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 [...]

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 [...]

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 Wrong With Articles Containing Sales Tips?

How many sales people do you think regularly seek out tips about selling on websites, in magazines, books, newsletters, etc.?  We have not done any research on this (if someone has, let me know), but I would expect the answer is: “a lot.”
What’s wrong with it?  Same answer: a lot.
Here’s why.  Many salespeople think that [...]