I’ve delivered lots of webinars over the years, working with all the well-know providers and others as well.  With only two exceptions where the audio was lost for all the participants, I’ve had very good experiences.  That’s not by accident.  My content is always relevant to the audience, I rehearse, I’m facile with the technology, I understand the medium, and I always use a checklist to make certain I don’t forget something.

I’ve delivered a few webinars with Boston Conferencing.  They really impressed me with their professionalism, the quality of the technology, and their turnkey approach.  In fact, I’ve got a webinar coming up with FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group on Wednesday, March 11, 1:00 pm ET — Strategies For Getting Your Customers Through the Financial Crisis. (Disclosure: I’ll be delivering a webinar for pay with Boston Conferencing in July.)

So in these times of reduced travel, I asked Boston Conferencing President, Dave Will, to help us make better use of this medium.

Dave Will: Actually the biggest change has not been with the technology as much as with the integration into day to day business processes. A decade ago, very few organizations outside of the technology sector were using web conferencing. Even 2 – 3 years ago we found that a lot of organizations were still trying to identify if webinars were a worthwhile marketing/training tool. Now webinars are a line item in the budget. The decision has been made and the vast majority of organizations have incorporated them into their business. The question has changed from “should we do it” to “when and how do we get it done.” It is no longer a competitive advantage to run webinars. It’s a “must-have” in order to keep up.

But to answer the question more directly, web conferencing technology is doing a better job of streaming video and audio over the internet. It’s also come a long way in providing simple one-click entry to events. Webinars and Web Conferencing are no longer for the tech companies or the geeks. It’s a common tool in all organizations. One more change is that there are tons of small unknown software tools in the market that may or may not be good for business use. What has not changed is that the major “industrial-strength” conferencing tools are still Microsoft LiveMeeting and WebEx.

DW: Naturally, organizations are looking for ways to reduce travel. Web conferencing is an alternative. Although web conferencing will never replace the value of face-to-face meetings, it’s a nice supplement and business is learning to incorporate it into their processes more effectively. For instance, Wal-Mart suppliers are meeting with their buyers more virtually now than they have in the past. Traditionally, suppliers would fly to Bentonville for a 60-minute meeting with their buyer. Although this does and should still happen, suppliers are supplementing their infrequent in person meetings with web conferences to discuss sales plans.

Organizations are also starting to decentralize their training. Rather than bringing their sales team back to HQ for training on sales tools or processes, they are rolling out live training via webinar. For example, many associations conduct professional development programs in person at conferences. With the restrictions on travel, attendance to these conferences has decreased and associations are responding by offering more live online webinars.

Also, given the revenue needs of associations and other training organizations, they are looking towards their virtual conferencing and distance learning as an opportunity to sell more sponsorship and bring in additional revenue from “virtual exhibits.” Many organizations are using this technology as a profit-center in this challenging economy.

There are a lot of social media technologies that are going to help create a nice “blended learning” environment. Second Life has led the way on the consumer side of simulated worlds. We’ve seen some organizations play with ways to incorporate Second Life into their marketing and professional development, but we are seeing more business oriented tools emerge providing more relevant functionality. An example of the Virtual Trade Show, which is the corporate version of Second Life is Unisfair.

Virtual trade show technologies usually incorporate all kinds of media into the simulated world including webinars, webcasts, podcasts, forums, downloads, chats, etc… So with that in mind, the virtual world technologies will actually increase the overall volume of webinars. More importantly, the virtual world create an environment to house several different content delivery mediums which will only help organize content better for consumers and business to absorb.

The trend we are seeing is organizations getting away from one single medium and moving toward blended solutions. For example, if you were to search iTunes for “Sales Forecasting” you would see all kinds of resources including books, music, podcasts, PDFs, etc.

DW: The answer to this question could make up a book, so I’ll highlight just a few of the things we see that can affect the presentation the most:

• The audio quality – this is very important. Most speakers want to feel comfortable and therefore often use a speaker phone. We strongly discourage this as the success of the event is determined by the attendee’s experience, NOT the presenters.
• Pre-event preparation – there are a lot of factors for presenters to think about before the webinar: Do you know how to change the slides, annotate on the slides, how to handle questions, what polling questions to ask? Have you given thought to how you’re going to engage the audience?
• Think of some “seed questions” – Most webinars incorporate some Q&A at the end of the event. In some cases a shy audience can be embarrassing for the presenter. So if the presenter thinks of some questions in advance the moderator can ask those questions first which often times will jumpstart the audience and get them asking real questions.
• Backup plans – with technology there are so many things that can go wrong. Have a backup plan for the following:
  • Missing presenters
  • Teleconference breakdown
  • Web conference technology breakdown
  • Network or computer failure or power outage
• Simplicity and Relevance – Most presenters create very heavy presentation decks with way too much information. Remember this when you’re creating your slides: the deck is there to support your words. Use pictures. Keep the slides simple and graphical in nature. Also keep the content relevant and provide practical information the attendees can use after the webinar. One common complaint we hear from attendees is that the content was too high level and it was nothing they have not heard before.
• Take out the sales pitch – even if your event is a marketing or lead generation event, no one likes a sales pitch. Always think in terms of education. People attend webinars to learn, not to buy.This is a production – think about the logistics. Will the lines be muted? Will the attendees hear music while they’re waiting for the conference to begin? Are you communicating the login procedures well for the attendees? Has the registration process been managed well? Is the conference being recorded? How will you follow-up with the registrants?

DW: Of course the best practices speak directly to the big mistakes presenters make but these are the mistakes we see most often:

• Presenter forgets how to change the slides
• Presenter forgets to take their phone off of mute at some point
• Presenter does not utilize annotation tools or polling questions to engage the audience
• Presenter uses a speakerphone
• The slides are too detailed
• The content is not detailed enough

DW: Boston Conferencing is a webinar production services company. WebEx is a software company. We do not compete with WebEx. Boston Conferencing delivers webinars from beginning to end for our clients so they don’t need to worry about the technology, the registration process, the communications, the payment processing for fee based event, the presenter preparation, or the logistics.  Our job is to take the weight of all the logistics and administration off our clients shoulders so they can focus on the content of the event. We take ownership and accountability for the success of a customer’s webinar program.

Photo credit:  (c) 2008 Dave Stein — Boston from 7000 feet
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Donate $25 or more to the human rights charity Witness.org, email your receipt to me,
and I’ll send you the full-size jpg of this photo.  dave.stein @ ESResearch.com
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ESR has a unique perspective on sales performance improvement. We don’t deliver sales training or sales consulting. We’re sales training industry observers, analysts, researchers and advisors to our clients on what works in sales effectiveness and training.

Here’s what’s been going on at ESR:

• A large client in the financial services sector is working very hard to keep their sales opportunities from coming down to price.  That tendency is considerably worse right now than it’s been in previous years.  They have superior service, a stellar reputation, a world-class team, enviable financial viability, and other significant customer-focused advantages. But in many situations, it’s a challenge to get the customer to acknowledge the direct link from all those capabilities to measurable business value for them.  The client is becoming considerably better a competing, employing advanced selling skills, strategies and tactics for overcoming price disadvantage, when it exists.  Even though demand is up, commoditization is the biggest challenge.  All in all, a challenging year.  I believe they’ll get through this pretty well, with everything considered.
• A smaller client is facing other challenges.  They are doing well at demand creation.  A strong marketing function is serving the sales team well.  However, they’re facing the all-too-common 80/20 situation.  The 20% of the reps that are bringing in the deals are top quality.  The company has to make a move to redeploy the reps who can’t be trained and coached into a higher level of sales productivity.  Also, the company is relatively process deficient.  They possess a single, high-level Powerpoint slide that represents their selling process, but it is in no way sufficient to drive consistent performance across an entire sales team.  The good news is that a strong management team is determined to overcome the challenges they have.  We’re working with the CEO who will be driving the transition to a more effective sales capability.  They aren’t looking for shortcuts.
• One Fortune 500 company is coaching us through creation of a collaborative proposal for ESR to perform an assessment of their global sales approach and capabilities.  That will result in an RFP and a vendor evaluation and selection process.  They need to transition from the commodity approach they employ now to a more collaborative and consultative relationships with customers.  They are seeking a long-term sales training/consulting partner.  We are delighted that they are taking a strategic approach to sales effectiveness. They aren’t looking for shortcuts either.
• Another Fortune 25 is in an enviable position with regard to the stimulus package and Obama’s strong energy initiatives.  They want to make the most out of this situation.  We’re providing guidance to them on the right approach for re-engineering their sales processes as well as in selecting a training partner.  They’ll only have one chance to get this right, and they know it.  No shortcuts here either.
• ESR is working with a leading sales training company, surveying the effectiveness of social media in B2B selling.  I’ll provide a link to the short survey soon.
• ESR has been investigating and evaluating the use of virtual worlds—mainly Second Life—for training and strategic account management among some very large corporations.  Anders Gronstedt is the expert in this area when applied to sales effectiveness and training.  We’ll be reporting on Second Life in March.
• Having suffered through a number of delays, ESR’s Sales Training Vendor Guide, Third Edition will be published.  Right now, I’m the bottleneck.
• Within a week ESR will be publishing a research update on Sales 2.0.  I’ve been writing about this subject a lot on this blog.  I’m very concerned about all the hype around Sales 2.0 and that it is distracting many companies from doing the right things to improve sales effectiveness.  Al Case, our Principal Analyst, performed the research and is authoring the reports.  I’m certain they’ll be enlightening because we’re unbiased, objective and don’t have any Sales 2.0 products or services to sell you.
• We’re working with a few trainers looking to sell or license their IP.  At the same time we are in discussions with several entrepreneurs looking to invest, in one form or another, in sales training IP.  Lots of phone calls and a bit of match making.
• We’ve got a number of events coming up:
  • FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group — Wed, March 11, 1:00 pm ET — Strategies For Getting Your Customers Through the Financial Crisis A webinar.
  • The TAS Group — April 8th — Time and subject to be announced for this webinar.
  • Callidus Software — June 26 — Sales 2.0: How to Realize the Full Potential Value – A webinar.
  • Boston Conferencing — July 30 — Hiring Salesreps and Managers That Get The Job Done A paid webinar.
  • We’re presenting at ASTD’s ICE conference May 31 to June 3: How to Measure Sales Performance Improvement
  • I’ll be keynoting at SMT’s annual conference October 14-16
  • Assorted presentations at different internal company events…
• Lots more going on, including a new ESR website, new value for our subscribers, and a few new, exciting initiatives.

We at ESR are fortunate, at least for the moment.  We see opportunity.  Our clients need our guidance.  So long was we can directly contribute to them getting through these tough economic times, they’ll be OK and therefore we will as well.

Photo credit: © Stephen Coburn – Fotolia.com

Last July I was honored to be sent a final draft of Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig’s revised and expanded edition of Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play.

Mahan and Randy are key members of FranklinCovey’s sales performance practice.  (Here is a podcast interview I did with Mahan.)

What is immediately significant about this book is its extreme richness—the product of four concurrent layers of considerable substance.

First, and perhaps the most important, is the underlying, immutable philosophy of seeking and handling the truth—the truth about our clients, our solutions, our sales opportunities, and the truth about ourselves.

The next layer is methodology. This is not like many books about selling, which are compendia of random tips and tricks. Here Mahan and Randy lay out the case for process and then employ one of their own to transport us efficiently through their content.

Then the “What you have to do” is layered throughout—clear, unambiguous guidance that takes us through the most difficult challenges we face as sellers.

Finally, the “How”—the words your client will say and how you might respond, powerful graphics that represent new concepts, and detailed checklists are examples.

Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play isn’t for the casual, opportunistic skill-and tip-skimmer who PLAYS at sales. It’s for those who need to get REAL about selling.

I highly recommend this book.

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 170 pages, the ESR/Arena (right) was, for many, the highlight of the report.  With appropriate deference to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, we designed the ESR/Arena to provide a quick, graphical perspective for those who would read the report.

We released a standalone copy of the ESR/Arena early in 2008. We found that some buyers of sales training were leaning toward making decisions about vendor selection based solely upon a single glance at the Arena.  We’re certainly delighted that they have that degree of trust in us, but that is precisely the wrong way to go about such a critical decision.

Selecting the right sales training company—the right way—is a process.  There are no shortcuts.  The foundation, and most critical component of the process, is a comprehensive assessment of the selling company’s situation.  I’m not talking about a quick, “The reps need training in cold-calling,” or “They need to get higher in the customer’s organization.”  Hundreds of millions of dollars a year are wasted on training based upon such short-sighted and matter-of-fact statements.  I know.  Performing postmortems on failed sales training interventions is part of what we do at ESR.  And now is a really bad time to spend money getting your people trained only to find that there has been no measurable improvement.

Now that I’ve offered that disclaimer you can take a look at the 2008 ESR/Arena. (Click on the graphic for full size.)  There are a few things for you to keep in mind:

• This graphic is a year old.  A number of vendors have gone through changes during the past year.
• There are eight additional vendors that ESR has included in our coverage that are not represented in the 2008 ESR/Arena.  (Here is a complete list.)
• There are literally hundreds of other training firms, from one person to many, that could very well be the right one to meet your company’s training requirements.  Your perfect partner may very well not even be on this chart.
• No single vendor that ESR covers is right for every company.  It’s your job, not theirs to make sure you’ve selected the right one.

ESR’s 2009 Sales Training Vendor Guide will be published early in the year.  It will include 26 vendors and considerably more information about training programs, CRM integration, Sales 2.0 technology, and other critical capabilities than previous Guides.

I’ve been writing about measuring the impact of sales training for a while.  ESR published a report on the subject.  We know from our research that there is little to no measurement taking place—not by most sales trainers and not by their clients and customers.  This is one of the factors that is preventing the degree of sales performance improvement we should be seeing, based on the $6 billion or so a year that is being invested in sales training in the U.S. 

Opinions differ on the subject of measuring the impact of sales training.  For example, Charlie Green (Trusted Advisor Associates) is a sales expert whose work I respect and appreciate.  He wrote a post with a strong opinion that we should stop measuring ROI on soft skills training.  Although I agree with some of his points in the post, there are others with which I don’t agree.  Charlie writes:

“But what if I take one course in trust, and another in listening. Suppose my sales go up next year by 50%. Which course did it? Or did my company’s 70% growth have something to do with it? Or my happy new marriage? Too many variables.”

With the right measurement system in place—simple, few metrics, easily implemented and managed—one can, with considerable accuracy, determine the impact of both the program in trust and the other in listening. 

Enter Making the Number: How to Use Sales Benchmarking to Drive Performance by Greg Alexander, Aaron Bartels and Mike Drapeau, of Sales Benchmark Index.

Although we have different business models, ESR and SBI are quite aligned in our philosophies.  We both know that sales managers, as a whole, think of sales more as an art than a science.  And that gut instinct has no place in decision-making.  On the positive side, we both know that collecting, analyzing, and using the right data about sales team performance, in the right way, can make a substantial difference in sales effectiveness.

If you’re a sales manager who has decided that now is the time you are going to start running your sales operation more like a business, Making the Number is a terrific place to start.  But let me warn you.  It’s not a silver-bullet-of-the-week book.  Not by a long-shot.  This is serious, but powerful stuff. 

Greg, Mike and Aaron take the reader (presumably a sales manager or someone whose success in their job is based upon sales productivity, like a Sales Ops director) through pretty much all you need to know about sales benchmarking with a detailed and logical step-by-step process. 

The authors provide an insightful list of common objections to sales benchmarking, including “sales benchmarking is a fad,” “it isn’t worth the emotional cost,” “and it won’t really work.”  In fact the best counter to the “it won’t really work” objection is their case studies: Netsuite, Discover Financial Services, FranklinCovey, Covad Communications and Smart Modular Technologies.  If you’re skeptical, you might want to start reading the book there, and when you’re convinced that this is all real and doable, skip to the beginning.

I like this book.  I like what it represents—taking sales management more seriously, and what it can deliver—a proven path to measurable and ongoing sales performance improvement.

Disclosure:   SBI and ESR have an informal business relationship whereby we have each referred business to the other.

Note: This post replaces the one published earlier.

During the past several months there have been significant changes at FranklinCovey.  In May the company sold off its Consumer Solutions Business Unit.  The company is now focused on global consulting and training in the areas of strategy execution, customer loyalty, leadership and individual effectiveness.

The Sales Performance Group (SPG) has been reorganized into a fairly typical practice area.  ESR subscribers will remember that SPG earned one of the two top leadership positions among the 19 sales training providers evaluated in the 2008 Sales Training Vendor Guide.  (We will continue coverage in our upcoming 2009 Guide.)

SPG has a team of very talented and committed individuals.  Since 2006, when ESR began covering SPG, we felt that the group was underfunded (and underappreciated) by the FranklinCovey organization.  We scratched our heads wondering why that company-within-a-company wasn’t able to leverage the FranklinCovey brand.  That was our observation—not anything specifically conveyed to us by SPG. 

I spoke today with the Covey’s senior leadership team.  They were enthusiastic about the sales performance practice’s prospects going forward.  They described FranklinCovey’s broad restructuring of the business into practice areas. It makes a lot of sense.

The sales performance practice (formerly SPG) is transitioning into the mainstream of the company.  Their sales performance solutions will be sold through the FranklinCovey salesforce worldwide. (There are 70 sales people in the U.S.—plus twice as many internationally, counting partners.  That’s a hefty sales force as compared to many of the other players.) 

As I understand FranklinCovey’s new approach, I see the end customer benefitting.  They will now have a salesperson calling on them with a portfolio of solutions to potentially address multiple challenges and opportunities, rather than just one.  Those salespeople will have practice specialists available as resources and backup during the sales effort.

FranklinCovey is serious about growing their sales effectiveness practice.  They’ll be investing in marketing and in the specific areas of development that ESR has highlighted as critical for a sales performance improvement provider to meet the requirements of their customers going forward. 

SPG was underleveraged.  Now, after this restructuring, the sales effectiveness practice has an already-effective distribution system.  With a brand-new marketing budget and funding for product development, they are determined to keep their position in the upper right-hand corner of ESR’s Sales Training Arena.

Quiz: Name one professional athelete that doesn't have a coach.

Coaching is the component of a sales effectiveness initiative that is most often sacrificed when costs must be contained.  (More accurately, coaching workshops and post-program reinforcement for first-line sales managers are what gets cut.)  Considering that coaching is the most important single mechanism for reinforcing and sustaining the impact of learning, this is a big problem. 

During a podcast interview I recorded Tuesday with Barry Trailer, partner with CSO Insights, the subject of coaching came up.  Barry feels as strongly about the subject as I do.  He considers getting a coach to be the first step on the path to sales mastery.  Both Barry and I have had coaches during our careers.  We agreed that if a salesperson is serious about selling as a lifetime career, then hiring a coach on their own, if their company won’t provide one, is mandatory.

Coaching is a skill.  It can be learned. The impact of coaching on an individual salesrep’s performance can and should be measured.  In my view coaching is a required capability for a sales manager.  It’s right up there in importance with hiring.  HR Chally’s The 2007 Chally World Class Sales Excellence Research Report  states, “World class sales forces implement processes and measurements to make coaching a top priority.”

We rarely see effective coaching in the companies we have worked with.  There are a number of reasons for that: 

• Managers don’t have coaching skills when they are hired and their companies don’t provide training and coaching for coaches, so they are never trained on the skill.
  

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• Managers don’t understand the impact coaching has on performance, so they don’t pursue it.
  

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• Managers are unable to extricate themselves from a selling role to that of an observer and coach.  There are two major reasons for this:  First, some of their salespeople are unable to win a deal on their own so the manager takes over. The other reason is ego.
  

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• The comment we get most often from first-line managers is, ”I’m too busy to coach.”  It’s the old, “I don’t have time for you to show me your word processing software because I’m too busy changing the ribbon on my typewriter, plus I need to go out and by some more White-Out.”
  

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• Managers don’t know what to coach to.  Coaching to the manager’s individual and personal selling style is NOT the answer. 
  

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• The company doesn’t have a process in place to inspect what sales personnel are doing.
  

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• There are no methods or guidelines for changing salesreps’ behavior.
  

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• There are no performance standards for each step of their sales process, if there is a sales process at all. 

Some of the sales training companies ESR covers have very strong coaching processes and coursework.  Richardson, Performance Methods, Wilson Learning, The Complex Sale, The Brooks Group, and FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group are just a few.