Selling Power Blog

Six Characteristics of World-Class Sales Coaches

Today’s guest post is by Diane Williams, product manager for the SPIN® Portfolio of training programs for MHI Global. She is responsible for the development of new programs that support the use of SPIN skills.

In the world of sales, good sales coaches are  hard to find. That’s because coaching is challenging. It takes training. And who has the time for it?

But, if you want to have a world-class selling organization, you must coach – no excuses allowed.

Coaching in sales effectiveness is like coaching in any field where greatness is expected: it is imperative. Great sales coaches know who to coach, when to coach, and to what to coach. If you want to be a great sales coach, the following six characteristics will set you on the right path.

1. The right balance of efficiency and effectiveness. Great sales managers find the balance of optimal efficiency metrics and practical effectiveness measures. Just a few effectiveness measures will balance an array of efficiency measures. That’s because efficiency metrics are quantitative; effectiveness measures are done in ratio form, e.g., did a call plan lead to the desired outcome? While efficiency can be improved by activity management and territory configuration, effectiveness improvement requires training, modeling, and great coaching. Great sales coaches help their salespeople understand the importance of outcomes.
   
   
2. The right management involvement in face-to-face selling. An effective organization considers a few rules when involving a manager in a face-to-face customer interaction: Involve a manager only when he or she can make a unique difference; don’t make sales calls on a customer unless your salesperson is with you; before any joint call, agree on specific and clear selling roles with your salesperson; and always have a withdrawal strategy that prevents any customer from becoming dependent on you, personally.
   
   
3. Sell where there’s an opportunity to create customer value through the selling process. Economics 101 will tell you that Value = Benefits – Cost. Great coaches show their salespeople where the opportunities exist to create value, independent of the product you sell. The research shows there are four ways to create value for customers: Help customers diagnose the unrecognized problem; help them arrive at an unanticipated solution; present an unforeseen opportunity that has escaped the customer’s attention; and become a broker of capabilities and act as a customer advocate.

   
   
4. Focus on the early stages of the business pipeline. The opportunity to create value rests in the early stages of a sales call – not the later ones. MHI Global’s research shows that successful sales calls come from spending twice as much time on the front end of the pipeline. By focusing on the later stages, average companies are inadvertently defining themselves as transactional companies selling a commodity.
   
   
5. Build a coaching culture. Creating a coaching culture means allocating time, metrics, and attention. Great companies recognize this basic truth and invest their time in developing a culture of coaching. Coaching cultures have thought through four questions: Who do we coach? When do we coach? How do we coach? To what do we coach?
   
   
6. Ruthlessly reward high performers. For high performers, it’s not about money – it’s about degrees of freedom. They want immediate rewards. They want hard assignments. They want quick and candid feedback. They want to be known as a top performer. Celebrate that on a regular basis. World-class coaches give rewards and feedback early and often.

Why Your New Sales Technology Tools Won't Solve Your Sales Problem

Today’s post is by Michelle Vazzana, a founding partner at Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm. She is co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code and a sought-after speaker on the topic of sales management and leadership with more than 28 years of successful sales and management experience. For more information, visit www.vantagepointperformance.com.

All sales organizations have problems. Sales technologies or tools solve problems. Logic would seem to tell us that all we need to do is match a technology to a problem and voilà – problem solved!

Yet, as every sales leader knows, this is not how it works. All too commonly, organizations apply technology in an effort to fix their pressing sales challenges but their expectations for it go unrealized. Why?

There are a couple reasons for this dilemma. First, tools are just that – tools. They don’t conduct activities or think through problems – people do. When companies employ a tool expecting it to solve the problem, they set themselves up for disappointment since it is people who need to solve it. Second, there often isn’t enough direct linkage between the tool and the real problem. In many cases, a tool is brought in to address a symptom of a problem because the company has never identified the root cause of that problem. In these cases, implementation can sometimes exacerbate the issue or create entirely new problems.

Take CRM as an example. Let’s say a sales organization purchases a CRM system in order to improve forecasting through better visibility into the pipeline. And then, let’s say, a sales leader takes a look at the pipeline and realizes: “Uh-oh! Based on our average close rate and the number of deals in the pipeline, we aren’t going to make our numbers this quarter.” So he or she instructs the team to go out and make their pipelines bigger. They do. But now the pipeline is inflated and reps are putting time and energy into deals that won’t close. So the pipeline looks full and the pipeline math indicates the company should meet its quarterly targets. But it’s a mirage. The poor quality of leads means the forecasts are still off and, to add insult to injury, win rates are sliding.

When leaders bring in technology to solve a problem without fully understanding its root cause, we often see the emergence of additional challenges. In this case, the root cause of, say, uneven forecasting might be that sellers aren’t spending enough time qualifying deals in the early stages. By teaching reps how to better qualify deals and putting emphasis here, they would better learn where to spend their time and which deals are most likely to turn into sales. In turn, this discernment would improve forecasting and boost win rates. While CRM could certainly be helpful as an aid here, it is not the solution.

I recently worked with a client that had invested half a million dollars in an automated call planning system. It had been implemented in response to complaints by reps who, as a result of inconsistent performance in sales calls, were required to create 10 call plans a week. Done manually, this task had been taking them five hours a week. The technology, with templates and drop-down lists, reduced the burden to mere minutes.

When the quality of sales calls didn’t improve, the company brought me in to take a look at the issue, and I knew right away we had a problem. The whole point of call planning is to think through an upcoming call  – but the automated system had removed the need to think. Moreover, sales managers had suddenly found themselves with 100 call plans in their in-boxes for review every week. Overwhelmed, they weren’t looking at any of them. The situation was a classic case of trying to use a technology to solve a symptom of a deeper problem.

To get a handle on the situation, I asked the sales leader to find five great call plans out of the hundreds reps had created. He came up empty. “There are no good call plans,” he admitted. “Reps are just throwing things together to meet the requirement for 10 plans and managers aren’t catching it because there are too many to look at.”

We went back to the original problem: inconsistent execution of sales calls. To tackle it, I recommended the company drop the requirement for 10 call plans a week. Instead, I urged sales managers to spend one hour per month with every rep on the team and work to create one or two great call plans in that time. Quality over quantity. The recommendation raised a critical question: If reps were creating one or two great plans instead of 30-40 bad ones, which targets were worth a call plan? The question led the company to more clearly define what constituted a great opportunity, how to target those opportunities, and how to better plan interactions with them. Sales results improved and the company scrapped the half-million-dollar call planning system.

If you turn to technology to solve a problem, you are likely setting yourself up for disappointment. Rather than seeking a technology fix, seek the input of those who are living the problem and can help think through root causes so you solve the right problem with the right solution. Sometimes the answer is sales technology. Often, it is not.

How to Remove Barriers to Effective Sales Coaching

Today's post is by Bob Sanders, CEO of AXIOM Sales Force Development. Follow him on Twitter @bobsaxiomsfd or connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/bobsanders.

If you are like most sales leaders, you have already realized that your ability to achieve your objectives – whether hitting forecast results or transforming your customer engagements – absolutely depends on the effectiveness of your frontline sales managers.

You have probably also realized that only a few of your team of managers are effective coaches today. Interestingly, when managers are surveyed about their own coaching effectiveness, as many as 80 percent believe they are good (or even very good) sales coaches. However, when their interactions with sellers are observed, a very different picture often emerges.

Such was the case with one notable AXIOM client. Prior to working with our company, this large sales organization with nearly 1,000 managers had decided to bypass the survey and actually observe the interactions between its managers and sellers.

And what did their executives find? Of 1,000 managers, only 16 were actually having meaningful coaching conversations. The others were absolutely interacting with the people on their teams, but the interactions simply didn’t qualify as coaching conversations.

Why the massive discrepancy? It turns out there are two critical barriers to fielding a team of exceptional coaches who develop outstanding sellers.

Barrier #1: Companies lack a defined coaching model.

First, few teams have a clearly defined model for an effective sales coaching conversation. Don’t get me wrong, there are numerous training programs that purport to teach managers how to have meaningful coaching conversations. However, in reality, most are little more than light improvements on what managers are doing today – providing performance feedback.

Barrier #2: Companies fail to support coaching efforts.

Second, even when managers embrace a true coaching model, executing on that model requires supporting systems most companies aren’t presently providing. Without this support, the typical manager simply cannot overcome the barriers to effective coaching.

Let’s break down the ideal coaching conversation. Here’s the problem: faced with gaps in sales performance, managers react almost exclusively by pointing out the performance gap that needs to be addressed. You can hear the conversation in nearly any sales office in the country.

MANAGER: Tim, as much as I like you and really appreciate your enthusiasm, selling is a numbers game – and you aren’t making your numbers. Now, I have looked into your metrics and determined that your biggest issue is that you just aren’t finding enough opportunities – your funnel is too small. You have got to find more opportunities or we are going to have to find something else for you to do…and, by the way, that doesn’t mean here at ACME. I can give you 90 days, but you have to show me you can hit your numbers by then, ok?

SELLER: Uh…ok.

Is this feedback? Yes. Is this coaching? Most definitely not! Our manager has just sent the same person, equipped with the same skill and knowledge, into the same environment but made it quite clear she is expecting a different result. What’s the likelihood Tim can make that happen based on this feedback? Just about nil.

For this conversation to transform from meaningless (and perhaps even counter-productive) feedback to useful coaching, the manager must do two things. First, she must identify the root cause of the performance gap. This requires her to understand how her seller is prospecting for opportunities today and why the seller is doing it the way he is. Until she identifies a gap in skill and knowledge, nothing can be done to help this seller improve his selling effectiveness.

Second, when a skill or knowledge gap has been identified, some learning activity must be assigned to address (or at least shrink) this gap.

Think about any lesson/coaching session you ever had. Generally, you don’t get better from the lesson itself (that’s just when the coach identifies the cause of your performance issues). You get better when you complete the assignment or drill that comes after the lesson. Selling is no different. If we want people to acquire and apply new skills and knowledge, we need to provide salespeople with clear, concise learning activities that will allow them to do so. Then, in a follow-up conversation after the seller has completed the assignment, the manager can determine whether or not the skill/knowledge gap has been addressed.

Based on effectively identifying the root cause and then defining an activity that will address the issue, the manager has elevated the underlying skill of the seller and affected a sustainable change in his selling behavior and results.

This leads us to the second barrier to effective coaching. The matrix of performance issues, behavior gaps, root causes, and learning activities is so large that few, if any, managers will be able to apply the model during their seller conversations. This is precisely why a growing number of forward-thinking organizations are providing tools to support this model.

These solutions provide managers with a wizard that leads them through the process of diagnosing the root case of a problem and then presents to the manager any learning activity designed to address the root cause. No need to memorize all the possible combinations or search through an exhaustive list of courses in the company’s learning management system.

By providing sales managers with a clear model for effective coaching conversations and tools to help them execute consistently, sales organizations are able to dramatically improve coaching effectiveness and sales results.

Want to learn more? Visit us at www.axiomsfd.com.

How Top Gun Sales Training Drives Performance for Sales

Today's post is by Selling Power Editors.

 

 

Want to grow a highly successful sales team? What you need is a system of support and reinforcement to consistently drive sales mastery.

That’s according to Steve Osborne, CEO of Top Gun Sales Performance. To improve skills, Top Gun uses a blended training approach combining online and instructor-led lessons. This is followed by constant reinforcement every few days on mobile devices.

Why Sales Training Must Be an “Ongoing Event”

What many sales managers fail to understand about sales training is that it must be a continual process – not a one-time event. Otherwise, new skills simply don’t turn into permanent behaviors. And that’s a waste of training time.

That’s why Top Gun offers a whole suite of ongoing support. The company can teach specific skills, but prefers to identify all the skills necessary to perform well at each company and then improve these skills in all sales reps. Osborne emphasizes it is essential to improve coaching and first-line managers as well.

Added Support: Sales Materials and More

Top Gun also works with execs, sales managers, and salespeople to develop the most effective sales materials for each product and market. These can be PowerPoint® slides, tools for improving a customer’s ROI on purchasing products and services, or effective illustrations of critical selling points.

Uniquely, Top Gun has both a process and its own Web-based system for ensuring managers know sales reps’ competencies and what they must do to improve. “Think of it as a combination of a learning management system, mobile learning, coaching, and reinforcement,” Osborne explains.

Without such a system, it is impossible for an exec with more than 20 reps to even know how good these reps are at each essential skill – let alone improve skills. That’s a big problem for improving the overall performance of the sales team. Top Gun gets each company’s best sales practices out to the sales force quickly and effectively.

Increasing Revenue Without Increasing Headcount

Finally, if companies want to conserve the time of sales reps, Top Gun can take responsibility for generating high-quality leads or doing inside sales. This increases revenue without increasing headcount. Top Gun has its own lead data, works with clients on acquiring more lead lists, and can even accompany client reps to trade shows to maximize lead generation.

Top Gun’s inside salespeople can handle inbound calls and proactively make outbound calls. They can pass new leads and prospects to client salespeople or pursue them to close. All call data is entered in the client’s own CRM system. Osborne says his firm is practically alone in backing up these broad performance-improving services with a robust technology infrastructure.

If you’re interested in exploring sales-training options with Top Gun, contact Steve Osborne at sosborne@topgunhq.com or visit Top Gun Sales Performance at http://topgunhq.com/.

Top 3 Insights from the Richardson Sales Training Survey

Today’s post is by Meghan Steiner, Director of Marketing at Richardson Sales Training. Meghan manages all demand generation and sales enablement efforts within the organization with the goal of creating new business opportunities.

We recently published the Richardson 2016 Selling Challenges Study, based on responses from over 400 sales professionals. Here are three major highlights from the study.

Hurdles to Closing Deals

Survey question: In 2016, which of the following will be your most difficult challenge in closing a deal?

Results: An overwhelming 48% of respondents felt that competing against a low-cost provider was the toughest obstacle.

Analysis: When a prospect is focused solely on the sticker price of your offering, it’s often a sign they view your service as a commodity. One way sales teams can counter this thinking is to know the prospect’s business backwards and forwards. In a Forrester report, it was discovered that 73% of buyers do not believe salespeople are knowledgeable about the buyer’s business. If you are a knowledgeable seller, you become less of a price tag and more of a value-added partner.

Negotiating Deals

Survey question: Which of the following do you believe will be your toughest negotiation challenge?

Results: The leading response (from 29.2% of respondents) was “gaining higher prices.”

Analysis: If some clients are fixated on lowest price, then your selling strategy must use value as the counter argument to preserve pricing structures and margins. While most business partners are reasonable, there are those that will want something for nothing (or close to it). It's these "tough sells" that need to be taught the value of value, and shown how price does not translate to quality.

Selling Value

Survey question: In 2016, which of the following will be the most difficult to deal with in terms of managing an account?

• Finding ways to add relevant value for various stakeholders

• Balancing sales and relationship management

• Addressing problems and complaints

Results: Of the three responses listed above, more than 27% of respondents felt that finding ways to add relevant value for various stakeholders was the most important concern.

Analysis: Based on this and the two preceding survey questions, it’s clear that sales professionals are concerned with combatting low pricing with added value and how to work with clients who only see dollar signs as the primary closing prerequisite.

How to Improve Negotiations and Sales Conversations

What can sales teams do to improve negotiations and sales conversations to overcome these common challenges? Here are two recommendations.

1) Involve Key Stakeholders Early

Richardson has noticed a trend of procurement and financial stakeholders entering the sales conversation in the final stages. These folks tend to look past all the emotion of the sale and stare right at the dollar signs. The sooner your sales team can involve key stakeholders in the sales conversation, the better.

2) Expand Current Client Relationships

A Bain & Company survey found that it costs six-to-seven times more to acquire new clients than to retain an existing one. Richardson has noticed a trend in more sales people migrating from solely a sales role into a hybrid of sales and account management. Positioning your sales people in a role where they can add value to current clients on a recurring basis means better retention and opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. Start asking yourself, what can provide your team with information on prospects and make them stand out on sales calls and in day to day client management?

Richardson’s study presents important data straight from the sales professional’s perspective on what challenges the coming year holds. Though the solutions will ultimately be your own, it is reassuring to know that obstacles such as low pricing and creating value are not unique to your own market niche, but are endemic to the entire sales industry.

Download the entire report here.

Six Reasons You Should Include Simulations in Your Sales Hiring and Training Processes

Today’s post is by John C. Kolencik, who has been conducting business simulations for client companies for more than 20 years. His company, Matrix Impact (http://www.matriximpact.com), focuses on increasing clients’ sales revenue an average of 42 percent by finding the best people, training them, and providing high-producing lead generation.

Organizations are only as strong as the people who work for it. That makes people your most precious resource. It also makes the hiring, assessment, and development of A-Players critical best practices in any company. Nobody wants to make a mistake in hiring or promoting. So why is it one of the most under-taught, under-improved processes in all of business?   

One of the best ways to improve your hiring, assessment, and development of A-Players is the use of simulations, but fewer than 2 percent of all businesses use them – and it is a mystery to me. What this stat screams is that, when simulations are utilized correctly, you can differentiate your business from at least 98 percent of your competition.  

I mean, nobody would buy a car without taking it for a test drive, nor would an airline hire pilots unless they could prove – in a flight simulator – that they were competent. So why choose to hire or promote someone without seeing their true ability to perform required business tasks with your own eyes?

Here are the six reasons simulations should be an integral part of any hiring, promotion, and training processes.   

#1: The 5:1 Ratio

A mis-hire/promote costs the company 5 times the candidate’s annual compensation (e.g., a $50,000 salary costs the company $250,000).

With training, it’s just as easy to see the ROI. A business parable for you:

CEO said to the CFO: “We have to train our people to get better.”

CFO says: “But what if we invest time and money to train them and they leave us to go to our competitor?”

CEO shoots back: “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

Whether it is a mis-hire or a less-than-adequately-trained employee, the impact on client relations, revenue, productivity, supervision time, and morale is negative – and it is huge.

#2: The Power of Proof

Have you ever had an interview where the person told you they couldn’t do the job? Or have you ever had a person who “stretched” their abilities in the interview and, as a result, you were cleaning their messes for days, weeks, or months after?

A best practice simulation provides you “point-to-point correspondence” with the job. When the activities found in the simulation are a replica of activities required on the job, you get an accurate portrayal of skill level.

This is also why simulations are critical to training. Do you really want salespeople “practicing” on customers? Of course you don’t! General George Patton once said, “The more my troops sweat in peacetime, the less they bleed during combat.” Simulations are a must in all continual development.

Reason #3: How They Handle the Debrief

Once they perform in the simulation, how do they respond to constructive criticism? Are they thin-skinned? Do they gloat? Is their self-confidence warranted? Many times, you find out the best and the worst of people by observing how they handle coaching.

It also opens a window to know how they learn best. Through the debrief, you will discover what they will and won’t respond to. This can be invaluable as you continue to train and develop your team.

Reason #4: Go to the Video

When recorded, simulations help reduce – if not remove – bias and subjectivity in the hiring process in one big  way: “The eye in the sky does not lie.” You don’t want a he-said/she-said situation in any business scenario, but especially in simulations.

Here’s a great example of the benefit of recording simulations: A hiring manager who got a “good hit” off a candidate in an interview might get a completely different feeling after watching a recorded simulation. The candidate might be the most charming person in the world, but, when the time came, he didn’t have the skills he had trumpeted. In any business, that is a disaster averted.

Recorded simulations are irreplaceable in training as well. There is nothing better than being able to go back and review specific areas for either praise or correction. Plus, reviewing with individuals their recorded progress or regression is a very powerful training tool.

Reason #5: Onboarding

Even if somebody is an A-Player, it does not mean he or she is perfect. Too many onboarding programs fail to adapt to the candidate, thus slowing the speed to effectiveness of the new hire.

Simulations don’t just weed out bad candidates. They also help assess a good candidate’s specific strengths and weaknesses in a hyper-accurate way. This allows you to design/implement an onboarding process to speed them to productivity. Not to mention, it helps in offer decisions such as salary negotiations.    

Reason #6: Positioning Your Company as the Best

The War for Talent is upon us and there are only so many A-Players out there. The mistake most organizations make is purposefully making the hiring process easier out of fear of losing the candidate.

Thomas Payne said, “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.” Being with the best requires paying the price. Candidates learn respect for the position and respect for the company by seeing how seriously the company takes the hiring process. The best candidates don’t want to be with some company that just rolls over. Remember: Everybody wants to belong to The Club that is impossible to get in.

87 percent of people who voluntarily (i.e., quit) leave a company do so because of a lack of growth and development opportunity. It’s human nature to want to improve, develop new skills, succeed, and advance. If you have good people, make them better. Use simulations to continually train and develop your team. And you know what they call the company with the top employees…they call that company the best!

Andy Grove, the Intel visionary, said, “The most important charge a good manager owns is the responsibility to continuously train his/her employees.” When you add in the training component, you have three areas where you can either irreparably damage or exponentially advance your most precious resource.  

To ensure you are hiring A-Players – and for training to be both impactful and “sticky” – you have to closely tie how things are actually done in your organization to any evaluation and development of personnel. This is why simulations are such a critical management tool.

How to Get Better Sales Results Consistently

Today's blog post is by Bob Sanders. He currently serves as President and CEO of AXIOM Sales Force Development. He has more than twenty five-years experience in sales, sales management, and marketing. He is dedicated to elevating the sales profession and delivering exceptional results for sales people, their customers and their companies. 

If you want a sustainable competitive advantage, it may be time to radically rethink the traditional approach to sales training. We are finding an increasing number of companies living on the front lines of a sales learning revolution and achieving lower turnover, faster ramp times, higher participation rates, and better overall performance. These spectacular results are being achieved by making learning a continuous part of the sales cadence and integrating learning, coaching, and selling tools into their CRM.

We all know the challenges with traditional sales training programs. Most can provide a small, short-lived spike in sales performance, but the overall impact and ROI of the investment is often suspect. However, the transformation of CRM systems, especially Salesforce.com – from contact, account, and opportunity management solutions to full sales effectiveness platforms – presents an opportunity for a radically new paradigm: the learning sales organization.

From our perspective, the learning sales organization differs from a traditional sales organization in the following ways:

• Classroom training is replaced largely by online learning that is available anywhere – any time salespeople want or need to learn.
• Sales managers play a significantly greater role in the development of their sellers. They leverage technology to help them better diagnose improvement opportunities and leverage the online learning to improve the skill and knowledge of their teams.
• Applications for opportunity management, account planning and management, and sales coaching are often embedded in Salesforce.com and drive learning application, methodology execution, and Salesforce.com adoption.
• Senior leaders set objectives for learning and coaching and integrate these performance metrics into their score cards.

A recent special report by Aberdeen helps highlight the impact this shift is having for best-in-class sales organizations.

Beyond improving sales performance, the continuously learning approach can help your company dramatically reduce their training expenses. One company we know well recently merged with another organization of nearly the same size – onboarding nearly 500 sellers and managers to their existing sales and coaching methodology without conducting any traditional training events! This saved the company an estimated $1,000,000 in travel and training expenses and dramatically reduced integration time.

Beyond the traditional metrics and improved CRM adoption, becoming a learning sales organization can transform your customer relationships. When learning is a matter of course rather than a sporadic event, sellers and managers develop the habit of continuous learning.  This habit will allow them to absorb and apply new information about your solutions and competitive intelligence more quickly and completely – making the entire organization more flexible and improving the sales ramp-up for new products. More importantly, however, by building their learning muscles, salespeople are able to engage with customers in a dramatically more effective way. Salespeople who have “learned to learn” build more authentic relationships with their customers, investing in understanding customers rather than constantly pitching the next product. Customers are better served, salespeople deliver better results, and relationships are stronger and more sustainable.

So where should you begin your journey to becoming a learning sales organization? As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Here are a couple of suggestions on how you can begin the transformation in small but meaningful ways:

1. Establish a common methodology for key selling activities, including opportunity management, account planning and management, and sales coaching. This should include an ideal model for engaging customers supported by well-defined skills.
2. Insist upon a plan for any training initiative that includes follow-up activities that will help cement the learning. See this blog post for more information on the learning cycle that necessitates the need for small, bite-sized learning activities followed by practice and application.
3. Implement a coaching solution. Sales leaders will have greater impact on the development of their teams than anything done by the training and development team.  Make sure your managers become great coaches by:
1. Setting meaningful goals and creating individualized sales success plans
2. Uncovering performance gaps before they impact sales results
3. Identifying the root cause of performance gaps
4. Defining corrective action in the form of learning, practice, and application activities that will shrink gaps
5. Measuring and evaluating coaching effectiveness across the organization
4. Integrate measures for sales coaching and learning into your senior leadership scorecard. Even if you are not fully equipped as a learning sales organization, adding measures for this will help ensure you continue to make incremental progress along your journey.
5. Celebrate learning and coaching. Once you start measuring this, be certain to celebrate it. Too often, leaders give far greater attention to what is wrong than what is right. As Frank Blake, former Home Depot CEO, has said, what you celebrate tells the organization what is important.

Should you need help with your initiative, or if you’re just looking to share ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at AXIOM. We’d be happy to assist you in any way we can.

 

Why Traditional Sales Training Is Broken - And How We Can Fix It

Today's post is by Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Allego.

 

 

In our digital world, traditional sales training and enablement techniques are broken. Salespeople simply can’t maximize their learning and retention of information when they’re brought into a conference room and pumped full of content they won’t use right away.

Research has shown that more than 60 percent of people are visual learners. In fact, we tend to process visuals 600,000 times faster than text. For younger business audiences, video is king. According to a Forbes Insight report, 30 percent of executives under the age of 40 indicated that they prefer video for reviewing business information.  

Historically, the technology to leverage video content has created bottlenecks for sales organizations. But, after two years of hard work honing the technology in the platform, Allego has formally announced the global launch of its mobile, just-in-time (JIT) sales learning platform, which successfully harnesses the power of video.

Allego’s solution securely manages large volumes of compressed video. This gives companies the ability to transform the way they create, collect, curate, and distribute content from the field. This enables managers and sales reps to maximize their collaboration through role-play and video-based practice, promoting continuous learning and improving sales performance.

We’re seeing that most organizations’ work forces are continually on the road. Allego was built mobile-first, so it can be easily accessed anywhere, anytime – with or without a network connection. With the power of video to communicate large amounts of information, Allego simplifies JIT learning and real-time collaboration so the best ideas from the field are captured and shared quickly throughout the broader sales team.

The platform also incorporates coaching and feedback, so sales managers can focus their attention on specific deals to ensure sales reps are prepared ahead of their meetings. Allego defines JIT learning as the combination of:

• just-in-time content

• practice

• assignments

• field knowledge

• collaboration

• traditional certification and live training.

There’s currently no other platform available that offers this combination of these components.

Mary Charles, sales enablement director at Demandware, has said that the Allego platform has “completely transformed” their global approach to sales training and enablement. Demandware has found the platform to be a critical asset in onboarding new hires and helping them ramp up faster – executing sales certification and enabling representatives in the field to quickly and easily share best practices, success stories, and winning strategies wherever they’re doing business. They’ve seen more effective collaboration across the team and more consistent messaging.

The Demandware experience validates the need for an easy-to-use, video-optimized solution that enables sharing, collaboration, practice, and feedback among distributed sales teams.

A New Way to Think About ROI on Sales Training

Today's post is by Jason Jordan, a founding partner of Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm, and co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code. Jordan is a recognized thought leader in the domain of B2B sales and teaches sales and sales management at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. 

Sales trainers have long been challenged to demonstrate a return on investment for their efforts.  Return on Investment (ROI) is a fairly straightforward calculation derived from two key numbers – the upfront investment and the eventual return. Divide the return by the investment, and, hopefully, a big number appears.

It’s fair to say that demonstrating ROI has been an ongoing challenge for sales management training and development teams, because the “return” portion is so difficult to measure. It’s easy to determine the “I” because the investment (or, as some like to think of it, the expense) is a known dollar amount that is budgeted and spent. Not accounting for other soft costs like internal company time and resources, this number is easily quantified and very apparent. No problems with the “I”. The “R” in “returns,” however.... 

What’s the Real Return on Sales Training?

Correlating specific returns with a particular sales management training investment is a bit of a challenge. First, there is the fact that the “R” can take a while to appear. Sales teams tend to want instant gratification; but that’s not how training works. It takes time for behaviors and skills to change – and even longer for them to demonstrably affect sales performance. Lengthy sales cycles may push the incremental returns well into the future, when the training is a distant memory and the budget long since spent.

A second challenge is even more difficult, though – the desire to measure the “R” in increased sales revenue. The investment is clearly a financial measure, so why shouldn’t the return be, too? It certainly could be…but, in our experience, it’s a hard case to make.

It’s a hard case to make because many elements affect revenue growth. For example: your products, your customers, the economy, the competition. Not to mention the fact that everyone – from product managers to the CEO – will try to take credit that their initiatives and activities increased sales.  

How can we know for sure that increased revenue was the direct outcome of a specific sales management training program? That’s a tough fight. And you could be fighting over credit for revenue for a long, long time.

So we believe the best strategy is not to fight over credit for increased revenue. In fact, we think revenue is the wrong “R” to use for determining the impact of sales management training. There are other ways to measure the impact of sales training that are more direct and apparent.

Three Metrics that Show ROI on Sales Training

If you’ve read our book Cracking the Sales Management Code, viewed our webinars, or generally engaged with Vantage Point in any fashion, you’ve probably been exposed to our ROA metrics framework revealed in our 2008-2010 research effort. Stated simply, we found that there are three levels of metrics that sales forces measure:

1. Business Results, like revenue, market share, and other things that are the outcome of many different influences
2. Sales Objectives, like new customer acquisitions, deal win rates, customer retention, and other goals the sales force is asked to accomplish
3. Sales Activities, like making sales calls, completing account plans, and (of course) attending training

One key insight from the research was that there are causal relationships between these different metrics. For instance, if I make more prospecting calls (an Activity), I should win more new customers (an Objective), and that should lead to more revenue (a Result). Or, if I do better account planning (an Activity), then I should retain more of my customers (an Objective), and I should maintain or grow my revenue (a Result).

So here’s where we think there is an opportunity for sales trainers to make a better case for the impact they are having on sales performance. In our opinion, trying to measure the impact of training (an Activity) on revenue (a Result) is too much of a leap. More specifically, it’s a leap right over the Sales Objectives that are more directly influenced by the changed salesperson behaviors that training creates.

Tracking a Sales Objective: Increased Close Rates

Let me give you an example. One of our major clients hired us to work with their sales managers to improve a very specific performance indicator. Was it to increase their revenue? Nope. It was to increase their close rates. They wanted to win more deals (a Sales Objective). Could we train their sales managers in such a way that close rates on new opportunities increased? Of course we could…and we did. Did that lead to increased revenue? Sure. But we didn’t have to fight over credit for that. We had increased the close rates – mission accomplished.

So aiming sales management training at a Sales Objective rather than a Business Result was a pretty smart strategy. It gave the sales trainers (in this case, us) something reasonable to accomplish: change certain behaviors that will directly affect a Sales Objective. We can design training to help reps cross-sell products. Or win new customers. Or grow existing accounts. The activities and behaviors that align with those Objectives are fairly apparent – much more apparent than “increase revenue.”

Now you understand why we propose that the return on sales management training not be measured in terms of revenue. We think the “R” should be measured in Sales Objectives that can be directly influenced by altered selling behaviors. Focusing on Sales Objectives provides a more direct target for the sales force and its trainers. And having a target you can assuredly hit is a very comforting thing.

How to Lead a "Mindset" Transition with Your Salespeople

Today's guest post is by Nick Rini, CEO of Selleration. Selleration combines 3D avatar role plays with predictive analytics to provide sales managers with actionable insight into the performance and productivity of their teams. 

Sales leaders are constantly leading our sales organizations through various transitions to address customer needs, navigate market conditions, overcome pricing pressures, and outdo the competition. Almost every one of those transitions requires a change in behavior to break habits and establish new ones that support your mission.

Whether we’re trying to improve customer satisfaction scores or get our salespeople to sell higher in the customer org chart, behavior change is the key factor to success.

So, how do sales leaders typically go about changing behavior? We usually start with sales training. We offer a stick, a contest, or a financial incentive. Too often, though, we employ the worst tactic of all – the dreaded mandate – to encourage change. We ignore the need for reinforcement. Then, we get disappointing results. We find that the training didn’t stick beyond the time it takes to walk from the training room to a salesperson’s BMW.

Why does this happen? Because we’ve missed the point! We give our troops training, incentives, and warnings to change their behavior, but we don’t change their thinking about the mission. We don’t compel them to adopt the mission and own the results.

So how do you really achieve behavior change? 

The answer is simple. Mindset Transformation (MT). Mindset Transformation is the process of changing the way people think about and view the mission. It’s the epiphany (or the “aha” moment) that causes us to make drastic behavior changes – like quitting smoking/drinking or committing to a weight-loss regimen. Because the urge to change comes from within rather than an external source (for example, incentives, rewards, punishments, etc.) we’re more empowered when we align our behaviors with the results we want.

How does sales training complement MT? Sales training is informational and great for addressing the questions that begin with “How do I..?” By contrast, MT is about answering questions that start with “Why should I…?” 

There are many ways to facilitate MT. Elements of MT include visualization, learning by doing, and understanding: 1) how we fit in the big picture, 2) how important a role each of us plays in accomplishing the mission, and 3) what’s in it for us. Sometimes it’s a matter of helping people understand how easy something is to accomplish. I’ve accomplished MT with games and simulations by putting salespeople in real-world selling situations where they understand the power and importance they have. We put reinforcement components in place as well to keep them on track. An approach to performing MT is as follows.

1. Communicating mission – Call a team meeting to inform them about the mission. Invite them to ask questions and share their thoughts about how to accomplish the mission.

2. Understanding mindset baseline – Ask your team members to share their perceptions of the mission, company and management. This helps  identify how those perceptions might manifest as challenges and obstacles that could affect the mission. Know that your team may communicate a wide variety of frustrations and fears – some may not be related to the mission. It’s important to hear them out on each and every point.  As you guide them through this process, weed out elements that are irrelevant to the mission. (You can always commit to addressing frustrations that do not relate to the mission at a separate time.)

3. Engaging – Have your team develop the plan that will accomplish the mission. They have to be the ones to lay out the goals, the end results, and the steps required to achieve the desired results. This is where they begin to take ownership of the mission and results. They will likely tell you why it’s impossible or difficult. You need to understand why they believe this can’t be done. It will likely boil down to some things you have to address – like access to information or a resource to make prequalifying calls. At this point, you need to commit to, and possibly explain, how you will address their concerns that would otherwise hinder their ability to accomplish the mission. Your commitment to participate in the removal of obstacles – whether it’s red tape or some other issue – is either a deal breaker or a deal maker. If you’re not able to do this for them, they’re not likely to commit.

4. Obtaining “Buy-in” – Ask the team for their commitment. “Can we get this done?” “Are you confident we can meet the goals we have here?” You may need to reiterate your commitment to removing the obstacles they have identified. You should challenge them as well. Ask them, “What will keep this from happening as we’ve laid it out in this plan?” You’ll know immediately whether they’re committed and feel they own the mission. If not, you’ve missed something important. Go back to step 2 and repeat that process, follow with step 3, and then move on to step 4 until you have garnered the commitment of the team. 

5. Reinforcing and tracking – Ask the team to develop a plan for how you will track progress and reinforce the behavior desired. This is essential to succeeding. Maybe create a spreadsheet that contains milestones and dates you can use as checkpoints.    

Empowering your team to do their jobs by removing red tape; giving them the tools, authority, autonomy, incentives, and support they need to accomplish the mission; and clearing the way for success will foster MT. 

By the way, your top performers naturally have a different mindset than the rest of the pack. That’s the primary reason they tend to succeed – usually independently. You might take some time to understand what makes them tick, but it will be enlightening and could help you identify skills and behaviors that help transform the mindset of other reps!