Should You Spend Your Money On Sales 2.0 Or Sales Training?

Sales training is more than 100 years old.  With few exceptions, it’s not very sexy.  Many salespeople believe (PDF) they’ve been through enough of it to last a lifetime.  For many reasons, most of their managers don’t see any value, so they take a tactical, event-based approach just to check the “trained my people this [...]

Miller Heiman. What A Brand!

When it comes to marketing, Miller Heiman leads the pack.  I recently spoke with Elizabeth Vanneste, their Chief Marketing Officer. Elizabeth brought Miller Heiman into four telecommunications companies where she had previously worked. She joined the Miller Heiman team last June as a sales VP and took over marketing three months ago.
Elizabeth shared with me that [...]

Sales 2.0: Does It Enable Effective Selling Or Is It Yet Another Decoy?

As ESR continues to work with our clients, observe salespeople and research sales effectiveness, we’re frustrated and concerned with the increasing hype around Sales 2.0.
Is Sales 2.0 real?  Yes.  Are Sales 2.0 applications actually helping salespeople to win business? Yes.  There is no question about that.  But we believe in numbers significantly less than some [...]

Checklists: For Surgeons, Pilots and… Salespeople

I believe in checklists.  Clearly the medical community just got the message as well.  A study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine this week shows that adopting a surgical safety checklist (PDF) reduced deaths and complications by more than a third.  From the Wall Street Journal:
Researchers collected data on nearly 8,000 patients [...]

Strategic Account Management: It’s Not Just A Sales Job.

One of the top firms among the 26 sales performance improvement providers ESR covers is Performance Methods, Inc. (PMI).  Founder and managing partner Steve Andersen is recognized as a thought-leader in the demanding and often misunderstood area of strategic account management. (Listen to Steve in an ESR/Podcast.)
To understanding what a strategic account management methodology is [...]

New Year Resolutions For Sales Leaders

Pick one or more of the resolutions below.  Commit, execute, enjoy the results.

I’ll never hire another sales rep who can’t get the sales job done. First, completely understand the position and the skills and traits required to be successful.  Evaluating whether a candidate meets those requirements requires [...]

Embedded Sales Learning

Chris Hens, President and COO of White Springs, presented at the Richardson client forum last week.  The subject was in-context sales learning and reinforcement.
With a background in sales training, Chris has a deep understanding of the challenges companies face with respect to sales performance improvement.  White Springs has worked with Complex Sale, Holden, Huthwaite, Miller Heiman, ValuSelling [...]

Joe The Salesrep and CRM User Adoption

Lee Allgood, a colleague from my days consulting with ERP provider MAPICS, sent me an email referencing a March 2008 survey performed by Sand Hill Group and Neochange.
Although the survey looked at enterprise software success from the software company’s perspective, some of the findings resonate with what we know about process alignment and user adoption related [...]

Analysts Are Optimistic About CRM – I’m Not.

Ann All (with ITBusinessEdge.com) posted an entry in her blog today about the optimistic outlook for CRM sales.  She wrote, “Datamonitor, KensingtonHouse, CSO Insights and Gartner are among the companies with an optimistic outlook on CRM.”  She then added AMR Research to the list.
I won’t dispute the prediction. 
What I will say is that progress is painfully slow [...]

How Long Will It Take?

Quite often I get questions about how long it will take to complete various sales performance improvement interventions.  (It’s the business equivalent of, “Are we there yet?”)
I’ll answer some of those questions one by one before I philosophize:
Q: How long it does it take to get a sales team performing at quota (and remaining there…)?