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.

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 

I recently noticed a schedule of public training classes to be run by SPI (Sales Performance International).  I wrote an email to Tim Sullivan, a director at the company.  Tim is a well-respected thought leader in the sales performance improvement industry (and writes the Selling Geek blog, which is on my illumio feed list). 

My email to Tim:

Hi Tim,  I have a question for you. I’m gathering my thoughts about a blog posting on public sales training programs. SPI offers public training courses.

I believe that SPI and ESR agree that sales training doesn’t return much for a company without relevant and underlying business process change and transformation.  If that’s the case, how do you at SPI justify individual or groups of sales people attending a public training program?
[...] Dave

Tim’s response (a downloadable PDF) is well worth reading.  SPI has accumulated some enlightening intelligence around the various applications for, and impact of, their public sales training programs. 

As you can see from my message, I came into this email exchange with a bias against public programs.  I’ve got a different view now. 

Here are a few important take-aways about public training programs:

1. Some companies using a sales performance improvement provider’s methodology use public programs to bring new hires up to speed.  Of course the public program isn’t customized, so it won’t be a perfect fit. With that in mind, the public program can serve the new hire and the company well until the next internal training event.
2. Other companies use the public programs as a refresher for selected sales people.  Again, the public program isn’t customized to the specific environment the sales person is working in, but there is still some value.
3. Tim and I do agree that the maximum results from sales training occur when it is a component of a total business transformation and sales performance improvement initiative.

Let me know your experiences and thoughts about public sales training programs.

I want to share with you some more of my recent experience and related opinions regarding sales training vendors and RFPs.*  (See my May 23rd post about RFPs.  If you haven’t read it and are interested in how sales training vendors—arguably world-class experts in managing RFP response strategies—reacted to one RFP, you should.) 

Before I go into where they generally fall down when responding to our clients’ RFPs, you should know that most of the vendors that ESR targets for our clients’ long lists respond quickly and competently.  They’re a pleasure to work with.

What transpired and my opinion:

• One vendor said to me, “If we can’t set the decision criteria, we don’t want to play.”  I understand the thought process here.  They don’t want to be column fodder in some vendor evaluation spreadsheet, where the winner has already been decided and it isn’t them.  Here’s the way I see it: They can’t meet the decision criteria and are doing their best to employ a (way too early and mishandled) flanking strategy.  There is another point: It’s an insult to a prospect who has invested considerable time and money in a requirements definition and RFP to have a vendor refuse to believe it was done above board, objectively and fairly. 
  

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• Another vendor—one with a leading brand—arbitrarily copied and pasted content from their website into the RFP response.  I wish I could share with you the document our client received.  You wouldn’t believe how unprofessional this came across.  Our client was appalled. There was absolutely no correlation between what an RFP question was and the vendor’s pasted response.  In this case, a salesrep was probably responsible for the RFP response and corporate made the mistake of entrusting this person with representing that company. 
  

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• One vendor’s proposal that resulted from another RFP had fees and costs that were so high, we thought they had made a mistake. I got a phone call from our client who shared with me the fees he was quote for rebuilding their sales process and customizing training material.  I literally almost fell off my chair.  My client felt that the vendor was attempting to take advantage of them since they’re quite large, with a significant global operation.  That’s not something you want a significant sales prospect to feel about you.  I called the CEO of vendor’s company and related what had transpired.  The vendor recovered, but I can only wonder what would have happened if I didn’t intervene.

Don’t conclude from this post that you shouldn’t go through the RFP process when evaluating sales training programs.  That would be a mistake.  My advice is this:  Take vendor evaluation and selection very, very seriously.  It’s so incredibly easy to get wrong, and your job literally depends on getting it right.   

*Disclosure: You probably know by now that my firm, ES Research Group, among other capabilities, assists companies in evaluating and selecting sales training companies as well as managing sales performance improvement initiatives.

Among other things, we work with companies in facilitating an understanding of their own sales performance improvement requirements as well as guiding them through the sales training vendor selection process where appropriate.  

One client of ours issued RFPs to a long list of six sales training vendors.  The RFP included significant sales process work, sales training and some sales enablement technology.  In the introduction to the RFP, our client stated that (1) no vendor had been involved in the creation of the RFP (in fact, ESR wrote it), nor (2) had the company spoken with any vendor.  In addition, the company stated that (3) from their perspective every vendor had an equal opportunity to win their business.  The company also assured the vendors to whom the RFP was sent that (4) this was a real opportunity, (5) there was a budget and (6) the CEO had committed to go forward according to the dates put forth in the RFP.  I personally sent emails to the CEOs of those six companies in advance of them receiving the RFP explaining those points and assuring them that (7) everything the client represented was fact.  Several of the training companies balked, saying they didn’t respond to blind RFPs, although I can’t see why, taking into account that degree of explanation. My team at ESR discussed this situation.  We feel strongly that the vendors that aren’t willing to respond in a situation like this are behind the curve adapting their own selling process to a legitimate customer buying process—in this case, the buying process of ESR’s client. Isn’t aligning your selling methodology with your customers’ buying methodologies a critical success factor in most sales performance improvement initiatives?

Of the vendors that did respond, three were selected for the short list.  It became clear right away that one vendor was ahead of the other two with respect to meeting the client’s requirements.  That vendor was selected and the engagement is now underway.

It has been pointed out to me that in the past I’ve been very vocal about salespeople not responding to blind RFPs without being granted access to the business owner of a project or initiative. That’s absolutely correct.  I still am, but this situation is very different.

Yesterday I interviewed Tom Roth (CEO) and Ed Emde (SVP) from Wilson Learning as part of my sales thought-leader podcast series.  (Click the tab at the top of the page to see the podcasts that we’ve already published.  They’re free!)

Every reputable sales trainer and training firm knows that a stand-alone training event doesn’t deliver in significant, long-term, sustainable value.  Tom quoted a study that found only 15% of what is learned in a classroom program is retained after 30 days.  ESR has performed research that validates this as well.

It’s the post-program learning reinforcement that extends the learning over months, quarters and years beyond the live training event.  And that’s what extends the performance improvement past the 30-, 60- or 90-day bump that we see with isolated training events.

Live training still plays a critical role in a strategic, sales performance improvement initiative.  But the live training event is only one of many integrated components required for success.

I get calls periodically from private equity fund managers and other investment bankers about the demographics of the sales training industry.  Journalists I speak with are interested in it as well. 

What’s so noteworthy?  The degree of fragmentation of the sales training industry.  It’s certainly not the most fragmented.  Law firms are considerably more so, for example, with Baker & McKenzie topping the list at 3,300 or so lawyers.  Here’s a fact: 50% of the 1.14 million lawyers in the U.S. are practicing alone.

With lawyers, your requirements will determine which lawyer (or law firm) best matches your requirements.  Certainly defending Microsoft against a $1.3 billion fine levied by the European Commission isn’t a job for your average storefront lawyer.  And you don’t need a $750 per hour senior partner to incorporate your sole proprietor sales training business.  The same goes for buying sales consulting and training.

Think about it, though.  You’ve got AchieveGlobal at $100 million or so (even though they aren’t a pure-play sales training company).  Wilson comes in at around $60 million.  When you study at the top 25, as I do, it doesn’t take long before you understand you’re down in the single-digit millions.  And you’ve got many hundreds of one- and two-person shops who may be doing business now and then with some of the Fortune 500.

There are no 800-lb. gorillas in the sales training industry. No vendor has claimed that space, although several are pushing hard in that direction. 

Why is this industry so fragmented?  Easy.  Low barrier to entry. You really don’t need much more than a few years in sales and one client to get you started.  I even get pitched to by sales trainers with no selling experience, if you can believe that.  What’s more interesting (or distressing) is they’re featured at conferences and written about in magazines and journals appealing to salespeople and their managers.  Since there is no standard of performance for a sales trainer like you have with a lawyer, their capabilities are all over the map.

There are sole practitioner sales trainers and consultants out there who do a terrific job.  I’ve worked with some, like Steve Waterhouse, and have heard about many more from their clients. Jill Konrath is another.  No, they can’t handle all the consulting and training requirements for a large multinational.  But they do deliver real value if you engage with the right one for a specific assignment.  On the other side of the coin, you can select the wrong brand name sales training company for a large assignment and watch them underdeliver, as some of them tend to do.

Buyers of sales performance improvement services, such as training, have to really understand their own requirements and be willing to think out of the box with respect to who will best match those requirements.  If you pick a person or firm just by name recognition, who you hired to do the training at your last job, who presented during the last webinar you happened to see, or who advertises regularly in SellingPower magazine you could be headed for a disaster.

Before I go any further, let me again state that there are a lot of effective, high value, ethical sales training companies out there.  They have long lists of customers who have managed to dramatically improve their teams’ sales performance.

Stealing

Let me dig a bit into a point I made in Part 1—the fact that some sales training companies steal content from their competitors.

At a SAMA conference a while back I sat in disbelief during a vendor presentation.  Nearly every slide was duplicated, verbatim, from another vendor whose content I was very familiar with.  What made matters worse is the presenter used the same anecdotes and examples to make his point as the founder of the other company from whom the content was pirated.  I know where it originated, since I had heard the founder of that other company use those same anecdotes and examples at least 10 years before.

What impact does this have on the sales training industry?  It can’t be good.  The content pirates could be little more than parrots—lip synching someone else’s ideas, strategies and approaches, without providing the process framework, tools and educational design for real learning.  Or, the most innovative vendors might decide that they don’t want to compete on innovation any longer.  That wouldn’t be good either.

What Versus How

You can slice and dice the sales training industry in numbers of ways: small versus large, a direct model versus franchisees/resellers, off-the-shelf versus customized.  Another view is skills- versus methodology-driven, and this one causes a lot of problems for unsuspecting customers.

Research has shown that sales training interventions fail for any number of reasons.  One is that the vendor over focuses on the “what” to do without providing very much on the “how” to do it.  There are a few reasons for that.  The vendor may have been so focused on methodology development that they haven’t developed the detailed content, coursework,  skills development mechanisms and post-program reinforcement to transform knowledge into capabilities.

In some cases, to differentiate themselves from their competitors, training companies developed advanced selling skills to the exclusion of “Sales 101.”  Again, the unsuspecting, customer who hasn’t done her homework, and has a team of relatively inexperienced reps, might wind up with a training disaster on her hands.

Substituting for John Smith is…

Here is one more thing to worry about.  You log on to a webinar given by a sales training company.  The presentation is flawless.  It’s motivating, perfectly paced, content rich, and even ends in a professional/subtle close, just like how you would like your salespeople to deliver it.  You call the company.  Set up a time to train your people (mistake right there).  The day comes and there is someone else in the front of the room at that Hilton near the airport.  That person isn’t close to being as charismatic, knowledgeable or credible.  Plus, it’s clear after 3 minutes that they’ve never worked in your industry and haven’t delivered this vendor’s program in quite a while, plus…    I can’t go on…  Too painful…

I’ve been on all sides of the sales training business:

• Class participant as a sales rep—many different programs over numbers of years;
• Buyer of sales training as a VP of sales;
• Buyer of sales management training;
• Inhouse sales trainer—my own content as well as a reseller for another company;
• Outsourced sales trainer—again, my own content as well as a reseller for another company;
• Author of best-selling sales book;
• And now, a sales training industry researcher and analyst.  In that role I speak with many large and small sales training company CEOs each week.  Some I have interviewed, with many more to come.  I see their proposals to prospects, their presentations, their training classes, and through our network of contacts, hear about their successes and failures.  I’m quite familiar with the business.

With that being said, here are some observations:

Sales Training Companies: The Good News

There are some absolutely terrific sales training companies out there, of all sizes.  Some are well-known and others are far below the radar screen of many who would search for a provider.  Here are just a few high-level points about what they do that delivers value to their customers. The best:

1. Operate with a high degree of integrity;
2. Invest in their products, services, clients and people.
3. Walk away from a opportunities where they and the customer won’t be successful;
4. Admit that they aren’t all things to all people;
5. Are short on hype, long on results.

Sales Training Companies: The Bad News

There are training companies whose approach and capabilities are flawed in one or more critical areas.  These shortcomings leave their customers and clients with less than optimal results:

1. They will pursue any opportunity, even where their capabilities don’t match customer requirements;
2. They push the products and services that provide the biggest margins, not the most value for the customer, such as filling classroom seats versus process work or post-program coaching;
3. They claim to do an impartial needs analysis or assessment, but only look for areas where they have solutions.  Think Maslow’s “If you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.”
4. They will claim that they customize their training, but do nothing more than a search and replace for “Company Name”;
5. They are not willing or able (or both) to present you with an ROI or at a minimum, customers of theirs that can speak to quantified benefits resulting from their programs. They will make statements such as, “We can’t be responsible for people over whom we have no control,” or “It’s impossible to measure the impact of sales training”;
6. They haven’t updated their intellectual property (“IP”) in years—perhaps decades!
7. They blatantly steal IP from their competitors.
8. Take shortcuts to convey the impression that they have certain capabilities.  Sales enablement technology is one example.

I’ve got more to say on this subject.  Come back for the next post in the series.

I was on the phone today with an associate from a private equity firm. 
He found ESR on the web and was interested in our opinion on a number of topics
as a foundation for his firm acquiring one or more sales training companies.  He
asked how sales training companies were generally doing during this
recession.  He pondered how a services-based company could weather these types
of economic downturns, correctly observing that it’s hard to find good talent
when the economy is strong and when there is a downturn, you run the risk of
having expensive, non-billable talent on the bench.  “Tough to grow a business
that way,” he said.

Next the comparison of training classes versus daily consulting came up.  I explained how sales training companies make significantly more margin from training classes than consulting.  In fact, many training companies only  do classroom training and are not at all interested in the assessment, methodology, process, customization, design, technology enablement, coaching and post-program support work that we believe is vital to a successful sales performance improvement intervention.  Why is that their approach? Margins!  A classroom day generates a lot more margin than a consulting day.  As a rule of thumb, a training day generates between 600 to 800% more margin than a consulting day. 

Companies that only offer out-of-the-box training rarely deliver the kind of long-term sustainable results that those that take the holist approach do.  The guys at Think, Inc! are proving that what was formerly considered a stand-along skill like negotiation really should be integrated with the client’s selling methodology.  As a result they have a consulting component, which they believe is required for success.

On the other end of the spectrum are companies that will not do any classroom
training unless it is part of a complete solution which would include the
components mentioned above.  Performance Methods is one.

There is another piece to this—non-classroom vendor-provided content, such as
e-learning modules, podcasts, remote coaching, opportunity management support
(White Springs, for example) and other web/software-based IP.  Vendor that
license this type of content to clients should be seeing highly profitable
business. 

What’s the point here?  You, the client, need to have the proper mix of consulting and classroom time as well as post-program support that will result in the greatest level of sustainable performance improvement for your team.  Don’t jump for what the training company proposes.  Don’t be willing to slash what’s required for success (like post-program coaching) because a vendor recommends it.  They may be willing to drop a less profitable but more important line item in your proposal because it suits them.