To My Loyal and Valued Followers:

Effective immediately, I’ve moved my blog over to a new domain:  http://DaveSteinsBlog.ESResearch.com.  I will no longer be posting on this URL.

Please take a moment to update your RSS feedreader.   Any of you with email subscriptions will automatically be transferred.

As I continue blogging, I’ll continue to provide you with the best that I have to give.  I need to ask a favor or two in return:

• If you’re a blogger, update your blogroll with my new URL.
• Help me get the word out.  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Groups.  You’ve got your own list.  I know I’m going to have a setback in my meager blog ranking, but would like to minimize it.

Thanks!

This is way off topic for me, but I decided to share this with you.

The other day I received a message from a Stephie Atta:

With Respect, I am Stephie Atta the Only Daugther of late Atta Mamadou. Before the sudden death of my father, he secretly told me that he has a sum of US$6.5M. I will require your assistance in receiving the funds in your account in your country. I will gladly give you 15% of the total sum for your assistance. Awaiting your urgent reply. Regards, Stephie Atta. Note: please reply to my private e-mail box below: (stephie.atta2008@ymail.com )

You’ve seen these before.  I get several a week, every week.

Last autumn I became riveted to a story entitled The Enforcers on the publicly-funded radio show This American Life.  I hesitated putting a reference to the story up on this blog.  But I guess I was pushed over the edge by yet another attempt at scamming me.

Here’s the description of the story from the radio program’s website:

Three guys who go by the names Professor So and So, Jojobean and YeaWhatever spend part of each day running elaborate cons on Internet scammers. They consider themselves enforcers of justice, even after they send a man 1400 miles from home, to the least safe place they can bait him: the border of Darfur. The three self-made enforcers tell Ira their story. (29 and 1/2 minutes)

In short, Ira Glass tells the story of how some “baiters” returned a con on one of the  email con men.

The outcome of this story isn’t pretty.  In fact, I felt the enforcers carried this too way far.  But you may have a different opinion.

Photo credit: © Andrea Danti – Fotolia.com

Private pilots regularly—and legally—fly up and down “the Hudson River Corridor” below New York City airspace.  I’ve done it 25 times.  My friend shot this video from the passenger seat of my Cessna.  I was flying north, approaching the George Washington Bridge at 900 feet, the same altitude that the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 was flying when he passed the bridge.  He was flying south, both engines having failed, knowing he had to ditch his airplane.  He did a miraculous job.

Here’s another post about a question everyone asks when they find out someone is a private pilot.

Finally, I have a post coming about checklists and salespeople.  Stay tuned.

A Peaceful Winter Day

Lambert’s Cove Beach, West Tisbury, MA

———————————————————

If you possibly can, please donate something to:

Save the Children or the ASPCA or the charity of your choice.

Photo credit:  © 2008 — Dave Stein

I don’t mean my blog’s website, although I hope you’ll bookmark that as well.

What I’m talking about is AllMyFavs, a website my friend Larry Berk of Bohoy Design forwarded to me.

I clicked on a few of the links.  Apparently some, like BestBuy, are tagged so the “AllMyFavs” people get click through credit.  Others, like WordPress and NOAA, aren’t tagged.  Free ride!

Anyway, I thought this was a cool site built by some enterprising person, although other sites like www.CEOExpress.com did this a long time ago.

Sorry, no blog post today. 

It’s Election Day.

Come back tomorrow, please. 

Dave

Start by asking your salespeople, one at a time, this question:

Specifically, what can we do as a company, and you do as a unique resource, to get each of your current customers through this difficult economic period?

If they’re focused on anything else, maybe they’re focused on the wrong thing.

Am I right about this?

This blog will not become a platform for me to attack individuals (or companies, for that matter), even when they are dead wrong.  But everyone has a limit.  I reached mine today.   I’m genuinely looking for your opinion on how to handle the situation I’m about to describe.

I spend a lot of time learning, reading, thinking, pondering, strategizing, researching, and speaking with customers, sales executives, sales reps, sales trainers, and their clients and customers.  I never pirate anyone else’s content.  When I do discuss someone else’s content, during a speech, or in a seminar, I always provide the source.  That’s the professional (and legal) thing to do.  Other’s don’t take that approach.

I’ve written before about a well-known management consultant in Boston who has a website containing dozens of pirated articles, tools, and presentations. He removes the name of the person who actually created the content, along with any copyright information.  He’s got a few of my articles on his site.  He has a dozen or so other sales experts’ articles and tools on his site as well.  This person not only represents all this pirated content as his own, but refuses to remove it from his site. 

Here’s what happened today:  I got an email from a client whom ESR is assisting with a sales training company evaluation.  They received an email (below) from a well-known sales trainer and author who had been told that he was no longer in the running.  My client told me that as they read the email, they thought of me.  It’s no wonder. 

Try this:  Open up another browser window and bring up this newsletter I wrote in June 2006.  (I recently republished it in a slightly different form on this blog.)  You can compare the email sent to my client (below) to my copyrighted content in the newsletter.  In the newsletter, where prompted, click on the link to read the rest of the article. 

Here’s the email the sales trainer sent to my client:
 

From: Xxxx Yzzz [mailto:XYzzz@snnnnnn.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 1:23 PM
To: [VP of Sales of ESR's Client Company]
Cc: The two people responsible for the evaluation
Subject: Sales Training-Methodology

Hi [VP of Sales],

I had another conversion with your team regarding the need for adopting a sales training approach for the [your] sales organization. From my experience with taking three software companies’ [sic] public and developing  a training approach  that has been taught in ten countries with unsurpassed results, I thought I would offer a perspective you might value.

Sales professionals need and have the right to be educated, trained, motivated, and prepared to leave a training session with improved selling capabilities, no matter how much experience they have. The world we live in has changed, how business is done has changed, so it only makes sense that individuals and organizations consider how they need to change their sales approach

While [your company] is in the mode of cycling through /evaluating sales training vendors,  I believe  you are hoping to provide your team with a repeatable and successful sales approach they will use effectively and buy into.  This being the case you might want to rethink your notions about the big methodology programs.  Even though this might have served you well in the past, as you know a lot of things of changed lately.  In this market most companies are not going to benefit for years from a mostly rehashed big sales methodology class.  Let me be direct:  From my experience and from speaking with thousands of sales people worldwide, the “Big Methodology Sales Training” approach doesn’t really offer the reps what they want and need. 

I recently spoke with a colleague who is a partner in a tech consulting firm.  I know him from his past life as a sales rep.  He worked for big name technology companies and was consistently the top performer.  He is a sales heavy-hitter if there ever was one.

We were discussing sales training.  He said, “I can’t tell you how many sales training programs I’ve sat through, I’ve experienced every major methodology vendor.  The programs were too long, didn’t provide me with value, and frankly were an incredible waste of time.”  Here is what got me.  “I was offended that management would think so little of me to force me to sit through that.”  I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that exact same thing over the years, not to mention I experienced the same type of thing in my sales career. This is why 10 years ago I didn’t just buy a sales training methodology franchise and instead developed the [name of his sales training program].

Do sales professionals need sales training? Sure. Most will admit they do. But the training they need has to provide them with almost immediate business value–it’s go to help them do a couple of things–sell more immediately and offer an approach they can buy into and use over and over again. In general ‘methodology sales vendors typically violate the sales professional’s code on many levels.

Here’s are some of the violations:  [From this point on, it was just a cut & paste.]

• Being trained by someone who hasn’t been in the field selling for years.
• Being trained by someone who doesn’t know anything about how your buyers buy.
• Being trained by someone who clearly doesn’t understand how tough your competitors are.
• Being trained by someone who is more focused on entertaining you than helping you get your job done, so they get good marks on the post-program evaluation.
• Being trained by someone who tells you what to do, but not how to do it.
• Being trained by someone who lectures every moment without the necessary balance which would include workshops, exercises, discussions, debates, etc.
• Forced to sit in a training class where 80% of what you learn is irrelevant to you, even though it may be to some of the people in the program.
• Being trained on a skill or a process only to find out after the program that the tools are too cumbersome to use.
•  Being trained by a person whom you don’t respect and who doesn’t have the track record your team will respect.
• Spending three days in a class where you’ve gotten an hour of value.
• Coming out of a class confused about what to do next.
• Not having an integrated program for services.  
• Not taking time to understand how you sell currently.
• Not relating to the people in the class.
• Training the same methodology they used and trained 5, 10, or even 20 years ago.

There are more but these are all things to seriously think about.

Why is this going on?

When violations like this happen, there is generally plenty of blame to pass around.  But the blame rarely falls in the lap of the sales professional.  As I said your team has the right to be educated, trained, motivated, and prepared to leave the training session with improved selling capabilities, no matter how much experience they have. They have the responsibility of walking into a training program with an open mind, ready and willing to learn, share their experiences, and to do what it takes to elevate themselves to get to the next level of sales performance.  They do not have the responsibility of having their time wasted and their experience and intelligence insulted.

Here are some possible explanations:

•  Sales management want  to do “something” so they invest in a big methodology training that will only truly be used if forced on the team..  [The trainer inserted a few bullets in my list to support his incorrect assertion.]
• Sales management didn’t have their training requirements match the sales people on the front lines who are responsible for putting the wood on the fire.  They have quotas and want help to exceed their numbers. When there is a heterogeneous sales team, for example experienced and new reps, or reps who sell different types of products into different markets, there is a big challenge.  A big one.  If it is not managed properly, the program will be irrelevant to half the audience half the time.
• There is weak buy in to the foundation of the methodology and related processes /measurements because the team doesn’t see how it will immediately impact their results, so the training has no foundation.  It’s just a bunch of unrelated skills.  Some of those may help win some business, but in the long term, they won’t amount to much. 
• The sales training vendor did not provide a competent facilitator that could relate to the group with a track record of unsurpassed sales success.
• The training program content was not relevant to the team’s current pipeline of prospects or issues they are facing.  It may have come off-the-shelf, or have been designed for customers in another industry.
• The content may have been relevant, but it was not delivered to you in a way that would promote learning.
• Training the sales force was a strategy but was really needed as skills training with the tactics of how to succeed.

 To the Point [ESR has been using "To the Point" in all our content since we started the company.  This is the smoking gun!]

Getting sales training right can be a challenge and confusing. If you have the sales team applying the right skills that meet today’s market conditions everyone wins.  I have found methodology sales training takes a pretty generic approach like training someone to answer a support call or balance the books.  Many companies try, but get it all wrong. 

You might consider offering [your] sales teams the skills they need to improve their results as a first step. The [trainer's program] training offers a solid skills training that certainly could be augmented at a later date if you deemed that to be a requirement.  Frankly I think you will find the skills, the approach, the culture change, the integration to other parts of the company, and the gained results to be very satisfying and you won’t need to go any further. All I can tell you, better let him tell you, [name of executive] at [well-known company] had no sale methodology- completely has embraced [trainer's sales methodology] and last quarter attributes [$x] of additional business to the approach. There are others that can share similar results. They too thought perhaps having a big methodology vendor was the right first step but then happily learned skills training showed much more results.

I hope you don’t find this email too assertive but I felt strongly about some the things I heard you are considering and wanted to at least share my perspective and years of experience for your benefit. Please let me know if you would like to discuss this. I would very much like to be a big part of the [client's company name] solution and help your team.

Best Regards,
Xxxx Yzzzzz
Trainer’s website
Office: xxx-xxx-xxxx
Cell:    xxx-xxx-xxxx 

You wouldn’t believe how up to speed the people in Ireland are about our presidential election.  At every turn during my two weeks there, I was questioned about my opinion and provided with a healthy dose of informed advice in return. 

I’m tired of talking about the Clinton-Obama contest, so I’m not going to offer a post-mortem on Hillary’s campaign.   

What I’ll do instead is direct you to Mark Penn’s Op-Ed piece yesterday in the NY Times.  (Penn is CEO of Burson-Marsteller and President of Penn, Schoen and Berland. He was Hillary’s chief strategist until April, when he left following a meeting with representative of the Colombian government to promote a free trade deal that Clinton said she opposed.)

This probably should be categorized as “humorous,” except I’m pretty sure Penn is serious.

Personally, I think this is his way of reminding Hillary that she still owes him a few million…