How Do You Fix Sales Ineffectiveness?

What’s going on here?

Sales training has been around for more than 100 years.  Yet every year, new approaches appear with the promise of being “The Silver Bullet.”  Old approaches—even those that are relevant to fixing the proble—are labeled “old-school,” and rejected.
On Amazon.com there are 29, 469 books under the category of “How to Sell.”  In [...]

Why Industry Analysts are Sales Tools

I received my regular opt-in email from BNET this afternoon.  The subject was, “Discussion: Why Industry Analysts are Sales Tools.”
Hey, I thought, that looks like it would be interesting!  So I open the message and I see this link: Industry Analysts… from an Analyst.
Now this really looks interesting.  So I click.  Turns out it’s [...]

ESR’s 2008 Sales Training Arena

Each year ESR publishes its annual Sales Training Vendor Guide.
The 2008 Guide, which was published last December, compares and contrasts 19 leading sales training providers across many different capabilities such as depth and breadth of offering, program effectiveness, educational design, available customization, post-program reinforcement, learning technology support and measurement.
Although the 2008 Guide came in at [...]

Baker Communications: Getting The Learning Job Done

I recently had an enlightening conversation with Walter Rogers (CEO) and Lawne Gerhardt (VP of Global Sales) at Baker Communications.  ES Research hasn’t covered Baker because they weren’t a pure sales training play—sales training content makes up about half of their broad array of course offerings.  You might not have heard of Baker.  Even Walter admits they’ve been [...]

Complimentary Sales Performance Optimization Report Offer

Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer, our colleagues over at CSO Insights, are currently in the process of launching their 15th annual Sales Performance Optimization study, the past results from which have been regularly featured in Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Entrepreneur Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Inc., CRM Magazine, etc.  We at ES Research have also presented some of [...]

Your Least Credible Point of Customer Contact

Last week I wrote a post about the panel I was on with Bill Friend.  I referenced my colleague Olin Thompson.  Olin is somewhat of a genius when it comes to sales and marketing strategy.  At the present time he is VP of Strategy at Lawson Software. 
For a number of years Olin ran the “Credibility Forum” for [...]

Should You Trust Sponsored Research?

I wrote a post a while back about white papers.  I said, “In most cases, white papers are marketing documents rather than the unbiased analyses they appear to be.”
The same can be said for a subset of marketing collateral labeled “Sponsored Research.”
There are three prominent flavors of non-academic, sponsored research:

Legitimate sponsored research.  A corporation (or more than one) [...]

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 [...]

What’s The Deal With Industry Analysts? (Part 1)

Too many companies (especially SMEs–small to medium-size enterprises) have either no formal analyst relations function or one that is managed by someone who is not qualified for the job. An approach like that leaves those companies unprepared for the ongoing and very competitive battles for positioning that take place within some industries.
How a company manages [...]