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 “Sales Techniques” there are 11, 194.
• I’m personally tracking 80 blogs about selling.  There are many more.  Dozens provide solid advice.
• There are several hundred sales training firms ESR is aware of, yet there is no single one or two that dominate, as you would see in any other industry.
• In 2008, U.S. corporations spent around $6 billion on sales performance improvement, yet sales productivity (pre-recession) was down.
• The number of free webinars focused on improving sales capabilities is at an all-time high, and increasing.  So are free articles, eBooks and white papers.
• Reports, statistics, surveys, research and opinion related to sales ineffectiveness are abound.  Here are just a few sources: CSO Insights, Forrester, Sirius Decisions, The Sales Executive Council, Selling Power, Sales and Marketing Management magazine, most of the major sales training companies, and of course, ESR.  You can find anything you need to know about the subject among these sources.
• There continue to be emerging movements with value propositions focused on sales performance improvement.  The latest is Sales 2.0.  Add the new online social media to the list.
• There is no shortage of associations and groups focused on sales performance: SMT (The Professional Society for Sales & Marketing Training), ASTD’s Sales Training Drivers, UPSA, SAMA (focused on Strategic Account Management, an advanced selling discipline), SMEI, The Sales Management Association, USEF (The University Sales Education Foundation), and a dozen or more groups on LinkedIn.

What’s my point?  The root causes of sales ineffectiveness are clear.   There is plenty of sound advice about how to fix the problem.   There is a proven path.  The answers are there for everyone to see.   There are companies you can read about and observe that have achieved sales excellence.

So, recession aside, why is sales as a profession and function, losing ground?

Let me know your thoughts, please.

Photo credit: © dragon_fang – Fotolia.com

Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer, our colleagues over at CSO Insights, are currently in the process of launching their 15^th 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 their key findings in our articles.  In fact, we have a feature article in the November/December issue of Sales and Marketing Management magazine, where we make specific recommendations based upon the results of their current report.

As we feel this information is very valuable to sales and marketing executives, we would like to invite you to take part in the CSO Insights new survey and in return be able to tap into the insights of your peers to optimize the performance of your organization when the new 200+ page report is published in January, 2009.

In appreciation for taking part in this study, you will:

• Be able to access CSO Insights’ new reports on Sales 2.0: Hype, Hope, or Happening upon completing the survey.
• Receive the 2008 Lead Generation Optimization report; highlighting the areas where companies are achieving the best ROI from their lead generation investments, sent to your email address.
• Receive a complimentary copy the full 2009 Sales Performance Optimization report from CSO Insights when it is released early next year.

To take part in this project click on the following:  CSO Insights 2009 Sales Performance Study Link

Questions on this survey can be directed to Kim Cameron, Executive Director of Research, CSO Insights: kim.cameron@csoinsights.com.

Authentic and balanced insight or just plain propaganda?

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:

1. Legitimate sponsored research.  A corporation (or more than one) funds some or all of an independent research project.  The research is sound and not manipulated or skewed in any way.  The funding entity benefits by having a quality fulfillment piece to drive targeted visitors to their site.  The research firm gets their project funded and has that research distributed by a company with presumably a much larger audience. An example of this is Salesforce.com and Kadient’s sponsorship (along with other entities) of CSO Insight’s annual research report. 
   

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2. Sponsored research about a vendor.  A vendor pays a research firm to write a report that positions the vendor in an advantageous position versus their competitors.  Unfortunately this is a common practice in the IT industry and is growing in other industries as well. The problem, of course, is that the reader assumes that the research was done by an independent research organization, considers what is said in the report as fact, and then makes decisions based upon what they learned. 
   

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3. White papers positioned as research reports. The functions of a vendor-written white paper and a research report (presumed to be written by an independent authority) have been deliberately blended for the very purpose of manipulating the opinions of prospective buyers.  Take for example this page.  The URL is findwhitepapers.com. The title of the webpage is “Technology Research for Business Professionals.”  The heading on the page says “Popular Research Reports.”  I didn’t look at every page, but the ones I did have vendor-written white papers exclusively.  It’s self-serving propaganda.  Nothing more, nothing less. 

On the other hand, some firms won’t play the game.  Burton Group, a technology research firm has this on their site:

“Since our founding in 1990, we have not published vendor-sponsored research of any kind. We cover relevant vendors and products without regard for vendors’ subscription to our services. We maintain complete independence from vendor agendas, providing unbiased assessments of markets, vendors, and products…”

Several years ago, Forrester Research announced that they would no longer perform vendor-sponsored research. 

My warning to you:  If you are in the market for sales training, sales consulting, or technology-enabled selling tools, and you are reading whatever you can get your hands on to help with your decision, make sure you understand 1) who wrote the piece, 2) what they are selling, and most importantly, 3) if the information that is presented is independent of any vendor’s agenda.

(Full disclosure: My firm, ES Research Group, independently evaluates sales performance improvement programs and tools as well as the vendors that provide them.)

Help me through this logic, please.

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 with respect to CRM meeting the requirements of salespeople.  Help me through this logic, please: 

• CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, right? 
• Sales, Customer Care, Marketing and Finance managers all need their reports from the CRM system to do their jobs managing customers, right?
• Who inputs a fair amount, if not most of the data?  Salespeople, right? 
• They have to be prodded, threatened, incentivized and shamed into keeping their information up to date, right?
• Follow me on this, please.  If the salespeople don’t sell anything, there aren’t going to be customers and customer relationships for a CRM system to manage, right?
• So, why isn’t there anything in it for the salespeople?  In fact, don’t most of your salespeople use your company’s CRM system for little more than basic contact management? 
• So why does the task of keeping the CRM system up to date at the expense of their selling time make any sense at all? 
• Why don’t the CRM companies design systems help salespeople sell more?  Because salespeople aren’t their customers.  Management is.

What we need is more companies like White Springs and The TAS Group that understand the size and the impact of the CRM problem and are providing solutions.  And we also need CRM companies to start adding capabilities that will contribute to, rather than hinder, a sales person’s ability to sell.  When that happens I guess we should call it CRM 2.0.

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 these tips (almost all of them are tactics) are all they need to win.  Read enough articles and books and grab enough of these skills, they think, and they’ll never lose another deal.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that many of the hundreds of sales experts out there have something valuable to say.  (I certainly felt that way when I wrote How Winners Sell, as well as a hundred or so articles.)  Sure, some have copied what others have done before them and represented that as their own.  And sales tips that other so-called experts are writing or speaking about have been proved ineffective years ago.  But all in all, I’m not questioning the advice.  That’s not the issue.

My problem is that too many salespeople collect whichever of these tips they think might work.  If they try a tip once, and it doesn’t work, they’ll likely reject it—without giving themselves an opportunity to perfect that skill or technique.  I’ve coached enough reps over the years to tell you that this is normal behavior for a rep.  If something is out of their grasp in terms of understanding, or the investment of time involved is more than they are willing to make, they don’t pursue that tactic either.  Again, however misguided that behavior might be, it’s normal as well.

Only because I have such regard for Tony Parinello did I allow our researchers to use his million-seller book Selling to VITO in our “Range of Sales Performance Solutions and Programs” graphic from ESR’s 2008 Sales Training Vendor Guide.  Look at the chart above.  If the primary sources of learning for a rep are self-paced and tactical, they are likely not going to see the whole picture and, as a result, ever hope to become more strategic in their sales approach.  Tony positions himself as a tactician.  He and I have talked about that on a number of occasions.  Sales reps NEED tactics.  They’re required.  But just tactics alone won’t get them where they need to be.

How do I know I’m right on this issue?  Sales tips books and articles have been around for a generation, right?  So how come recent research (CSO Insights and Sales Benchmark Index, among others) agree that 40% of B2B sales people don’t make quota?  And, the companies that have a formal, institutionalized sales methodology consistently sell more effectively than those that don’t.  These are the facts.

So, if your salespeople swear by those valuable insights from the great sales experts, do your reps, your company, your customers and yourself, a favor. Integrate the best, most relevant tactics into an overall, documented sales approach, which must take into account how your customers buy and must include, among other critical components, a comprehensive assessment of your customer’s situation, a S.M.A.R.T. sales objective, appropriate strategies and then, and only then, those very tactics that sales people spend millions a year in bookstores to get.