and fit your strengths.

WHAT TYPES OF SALES MANAGER DO YOU HAVE? Almost all sales managers will need training and coaching to reach their full potential. In our client work, we have identified five main types of sales manager, each with its own strengths, weaknesses and development needs: the Senior Salesperson, the Best Friend, the Coach, the Process Junkie and the Balanced Achiever.

The ideal type of sales manager, as the name suggests, is the Balanced Achiever.

Balanced Achievers are relatively rare, but a careful development program, focused on the specific competencies of each manager and of the team as a whole, can create more Balanced Achievers and in turn, have a significant impact on your ability to grow the business.

Richard Barkey is the founder and CEO of Imparta. Email Richard.

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LEARN-ABLEMENT MAKES

SALES TRAINING WORK

By James Touchstone

When change creates the need to adjust business strategy, companies must also change their approach to sales. Such changes must be understood and applied by the entire sales team if the organization is to adapt and succeed.

Fortunately, through assessment and talent analytics, leaders can quickly and accurately identify knowledge or behavioral gaps that need to be addressed in order to align sales talent – at both individual and organizational levels – with the changes in company strategy. Further, training can now be optimized for each sales professional based on his or her learning preferences and at the time and place that he or she most needs it.

Automated enablement tools can help sellers execute desired behaviors more confidently and consistently, thereby accelerating attainment of desired results.

THE EVOLUTION OF LEARN-ABLEMENT The emergence of advanced assessment, learning and enablement capabilities helps sales leaders adapt to changes in strategy.

However, such capabilities can increase the complexity of executing their initiatives. To ensure successful results, we bring these capabilities together under a cohesive and rational learning architecture, which we call Learn-Ablement.

The Learn-Ablement architecture aligns learning, development and enablement around three key questions: 1| What does a good approach to selling look like for our organization?

2| What does “good” look like for personal development in specific roles?

3| What does “good” look like for improving skills and abilities in specific sales situations?

For each of these questions, there is an ideal developmental approach: MacroLearning, MicroLearning or NanoLearning. Each approach is optimally supported by different enablement technologies (see Figure 1 on page 33).

MACROLEARNING: WHAT “GOOD” LOOKS LIKE FOR THE ORGANIZATION Sales organizations have traditionally implemented new sales methods, skills and tools through live, instructor-led training, and then deployed enablement technology, such as automated sales process playbooks.

In this process, learning is not immediately and directly reinforced, and most of the desired sales behaviors don’t happen consistently – or at all.

Learning new methodologies and skills is most effective with the use of the actual tools a learner will use on the job. For example, when learners are introduced to best practices for preparing for and executing a sales conversation with a prospect, they can not only learn about and

ENABLEMENT TECHNOLOGIES MACRO

GOOD FOR THE ORGANIZATION

MICRO

GOOD FOR THE INDIVIDUAL

NANO

GOOD FOR THE SITUATION

FIGURE 1 role play the approach, but they can do so in the context of executing that activity in a selling process as reflected in an automated playbook. In this example, the learning goal is supported by an activity: preparing for a conversation with a questioning prompter tool accessed within the online playbook.

MacroLearning combines traditional training with the embedded use of enablement tools, thus providing a more realistic scenario for applying learning concepts.

This process provides more utility to the training experience and more practical applications to real-world situations, thus enhancing adoption and application of sales best practices.

MICROLEARNING: WHAT “GOOD” LOOKS LIKE FOR THE INDIVIDUAL Often, a sales organization will construct a competency model with different areas of focus and levels of proficiency for a given sales role. For example, an individual could have a learning plan that reflects his or her specific areas of need, which are identified with knowledge and behavioral assessments.

Today, it’s much easier to create highly tailored, bite-sized portions of learning content that can easily be consumed from smart phones.

Furthermore, it also much easier to reinforce learning using adaptive and spaced repetition principles – making it much more likely that learners will retain and apply whatever they are attempting to master.

NANOLEARNING: WHAT “GOOD” LOOKS LIKE FOR THE SITUATION Once learners reach desired levels of proficiency, they should consistently be

PROVIDE SALES PROFESSIONALS WITH CONTEXTUAL, JUST-IN-TIME CONTENT.

applying what they learned. One of the most impactful ways to improve learning application is to provide sales professionals with contextual, just-in-time content that can help them execute specific activities in their everyday sales situations.

a sales organization can take to make the approach manageable. We often help clients execute these actions and develop a tailored Learn-Ablement structure.

For example, consider a situation in which a sales professional has 15 minutes right before a sales conversation with a prospect.

She wants to refresh her memory about what a good, consultative sales conversation looks like. She could simply access her on-demand library or sales playbook and launch that specific content, whether it’s a short video, soundbite or text tutorial.

» Define your selling framework for each go-to-market model.

Again, the ability to create useful content quickly, even on a mobile device, and then make that learning available to colleagues, is just one of many avenues for providing contextual learning in an accessible and highly digestible fashion.

IMPROVED SALES MANAGEMENT WITH LEARN-ABLEMENT While the objective of the Learn-Ablement architecture is to fully support what “good” looks like for your sellers at the organizational, individual and situational levels, the use of optimized technology at each of these levels also provides more valuable data points for sales managers.

With these data, a manager can see correlations between opportunity win-loss ratios and the tools sellers use.

With these kinds of data analytics, sales leaders can ascertain if desired behavior change is occurring and predict earlier and with greater certainty whether or not they will achieve business results.

MACROLEARNING

» Create common Learn-Ablement plans for these groups. » Infuse core enablement playbooks in training.

MICROLEARNING

» Use analytics to assess areas of individual focus. » Determine the most strategic competencies for your key sales and management roles to develop. » Configure Learn-Ablement plans for individuals based on required proficiency levels. » Reinforce desired behavior changes (management function).

NANOLEARNING

» Identify your key selling situations. » Create NanoLearning assets (e.g., justin-time how to videos, text entries, etc.). » Embed the assets in sharing portals, playbooks and/or enablement platforms (e.g., CRM).

GETTING STARTED WITH LEARN-ABLEMENT

No longer must sales and learning functions debate where to focus learning and enablement efforts. They can be integrated at the organizational, individual and situational level, all working in concert to enable the sales organization to adapt quickly to any changes in company strategy.

Applying an integrated Learn-Ablement architecture might seem overwhelming: Where do you begin? There are steps that

James Touchstone is director of learning and development at Sales Performance International.

Email James.

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WHAT SETS

HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS APART

BY JULIE THOMAS

Recruiting, onboarding and training a sales organization is a balancing act to take seriously.

As a sales leader, you’re always on the lookout for people who offer the right personality and team fit combined with competency in selling skills. Once you’ve secured them, you’re on the hook to hold them accountable and reward their successes. Yes, it’s a balancing act, to be sure.

I’ve hired, trained and coached thousands of sales professionals at all levels. Working with both multinational sales organizations and rapidly emerging firms for the past 20 years, I have found five common characteristics of high-performing teams.

1|THEY HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE Jim Collins said it well: “Get the right people on the bus, then figure out where to go.” Each organization

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defines the “right” team members based on company culture, team makeup and job requirements.

High-performing sales leaders hire individuals with the right attitude, the right enthusiasm and the right work ethic. They look for people who love to learn and who can accurately self-assess and adjust.

These traits are all innate. You can’t teach someone to be an optimist or have a positive attitude.

It takes time to get the right mix and the right team members. One person with a bad attitude can be viral to your team. It’s worth the wait and due diligence required to build a strong team.

2 | THEY CLOSE COMPETENCY GAPS. Whether you hire seasoned pros or train new hires on your organization’s sales methodology, have a plan for onboarding and continual reskilling. Then, make it happen.

Know the skills your team and your organization need. Assess each individual and train him or her to close the gaps. You can have great people – likeable, easy-going, hard workers – but if they don’t know what to do and how to do it, they are operating with both hands tied behind their backs.

“Fake it ‘til you make it” is not how new team members should be operating. Instead, provide the right training, education and coaching. To make training stick, be sure it’s easy to implement and fits within your existing processes. Offer a learning environment that’s engaging, relevant and ongoing.

THE BEST SALES MANAGERS ARE ABLE TO CONNECT PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS WITH TEAM GOALS. destructive and criticizing. Make sure your positive feedback outweighs the negative, two-to-one.

Nobody’s perfect, and no one likes to be called out after making a mistake. Praise in public, and correct in private.

5 | THEY DRIVE INCREMENTAL PERFORMANCE. Create an environment where you can use coaching to drive incremental individual performance. How can you get all team members to do their jobs just a little better?

Do you have a culture that celebrates team success or only individual success?

3| THEY MEASURE WHAT MATTERS.

Consider a baseball team analogy. The coach’s goal is for the team to play better.

How does he do that? By making each player’s performance better. While every player has a distinct role on the field, success in one position doesn’t diminish the success of other positions.

We’ve all heard that what gets measured gets done. Apply that adage to identify the metrics that truly matter. Hold your sales representatives accountable to the things that are important to them.

By increasing each person’s skills incrementally, the competencies of your entire team come together. With this coaching strategy in place, you are positioned to win the game.

Are you building a culture of continuous improvement? Do you have a team where nobody gets complacent? Where they continually stretch, learn and grow? Those are the people you want on your team. As sales professionals, they’ll serve as shining examples for the new hires.

Finding the right balance of these five characteristics is the foundation of highperforming teams.

To recruit and retain the right people, create metrics that are meaningful at the individual, team and organizational levels.

When all three are aligned, the team is highperforming and unstoppable.

4| THEY RECOGNIZE AND CELEBRATE THEIR PEOPLE. As Ken Blanchard said, “Catch people doing something right.” High-performing leaders recognize and praise more than they correct and criticize.

When they do have to correct a team member, they do it in a way that’s constructive and motivating rather than

LEADING A HIGH-PERFORMING SALES TEAM What does it take to lead such a team? At one time or another, all of us have worked for managers we didn’t respect. We know firsthand what doesn’t work.

are able to tap into those motivations. Yet they are also able to connect that personal motivation with a team goal so everyone is working toward the greater good.

COMMUNICATION: Their vision is inspiring. Their expectations are positive.

Their feedback is constructive. A big part of being a sales executive and manager is practicing and mastering the communication process.

COACHING: The culture you promote within your team will determine the level at which your team feels individual ownership.

Make sure you and your team get better year after year, quarter after quarter and month after month.

EMPATHY: Good coaches know what their players are experiencing. They have traveled the same career path and overcome similar barriers. They demonstrate not only that they care but also that they understand. Can you imagine being on the receiving end of coaching feedback from someone who didn’t understand your world? Most likely, it’d be ineffective.

As you build a high-performing team, gain the respect of, rapport with and credibility of your team members by staying flexible, communicative and empathetic. Because you can’t be a leader if nobody’s following.

Julie Thomas, president and CEO of ValueSelling Associates, is a business consultant, coach, facilitator, speaker and author of “ValueSelling: Driving Sales Up One Conversation at a Time.”

Email Julie.

Here’s what does work: CREDIBILITY: As a leader and a coach, you have to be credible. You can’t just rely on power or authority based on a title. You have to earn respect by adding value and showing that the people on your team can learn from you.

FLEXIBILITY: The best sales leaders use situational management. They understand that each team member is personally motivated by different things, and they

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UNLOCKING SALES TRAINING

FOUR KEYS TO RAPID BEHAVIOR CHANGE

BY MARK BASHRUM

Improving sales performance more often than not requires changing the behaviors of sellers and managers. Sales organizations are continually challenged to bring in higher revenue, quarter after quarter, and year after year.

They are asked to expand markets, launch next-generation products, and keep pace with the changing needs of their customers. The sales environment is dynamic and relentless, and to remain competitive, sales organizations need the ability to change, and change rapidly.

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A structured approach is essential for any organizational change, but particularly so for rapid behavior change. Here are four keys to ensure that sellers and their managers buy into your change initiative and that new behaviors are impactful and sustainable.

1| DEFINE Start with KPIs and work backward To be effective, it is important that behaviors targeted for change are directly aligned to the sales organization’s KPIs and desired outcomes. Alignment keeps stakeholders supportive and ensures that behavior change results in meaningful impact. Start by identifying the actions, measurements and behaviors that drive results.

This involves understanding current and desired-state KPIs and prioritizing specific behaviors that make the most impact on KPIs, for both sales professionals and their managers. Design relevant and challenging learning interventions to address desired behavior changes and create a measurement plan to confirm and quantify business impact.

because it is obviously in their own best interest. They change because they buyin, and that happens when salespeople actively participate in the transformation.

Change needs to be comfortable and familiar. Well-designed learning activities provide the opportunity to model new behaviors in a supportive environment that reflects the real-life challenges sellers face in the field.

To engage sellers and managers, create targeted learning interactions that focus on the sales dialogue between buyers and sellers that are highly customized to the specific selling environment. Emphasize learning-bydoing and engage sellers in problem-solving, brainstorming and collaborative thinking.

Additionally, utilize intensive facilitator and peer-to-peer feedback and coaching, and incorporate thoughtful, field-based sustainment activities.

TRAINING IS JUST ONE ELEMENT IN A BROADER BEHAVIOR CHANGE STRATEGY.

Each element informs and supports the next, creating a framework for meaningful and actionable change that can be observed and measured. From knowledge acquisition through business impact, be sure that measures are put in place to drive your KPIs.

Training is where many sales organizations begin and end the transformation process.

Though critical, training is just one element in a broader behavior change strategy.

2 | LEARN Engage sellers in their transformation

3 | CHANGE Make new behaviors matter

As with any group, salespeople and sales managers do not change their behaviors because they are expected to do so, or even

Sales is a very practical discipline, and salespeople have a keen sense for what will and will not add value to themselves

COACHING DEMONSTRATES ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND PROVIDES SALESPEOPLE WITH THE CONFIDENCE TO CHANGE. and their clients. For sellers to really buy-in, they need to see new behaviors succeed in the field, and they need to know that those behaviors are expected and supported by the organization.

To ensure that new behaviors take root, confirm that the managers and coaches of sellers can demonstrate the behaviors at a high level of competency. Train managers on coaching best practices and build in a cadence of observation and feedback so that sellers are supported on the job. It is also essential to provide managers with a practical way to observe and coach sales behaviors in the field.

behaviors are adopted, without measures there is no guarantee that change is actually moving the needle in the right direction.

To ensure behavior change and prove business impact, your measurement strategy should provide insights into the quality of learning engagements and how well sales teams retain knowledge and skills over time. You should be able to pinpoint where coaching is taking place across the organization and identify when and where specific behaviors have changed, and how specific behaviors are impacting KPIs.

4 | MEASURE Shift from guessing to knowing

Moreover, it is important that your measurement process be practical and efficient. If capturing data is burdensome, then managers and sellers are unlikely to comply. It is also essential that your measurement process align to your coaching and KPI cadence. Ultimately you will want to quantify specific behavior changes and correlate them with changes in your KPIs. This requires putting some thought into attribution and timing.

A defined measurement strategy is essential for real-time visibility, informing the learning program, and validating success. Without key measures, there is no way of knowing where, when or if change is occurring. Measures are also critical to training. Learning programs need to evolve and adapt overtime and that depends on knowing what is, and is not, working in practice. Even when new

The path to rapid behavior change relies on processes to define, learn, change and measure critical selling behaviors. Because transformative change doesn’t happen without interaction and commitment, it is essential that learning programs focus on the right behaviors and that those behaviors are taught in a way that fosters buy-in and personal accountability. Knowledge and

Sales professionals who don’t receive ongoing coaching and feedback from their managers generally fall back on old behaviors. Coaching demonstrates organizational commitment and provides salespeople with the confidence to change.

skills modeled in the classroom need to translate to behavior change in the field.

To sustain new behaviors, it is critical that managers are equipped with the knowhow and methodology to coach effectively. Lastly, transformation needs the visibility, insight and validation provided by an effective and practical measurement strategy.

Your sales organization is critical to the growth and well-being of your business.

Sustained success for them will mean adapting to the velocity and dynamics of your customers and markets. To keep pace, your sellers and managers will need to change, and the faster the better.

Mark Bashrum is the senior vice president of marketing at Richardson. Email Mark.

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PERCEPTION VS. REALITY DO YOUR SALESPEOPLE KNOW WHERE THEY'RE STRUGGLING?

By Tim Riesterer

Behavioral economists sometimes draw the distinction between “declared preferences” (what people say or feel) versus “revealed preferences” (what people actually do). They typically refer to this idea when explaining the discrepancies that tend to exist between opinion polls and actual behaviors.

There seems to be a similar discrepancy among sales reps, who may say they’re struggling in a certain area of their customer conversations but are actually struggling in others. In other words, what reps believe to be their biggest skills and challenges do not align to what the behavioral outcome data reveal.

Last year, when I co-authored the book “The Three Value Conversations,” we launched a parallel online self-assessment tool aligned to the key skills and concepts detailed in the book. The assessment is designed to measure reps’ proficiency in three critical areas of the sales cycle: creating value (differentiation skills), elevating value (executive conversation skills) and capturing value (negotiation skills). Nearly 300 sales professionals have taken the assessment.

DISCREPANCIES REVEALED For each skills area, we asked reps which of six skills they viewed as their biggest selling challenge. Then we compared this answer to what the behavioral outcome survey questions revealed. In each skill scenario, 38

the assessment showed a discrepancy: The selling challenges that reps believed were their most difficult didn’t match what their answers to the behavioral survey questions indicated.

Here’s a summary of the results.

CREATE VALUE Objective: Defeat the status quo and differentiate your solutions.

• Participants declared

Their top challenge is illustrating a sharp contrast between a customer’s current state and a desired future state.

• But the data revealed

Their actual top challenge is creating and confirming urgency by stirring emotions.

ELEVATE VALUE Objective: Make a business case that passes muster with executive decision makers.

• Participants declared

Their top challenge is winning access to executive buyers rather than being delegated down.

• But the data revealed

Their actual top challenge is identifying the specific financial metrics that their solution will impact.

CAPTURE VALUE Objective: Protect pricing, and expand deal size amid tense negotiations.

• Participants declared

Their top challenge is encouraging customers to reveal their underlying motivations.

• But the data revealed

Their actual top challenge is procuring agreements to mutually beneficial terms in response to their concession plan.

Many companies plan their sales training based on what their reps say their biggest needs are. Our assessment results cast serious doubt on that approach and suggest something worth keeping in mind the next time you plan your training: Perceptions are not reality.

In other words, take what your reps say about their biggest selling challenges with

TO PASS MUSTER WITH EXECUTIVES, ADOPT A C-SUITE PERSPECTIVE IN YOUR STORY. a grain of salt. Relying heavily on anecdotal evidence rather than behavioral data could prevent you from addressing the most pressing needs and skills gaps in your customer conversations.

A PERFORMANCE GAP? Speaking of behavioral data, the results of the assessment reveal another serious problem with sales conversations: Reps, on average, are performing 30 percent below the benchmark we’ve identified among reps who have gone through skills training on the three value conversations.

Underperforming to this degree in the most pivotal buying moments could be preventing your organization from hitting its targets. It also suggests that what’s hampering reps’ efforts isn’t an easily correctable flaw but rather some fundamental skills gap.

Here are some tips to help you close that 30-percent performance skills gap in the areas of differentiation, executive conversation and sales negotiation.

PERCEPTIONS ARE NOT REALITY. Defeat the status quo with a great “why change” story. When salespeople obtain a meeting, their first impulse is often to launch into a product-focused message that centers on features and benefits, not realizing that leading with this “why you” story is a prescription for a commodity conversation.

Instead of beginning by telling prospects why they should choose your solution, salespeople should lead with a story that shows prospects why they need to change – why they need to do something different from what they’re doing today. That “why change” story is how they will sharpen the contrast between the pain of their prospect’s status quo situation and the value and relief your solution can bring them.

Demonstrate business acumen to free up the budget for an opportunity. Your sales reps worked hard to obtain access to executive buyers, but they only get one chance to show they can go toe-to-toe with them on the business issues, challenges and trends that matter to them. If they aren’t relevant to executive decision makers, they’ll squander that chance and get delegated down to the level to which they do sound relevant.

To have a business conversation that passes muster with executives, you need to adopt a C-suite perspective in your story, speaking to the external factors that are top of mind for them.

Make sure your reps have a thorough understanding of the regulatory challenges their prospects face as well as economic conditions or shifts in customer preferences.

Then, to create a compelling executive buying vision, link these issues to their strategic business initiatives – and to your business value.

Assert your low-power advantage. In the world of complex B2B sales, customers and sellers are in full agreement on one point:

Customers have the power, and sellers do not. At face value, that doesn’t seem to bode well for vendors. And that’s true – if you’re relying on conventional wisdom about sales negotiations.

The conventional approach to this skewed power balance is to try to match your buyer’s power or retake control. But research suggests that this approach can actually backfire and lead to worse outcomes for buyers and sellers alike. To capture more value for their deals, reps should embrace their low-power position and turn it into a competitive advantage, using counterintuitive skills and techniques to execute.

One negotiation technique sales reps can use to give themselves an edge in pricing is to make the first offer rather than letting their prospect broach pricing matters first.

This approach allows them to anchor their price higher and expand their prospect’s range of reason, giving them the foundation they need to protect their margins.

Defeating the status quo, engaging executive decision makers, and protecting your pricing cover some of the most pivotal moments in the sales cycle. To win better, more profitable deals, reps must shore up the skills they need to articulate value in these key moments – and put a dent in that 30-percent performance gap.

Tim Riesterer is the chief strategy officer at Corporate Visions. Email Tim.

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BANISH THE OTHER FOUR LETTER F-WORD

BY EDWARD G. BROWN

CONTROL THEIR MIND AND THEREBY CONTROL THEIR FEARS. 40

THE 41ST ANNUAL BANISHED WORDS LIST IS OUT, AND IT DOESN’T INCLUDE MY NOMINATION. I NOMINATE THE OTHER FOUR LETTERED F-WORD: FEAR. WHY? BECAUSE FEAR IS SO CORROSIVE AND YET INVISIBLE. IT IS AT THE BOTTOM OF SO MUCH PAIN, WORRY, FAILURE AND LOSS, AND YET IT NEVER SEEMS TO GET THE BLAME. In training, you know the scenario. You identified your people’s training needs. You put them through a great training program.

You even certified them. So you know they know what to do and how to do it, but why aren’t they doing it?

Because they are afraid! Not shaking-intheir-boots afraid, but still impeded by fear of one kind or another that prevents them from executing the new behaviors you’ve trained them on. As it says in the dictionary, “Fear makes us unable to do what is right or expected of us.”

But are they going to tell you that? Of course not. Fear is not a respected emotion.

Everybody knows there’s no crying in baseball and no fearing at the office. So fear gets driven underground.

That’s why it’s up to you to learn how to discern when fear is the obstacle, what kind of fear is involved, and, finally, how to teach people to overcome their fears so that they perform with excellence.

THE FIVE BIG FEARS 1 | Fear of running out of time.

People don’t believe me when I first mention time, but think about it: What is one of the most precious things you have? Time is a true, finite treasure and way too many people spend their working days thinking, “I have too much to do and not enough time to do it! Deadlines are looming and I’m coming up short!” As the workplace gets more distracting, thanks to open offices, too many devices and too many alerts, time and attention get squandered to the point that people truly fear they will never, ever find the time to deliver.

2 | Fear of rejection.

This one is painful to write about, because it’s such a waste! Full disclosure: From childhood I’ve been blessed with enough chutzpah that fear of rejection never stood much chance with me, and as a consequence, I think I wring every last drop of opportunity out of my abilities. So it kills me to see capable people back away from fulfilling their potential just because somebody might – might – reject them. People actually choose to underperform, to be underpaid, underrewarded, under-respected – all because

of something that might happen. And if it did happen, rejection would be no big deal.

Rejection isn’t death. It’s a sign that you need to take a different track.

3 | Fear of failure.

If you don’t fear failure, then you’re not thinking through the risks and how to prevent them. But too many people experience something on the atychiphobia spectrum, “the abnormal, unwarranted, and persistent fear of failure.” They have so little confidence in themselves that they simply don’t try. These people live their working lives under the radar, seeing things and not naming them, knowing things and not using them – all because the prospect of failure blots out the sun of possible success. For them, no excitement about possible success is worth the terrifying prospect of failure.

4 | Fear of success.

A different side of the same coin, fear of success leaves people feeling hollow, and as a consequence, they underutilize their gifts. When they do experience success, they feel like an imposter (“I just got lucky”). They fear the exposure that comes with success: “Tall poppies get cut down to size.” Better to let somebody else rise to the occasion.

I like how Tony Robbins puts it: “It’s not the events of our lives that shape our destiny, but rather our perception of those events.”

Research says that 70 percent of all successful people have experienced the feeling of being an imposter!

5 | Fear of the unknown.

People like predictability – fair enough.

“I got along just fine the old way – I know what happens. And I don’t know what will happen if I start doing things the new way.”

Old habits got them this far, and who knows what new habits would bring? The problem is, they tend to overrate their ability to predict things. Old habits got them a raise and a bonus this year, but now there’s a new strategy, and they won’t measure up. But that’s where fear of the unknown creates a level of stubbornness that leaves trainers sorely frustrated.

FIXING FEAR By now, if I haven’t struck fear into your heart, you’re asking, so how do I solve this?

1 | Start by putting fear in its rightful place.

That’s what FDR was saying with his quote, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

It was the worst year of the Great Depression, our unemployment topped 25 percent, Hitler opened Dachau, banks were shaky, and the Dust Bowl was ruining the world’s breadbasket. But still, back then Americans had it better than humankind had ever experienced in history, and 80 years later things are even better in so many ways.

2 | Remember that fear is a coward itself.

It folds in the face of bravery. Which is another way of saying, people can learn courage.

Everybody starts out with monsters under the bed, and it’s terrifying. If we can learn by adulthood to not fear for our ankles when it’s time to go to bed, then we can learn to overcome the Five Big Fears at work. When you encounter fear, teach courage. It comes in small steps, like learning any other skill.

3 | Experience is the best teacher.

When you want to teach courage, you treat people to a small experience with courage, but in a setting where they risk little exposure or loss. They like the feeling of courage instead of fear, they relinquish a bit of fear, and the next time they take a bigger step, and so on, until suddenly they are ready for the main stage. We call that the Off-Broadway Principle. Small risks with small rewards pave a path to large risks and larger rewards.

4 | Give your people the gift of mindfulness.

Teach them what I call the “Mental Hygiene Process” described in the blog, “Six Tips for Concentrating at Will.” These tips can control their mind and thereby control their fears.

If fear, the other four lettered F-word, is holding back your people, surface it, talk about it and eradicate it. Don’t let another year go by without learning where this enemy of success hides.

Edward G. Brown is president and co-chairman of Cohen Brown Management Group. He has 36 years of experience creating training programs that help executives solve their most pressing challenges. He is the author of, “The Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had.” Email Edward.

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THE SECRET OF SALES ENABLEMENT BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN SALES STRATEGY AND EXECUTION

BY KEN VALLA AND ED EMDE

A compelling conversation about “sales enablement” is unfolding among thought leaders in sales and marketing. The initial emphasis on sales enablement grew out of what “Harvard Business Review” calls “the notoriously fraught relationship between sales and marketing.”

As companies sought solutions to better align sales and marketing to drive revenue, people started to talk about how they should approach and align other functions in order to enable sales. Yet as with any exciting evolution, there is a lot of buzz but not necessarily a great deal of clarity as to what it means. So what exactly is sales enablement, why does it matter to your business and what are the keys to doing it well?

• Are you hearing customers and salespeople complain about information overload?

WHY DOES SALES ENABLEMENT MATTER?

Put simply, sales enablement is an approach that bridges the gap between sales strategy and execution. It ensures that actions taken to support your sales and service functions align with the overall strategy of your organization and with the way you want your customers to experience your brand.

Everyone wants a piece of the salesforce.

Internal functions, such as marketing, training, research and development, and sales operations, all have information they want to provide to sales. Well-intentioned efforts to help equip your salespeople with knowledge, information and resources may actually be wasting precious selling time as your salesforce struggles to make sense of it all.

Ask yourself these questions to identify opportunities for improving your company’s sales enablement: • Have your internal processes failed to keep pace with the way your customers prefer to shop, buy and use your company’s products or services?

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• Are various internal functions competing for your salespeople’s time?

• Are your salespeople receiving conflicting messages from different sources?

• Is time wasted on training that is not relevant or immediately useful?

WHAT SALES ENABLEMENT IS

WHAT SALES ENABLEMENT ISN’T Sales enablement is a new term, and many companies make the mistake of applying this new term to old ways of doing things.

They rename “sales training” to “sales enablement,” or they create more mobile or technology-assisted selling tools and call these tools “sales enablement.” The reality is that learning and technology are important to sales enablement, but they are only parts of the equation, and focusing on any one element in a vacuum is likely to produce limited results.

WHAT’S CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS? A systems view of sales enablement includes four core elements that must be aligned with one another, with your organization’s go-to-market strategy and with your desired customer experience.

Achieving or improving this triple alignment is the ultimate objective of sales enablement. Let’s consider each of the four core elements in more detail.

Process Mesh or Mess?

All too often, the sales processes and systems that are intended to help drive results actually conflict with one another and consume time.

Consider the following questions: • Does your salesforce rely on or resist using your CRM system?

• Do you have a well-defined sales process?

Does your salesforce consistently follow it, and do managers coach to it?

• How well do your sales process and systems mesh with your customers’ shopping and purchasing processes and preferences?

Information: Access or Overload?

A sales enablement approach to information and resources focuses on optimizing the streams of information aimed at the salesforce, support staff, customers and prospects. When these flows are

TRIPLE ALIGNMENT

GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY

SALES ENABLEMENT SALES PROCESSES & SYSTEMS

INFORMATION & RESOURCES

LEARNING STRATEGY

LEADERSHIP PRACTICES

DESIRED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

orchestrated by a sales enablement strategy, the sales process begins to synchronize more closely with the “shop and buy” cycles of customer organizations. Instead of being overwhelmed by the constant push of information into their space from other parts of the organization, salespeople begin to pull critical information and skillfully guide it toward customers. Instead of simply reacting to customer inquiries, salespeople and support staff are able to anticipate customer questions, and, as a result, customers begin to view the information they provide as an important source of value.

Learning Clutter or Learning Strategy?

In order to support sales enablement, your learning team must stop focusing on the quantity of learning programs and instead develop a learning strategy for sales that is aligned with both your organization’s goto-market strategy and with your vision for the desired customer experience. The team must partner with sales leadership to define the mindsets and behaviors necessary to execute the strategy. The salespeople must be equipped with the knowledge and skills to engage prospects and customers to drive sales forward.

Sales leaders must also be equipped to coach salespeople toward higher levels of performance. Consult with business

leaders to identify barriers to successful sales performance and drive solutions that go beyond training and development.

Leadership: Tactical and Practical No element has a greater impact on sales effectiveness than the day-to-day practices of sales leaders. Unfortunately, few organizations take the time to actively ensure that sales leaders fully embrace and then visibly support all the systems, information and learning described above.

A sales enablement approach entails asking the following questions and addressing identified disconnects and gaps: • Do the everyday actions of sales managers and their supervisors support the organization’s strategy and desired customer experience?

• Do they accept the importance of their coaching role to the success of the sales strategy?

• Have they had sufficient skills training to be effective in their role as coaches?

• Who is coaching the coaches?

• Are leaders held accountable for ensuring alignment and performance?

SUMMARY

ever, the productivity of the salesforce is tied to how effectively marketing and other internal support teams work with sales and one another.

To improve your company’s efforts at sales enablement, consider beginning by bringing together leaders from multiple functions to engage in a sales enablement audit. Using the questions posed above to guide discovery and dialogue will allow the team to identify inefficiencies and identify improvement opportunities.

A well planned and executed systems approach to sales enablement can yield increases in sales by maximizing the role of sales leaders, optimizing the flow of information to salespeople, leveraging cross-functional collaboration and freeing salespeople to spend more time with customers. Done well, sales enablement closes the gap between sales strategy and sales execution.

Ed Emde is president of Wilson Learning Corporation, where he is responsible for overall business strategy and operations in the Americas.

Ken Valla is regional vice president of sales at Wilson Learning Corporation, where he is responsible for driving sales strategies to increase revenue, profitability and market share in North America. Email Ed and Ken.

Sales enablement requires new levels of cross-functional collaboration. More than

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W H AT ’ S ONLINE T R A I N I N G I N D U S T R Y. C O M

A RTICLES USING LEARNING SCIENCE TO CURE MISSED SALES GOALS I By Chanin Balance When sales training seems to wear off, learning science can help pinpoint where training went wrong.

SALES TRAINING: IS YOURS A HOLE-IN-ONE OR IN THE WEEDS? I By Michelle Vazzana There are a few key questions that learning leaders must answer to make sure they are on course.

10 PRINCIPLES OF A SUCCESSFUL SALES REINFORCEMENT PROGRAM I By Lisa Clark Identifying what to reinforce is the first step to achieving maximum ROI on sales training investments.

THREE REASONS WHY SALES COACHING ISN’T FIXING YOUR SALES TEAM I By Kevin Davis Effective sales coaching is something you must do every day if you want to see improvement.

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CO M PA N Y N

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ACQ UIS I T I ON SAN DPA RTN E R SHIPS Weld North Holdings LLC announced its continued expansion in the big data and educational analytics technology market with the acquisition of Performance Matters, a leader in student assessment systems and analytics. Performance Matters will merge with Truenorthlogic.

The combination creates the first company with educator evaluation and professional development data; student achievement data; and powerful analytics capability to better understand the drivers of student outcomes.

Fullstack Academy, an industry leader in immersive coding education, has acquired Chicago-based coding school, The Starter League. This is the first acquisition for New York City-based Fullstack Academy, and a significant step in its goal to empower more people to pursue their dream careers in software development.

Globoforce, a leading provider of social recognition solutions, announced a new partnership with Evanta’s Professional Development Academy, a collaborative learning program for developing and maximizing leadership capabilities and skills for frontline to mid-level managers. Through the partnership, the two organizations will collaborate on interaction with student and alumni communities and joint events.

Allego, the leading mobile-video justin-time (JIT) sales learning platform, announced that it has a strategic partnership with Matrix Achievement Group to deliver JIT mobile video coaching capabilities to Matrix’s clients worldwide. Matrix uses the Allego platform to deliver mobile video coaching to improve sales enablement and training for its clients.

Mobify, a mobile customer engagement leader, announced the acquisition of Pathful, provider of advanced machine learning-based technology for behavior-based targeting. Pathful machine algorithms are able to generate and analyze 25 times the data of Google Analytics for unparalleled on-page insights. The technology is being integrated with Mobify's Mobile Customer Engagement Platform, enabling retailers to acquire and qualify customers by understanding the entire customer journey.

Pearson and Flatiron School Partner to provide “coding bootcamp” training solution to help students acquire skills that increase their employability. Through the partnership, learners will have access to a full-time, 800-hour training program in high-demand software development skills that precisely simulate a professional coder’s environment.

INDUSTRY NE WS Top Challenges in B2B Sales Negotiations Corporate Visions, a leading marketing and sales messaging, content and skills training company, announced results from a new survey polling more than 300 B2B marketers and salespeople about price negotiations. The data revealed the number one factor impacting margins is the inability of salespeople to articulate value, followed by salespeople negotiating against themselves by not believing in their company's price.

Sales Training Solution to Leverage Customer Insights Richardson, a leading global sales training and performance improvement company, announced that it has launched its Selling with Insights® Program, a custom-tailored

sales training solution designed to provide sellers with advanced-level skills, allowing them to leverage insights during strategic dialogues with customers. The program is built on the importance of establishing credibility, fostering trust, and creating value for customers.

Survey Uncovers Misalignment on Rewards and Motivations There is mounting evidence that optimal performance comes from the alignment of an executive’s personal values with the organization’s culture and the role’s responsibilities, yet few executives or organizations have made the adjustments necessary to take advantage of this synergy, according to a global survey of senior executives conducted by Egon Zehnder.

New Sales Training Program for Produce Industry United Fresh announces a new sales training program specifically designed for the fresh produce industry. The program will focus on the fundamentals of selling for up-and-coming produce sales staff.

The course is designed to be highly interactive and customized. Attendees will learn key objectives such as how to identify customer needs, how to engage customers, and how to close a sale.

INTERESTED IN SUBMITTING COMPANY NEWS? PLEASE SEND TO EDITOR@TRAININGINDUSTRY.COM

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