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

There have been some interesting conversations taking place on The Customer Collective on the subject of the adoption of social media and the changes required in approach and skills for B2B salespeople.  If you’re interested in a little entertainment—snarking, social media-style—I would suggest looking at these two posts and more important the comment thread that follows: David Brock’s Why Do Sales People Have Such a Bad Reputation? and Axel Schultze’s Death of a sales man (sic).

Axel, a proponent of social media for B2B sales made a strong case for massive adoption, now.

What follows is my comment to Axel’s post in Death of a sales man.  There are a number of other comments to read, most of which make some good points.

I agree with many of your points.  I see things a bit differently … with respect to where some components of some sales peoples’ jobs are headed in the short term.  Technology, and more specifically, social media are playing a larger and larger role.  No argument from me there.  I know that as a researcher, as a business person, as a salesperson, and as a buyer!  I’m engaged.

Here, however, are some points for consideration:

• Some major market segments are today very, very far away from regular and widespread use of social media between buyers and sellers.  Industries such as industrial equipment, insurance, and some sub-sectors of health care have a long way to go.  There are other segments as well.  Government sales is in that category.  Those lagging industries and local, state and federal agencies, for the time being, are employing more traditional ways of learning about products and services—Web 1.0—looking at alternative vendors’ websites and discussions with salespeople and the experts they bring to the party.  Attempt to come at them through social media and you’ll likely find no one at the other end of the tweet.
• Certain modes of selling will lag significantly in the adoption of social media as a selling tool and capability.  As one example, the success of the strategic account manager (SAM) presently depends on many of the more traditional sales skills and capabilities to drive the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue they each bring to their companies each year.  Will that change?  Sure.  But not this week, this month, or maybe even this year.  If the seller tried to alter that relationship it would be very risky. [The premier source of intelligence on that discipline is SAMA: the Strategic Account Management Association.]

We can’t throw out all the old concepts, approaches and skills just yet.  Many billions of dollars of business will get done this year by sellers employing the skills taught by Miller Heiman, Wilson, Huthwaite, Holden, SPI, The Complex Sale, and the other larger as well as single-person firms. My firm studies those companies and has audited the performance improvement results that some of their clients have achieved.

I know there are many reading this that think that stuff is old and irrelevant.  I agree.  It is, but only in a minority of B2B selling situations.  Mainstream corporate and government sales success is still driven by overall compliance with a buyer-centric sales methodology.  I know some don’t want to hear that.  But the fact is this: research proves that compliance with many traditional sales best-practices is getting the job done for many companies.

So, if my points about social media being relevant to a relatively small piece of the B2B market are correct, we are potentially doing a real disservice to many sales people and managers by distracting them with representations that the whole world of selling is changing, now.

I would estimate that 80 to 90% of direct salespeople in B2B sales need to get better at the more traditional approaches to selling–for the time being. This is important:  There is significant room for improvement in sales performance through sales leaders adopting the best-practices of top-performing selling companies in areas other than social media.

Here’s the bottom line for me, Axel:  If a salesperson’s buyers have really embraced social media as a way to establish and build relationship with those who would provide them with valuable products and services, great.  Those companies do exist.  But in general, and regretfully for some I’m sure, we’re just not there yet.

Special favor: I’m really interested in your feedback on this subject.  If you’re a sales leader, would you please take this brief Kadient survey?  It will help us figure out what is really going on with respect to the use of social media in B2B sales.

Note: I suggest the reader peruse the comments to this post.  Wow!

One of the top firms among the 26 sales performance improvement providers ESR covers is Performance Methods, Inc. (PMI).  Founder and managing partner Steve Andersen is recognized as a thought-leader in the demanding and often misunderstood area of strategic account management. (Listen to Steve in an ESR/Podcast.)

To understanding what a strategic account management methodology is you’ve got to look at that old word “strategy.” Your salespeople are simply not going to be able to drive the kind of long-term, mutually profitable relationship with a customer by the seat of their pants, employing  tactics, tips and tricks.  Strategic account management is serious business.  In the U.K. I worked with a Hewlett-Packard SAM whose team of 40 HP account managers serviced a Europe-based global consumer package goods company.  Even your best heavy-hitter sales hunter would fall flat on their face in a business situation like that.  Believe me.

Over the years, ESR has recommended that some of our clients join The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) for the programs, resources, expertise and ability for their SAMs (strategic account managers) to network with other SAMs.  Steve Andersen is one of the experts that present regularly at SAMA events.

I posed a few questions to Steve as we come into this challenging new year:

Dave Stein: What actions are some of the more strategic of your clients taking during this economic crisis with respect to managing their strategic accounts?

Steve Andersen: Everyone knows that a supplier’s most important assets are their customers, but I continue to be surprised at how little some organizations are doing to become more strategic to their most strategic customers. Despite the economic downturn, many of our clients are investing in best practices that will position them to become more strategic to key customers through the deployment of advanced selling skills and the strategic account management efforts of their sales organization. We’re seeing a renewed commitment to understanding how important customers define value, sell, create and deliver this value, and then follow-up with customized metrics and measures that have meaning and significance to both the customer and the supplier. (Note: ESR audited and certified PMI’s sales performance improvement measurement methodology.)

DS: What are they doing in-house to weather the storm?

SA: Many of our clients are re-assessing their value propositions for their most strategic customers and are now deploying programs that will connect them more directly with what these customers value most. Other are expanding the level of field coaching that they expect from their first and second-level sales managers and equipping them to be more proactive with sales coaching best practices that will help them create value for their reps and salespeople ‘out on the street,  reducing rework in the process. We have several clients with travel restrictions going into effect for 2009, and we’re building customized, blended training and reinforcement programs for them (utilizing WebEx, Sales 2.0, Web 2.0/3D and Second Life technologies) to maintain the momentum of their current training initiatives, and in some cases, to launch new, “next level” initiatives. Other clients are planning to get more out of their investments in CRM solutions, and we’re working actively with them to technologically enable their sales best practices solutions to provide more value to the end-users.

DS: Do you see any new or innovative approaches in the area of strategic account management?

SA: Yes – many! So many, in fact, they PMI is offering a new “sales best practice” solution area to our clients that we refer to as “Innovate to Differentiate.”  Through our client work, we have had the good fortune to observe the best practices of some of the top account managers in the world and have documented and organized our findings in what we call the “Zones of Innovation.” When we observe an innovative best practice, particularly those that either create customer value, provide supplier competitive advantage/differentiation, or as is usually the case, both, we add this to the appropriate “Zone.” In a smaller 2009 market, we believe that innovative best practices can be the difference between winning and losing business, and of all of the innovative best practices that we’re observing, perhaps the “hottest” is planning collaboratively with strategic customers—our clients’ customers, that it.  It’s surprising to see just how much can be gained by simply changing the way that you engage with your customer so that the supplier is more aligned with their customer’s decision process.

DS: What are PMI’s prospects for 2009.

SA: 2008 was one of the most successful years in PMI’s history, and I believe that this was because of the type of value that we are creating for our clients. Much of our work is at the strategic customer/supplier level, as opposed to basic Sales 101—type training, and these types of projects are more important than ever in a down economy. To illustrate, we kicked-off a new client project in November with the SVP of Worldwide Sales taking center stage and informing the audience (his entire sales management team) that he could either “invest in the future” or shut-down all discretionary spending. He explained that his decision was the former and he made it quite clear that he expected them to do their part and win a “bigger piece of a smaller pie” in 2009. This client is deploying several of PMI’s SAM programs. This evaluation was quite competitive, with several vendors covered by ES Research in the mix, as well as an incumbent “strategy consultant.” With clients like this, we are forecasting another strong year in 2009.

Note: ESR has found that many sales training providers do not have specific methodology, curricula and content for strategic account management programs.  Yet, they try to convince their buyers that they do.  In 2009 ESR will target coverage of challenges and solutions around strategic account management and the providers that excel in that discipline. This is the first part in a series.

Disclosure: Performance Methods, Inc. subscribes to ESR’s research.

Photo credit: © Jason Branz – Fotolia.com

Any sales manager will tell you that negotiation is one of the required skills for success in sales. Yet few salespeople are equipped to go one-on-one with the increasingly experienced and tough corporate buyers and procurement managers whom they must negotiate with in order to make a sale.  For years I saw negotiation as a set of soft, tactical skills-verbal sparring, if you will-rather than the business process that it should be. Evidently I wasn’t alone. Earlier this year, SAMA (the Strategic Account Management Association) and Think! Inc., a consultancy specializing in strategic negotiation processes, recently completed a study that benchmarked the current state of negotiation against other professional skills and practices in the selling and account management disciplines.

Look at these statistics:

Eighty-three percent of the 361 respondents reported that they have no negotiation strategy, or merely an implied one. That is the likely cause behind the 80 percent of the respondents that said they see mounting irrational competitive behavior, such as drastic, last-minute lowering of prices or the giving away of free services.

Within the companies surveyed there were considerable discrepancies in how negotiation was seen. Executives were 77 percent more likely to view their decision-making authority as highly centralized, while sales people were 71 percent more likely to view it as somewhat or highly decentralized. Sales people and their corporate executives are clearly not reading from the same sheet of paper on this issue.

Brian Dietmeyer (podcast), CEO of Think! Inc., says that many companies have little agreement cross-functionally on what a successful negotiation should look like. Only when organizational silos are broken down and stakeholders are aligned around desired outcomes-margin protection, mitigation of legal risk, top line revenue, as examples-can a solid foundation for successful negotiation be built.

The study also showed that of the 50% of the respondents that attended traditional negotiation skills training, only 6.8 percent rated themselves as highly effective negotiators. Tactical negotiation training alone doesn’t get the job done in today’s highly competitive selling environment. If sales people don’t know what outcomes they are negotiating to, the companies for which they work won’t achieve their objectives.

Think! Inc’s approach integrates negotiation with a company’s sales process so that negotiation is managed strategically starting at the discovery phase of the sales cycle. Integration of negotiation into the sales process has other benefits as well, including knowing what is important to the customer and what isn’t so that trading can be leveraged. The study revealed that 79 percent of respondents said occasionally or do not effectively trade for customer demands. In most cases, they just give value away. Dietmeyer says that when negotiation is integrated with an effective selling methodology, there is no longer any reason for a sales person to get rocked back on their heels when a purchasing executive says their competition is offering what they are-at 20 percent less.

Going head-to-head against professional negotiators isn’t easy. If that is part of a sales person’s job, then it is our responsibility to provide them with a proven and effective approach and the associated training for them to be successful.

Regarding this redefinition of negotiation… Count me as one of the converted.

By the way, Brian emailed me a link for a new piece about negotiating myths.  It’s really worth reading.

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…