Earlier today I read a blog post from the ever-thought-provoking Dan Waldschmidt. If you care about your sales team, or maybe if you’re planning a sales training initiative for 2011, you should first read the entire post, but it begins like this …

Sales training is broken.

It’s dead.  Washed-up.

And we might be all the better if we helped give it a final push into the coffin.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I care deeply about this topic, and perhaps unsurprisingly I commented on the blog post. My comment is rather long and perhaps at times a little passionate, but it’s an important topic and, as ever, I tend to speak my mind.  I thought I’d share it here.

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My Response to “The Bullocks Behind Sales Training’ by Dan Waldschmidt

Dan, your premise is entirely true. You forgot to mention that companies spend $10Bn each year on sales training, and most of that investment is wasted. Now, it might seem strange that I’m agreeing with you given that I’m CEO of The TAS Group. But when I got into this business just a few years ago I was appalled by the level of negative ROI. Industry reports would suggest that after just 30 days sales training results in only 13% retention of what was taught. Yep, that’s 87c in every dollar wasted.

We are now achieving 93% retention after 12 months.

I got into this business to fix the fundamental problem of negative ROI; to fundamentally change the approach and to deliver long-term customer value. We thought a lot about why it was so broken, why the latest 7-step methodology, color-coded sheet, or sales-tips library, was no longer lasting than the Heimlich maneouvre, and a lot less effective.

We looked at why sales people – in contrast to their peers in other professions – did not apply consistent proven best practice. I’m an engineer, and I know that there are engineering principles that always need to be applied – otherwise the bridge will fall or the software application won’t work. When I practiced as an engineer (a long-time ago) I used the engineering methodology because I could see how it helped me and it was not difficult to use. That reward/effort equation is not solved by the traditional sales training approach.

The problem with traditional sales training is two-fold. It is as you say about a mindset change. To extend my engineering analogy – I should care if the bridge will fail because people will die, but I also need my theodolite and my CAD system to keep me within the guardrails of effective practice. These tools have embedded best practice and supporting knowledge and intelligence that I as an engineer could not survive without.

As we sought to address the problem you so eloquently articulate, we built tools that help sales people to collaborate with their customers to help ensure that the customer gets what they need – not just what they want. We understand that the impact on a customer of a bad buying decision is always greater than the impact on a sales person of a lost deal, and that if the sales person’s ‘solution’ is not a good fit for the customer’s needs then the sales person should graciously withdraw. It’s better for everyone in the long-run. Our software platform (Dealmaker) supports that ideal and as a consequence our customers are more successful. We look at our customers through the eyes of their customers and help them to make their customers successful. That’s why we have customer retention rates of 93%.

The conversation you surface here is an important one, and one I enthusiastically welcome. Innovation has been lacking in this industry for 25 years and the consequence has been a cartel of mediocrity that serves no party well.

Our customers are excited about the intelligence we’ve built into our sales effectiveness software platform. They relish the automated deal coaching, they drool over the ease-of-use and how we solve the reward/effort equation. They embrace the embodied discipline and the consequence increase in their sales forecast accuracy. Most of all they value the results.

Some of my heretofore competitors have partnered with us to leverage our innovation investment to better serve their customers, because they too want to deliver sustained value and recognize that the old way just doesn’t work. They now compete with me at the high-end of the value chain and I welcome that, and would welcome others. Together we can raise the standard for all.

CRM vendors are also complicit in this morass of methodology mediocrity. Look into any CRM system today are see how many sales deals are forecasted to close in the past. As I write this, it’s August 21 2010, and I will guarantee you that nearly every CRM system (where Dealmaker has not been integrated) will have deals with forecast close dates in July and June. Good methodology integration can solve that problem, and not doing so is lazy and irresponsible. That’s what sales people waste 2 hours each week on average doing sales forecasts that are as real as a Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale.

Buyers of sales training too have a part to play in raising the bar. If they measure success by the number of hours people sit in a classroom then they will find plenty of providers will to service them. If they pay for mediocrity – that’s what they will get. If they consider instead the sustained transformative results they should demand, and then demand them from their providers, they will help solve the problem.

Thanks for calling out the bullocks.

Donal Daly
CEO, The TAS Group

This post is mainly for the non-quota carriers out there. Or maybe it’s for quota carriers looking for a little help from their friends!  We’re all in it together, right?

If you accept that nothing good happens until someone in your company sells something, then it might be worth your while thinking about how you help to make that happen.  This was how a CEO of one of our customers (I will call him Jim) explained to me how he gets everyone in his organization fully aligned and supportive of the sales organization.

Jim’s perspective was simple. He’d ask each of his employees to describe their value proposition to the sales team. Jim felt that unless each of his employees in marketing, product development, customer service, operations and finance, understood that at least part of their job was to support the sales team, then something was wrong; and the way that he would test it is that periodically he would ask each person to articulate his or her value proposition to the sales team as their customer.

I love the simplicity of Jim’s approach.  It’s an extension of the old saw ‘Everyone is in sales’ but applied in a practical way that gets everyone to understand why in fact that must be true.  So, I thought I’d try to extend Jim’s approach just a little bit. Before the sales person asks his colleague “Hey, what did you do for me lately?”, it might be worth calling out some of the areas where the sales team might need help.

[For the purpose of this post, I'm going to assume that the sales team is perfect .  Okay, you can get up of the floor now.  It wasn't that funny, really it wasn't.  But if I try to explore the foibles and inadequacies of how sales interacts with their colleagues .... that's for another day.]

Here instead I wanted to adopt the voice of the sales team, set out some hypothetical problems that many sales organization face, and ask my imaginary colleagues in Finance, Customer Service, Product Development and Marketing for their help. If any of the  issues mirror yours, then you might like to forward this blog post to your (non-sales) colleagues.  It might prompt some discussion,

• Voice of Sales to Finance: Please know that if I ask for approval on a discount, or special payment terms, it’s not because I don’t want make the effort to sell the value of our solution, but because I’m finding it difficult to get the buyer to accept our standard terms.  You could help me perhaps by working with me to develop a statement of ROI for my buyer that you would be happy to walk through with the customer.  And, on the special payment terms item, I’m not clear about what is important to you – total revenue, recognized revenue, cash-flow, or profit.  If you could help me understand your priorities, then I will manage my negotiations with the customer with your priorities in mind. You spend a lot of your time negotiating with vendors? You probably understand my customer’s financial statements better than I do?  How can you help me close more deals, at a higher margin?

Insert your answer here: ____________________________________

• Voice of Sales to Customer Service: I spend a lot of time finding and closing new customers.  I really care about each one of them.  I could ask you to not screw up the relationships that I’ve built – but that would be insulting, and I know you will not do that.  However, as you know selling more to an existing customer is sooo much easier (and profitable) than finding a new customer, so I need you to wow them.  If I’m setting inaccurate expectations – please tell me how you think I can do a better job.  I think what we do is awesome, and you guys are amazing, so sometimes I might get a little carried away.  So, what can you do to help me sell more to our existing customers, or ensure that each one of them wants to be a zealot reference for me?  How do we set the bar high, and then really exceed it?  How can you help me?

Insert your answer here: ____________________________________

• Voice of Sales to Product Development: Look, I know you want me just to sell what we have today.  You don’t like me asking for new features, or making promises to customers that you can’t live up to.  I’m cool with that.  I do think our products are the best in the market, but sometimes there might be a feature or two that the competition has that creates FUD, and I need to really understand deep down why we’ve chosen not to deliver that feature.  I know this might be marketing’s job to help me understand that – but your perspective would add value.  But you’re really smart.  You know why you’ve built the product the way you did, and I know you take a customer perspective, but can you please tell me how you can help me sell more?  What’s your value proposition to the sales team?

Insert your answer here: ____________________________________

• Voice of Sales to Marketing: Ok, we’re joined at the hip.  Some of my colleagues would say that the difference is ‘Sales is measured and marketing is not’ but that’s not my perspective.  I depend on you.  Here are my current challenges.  I don’t have enough opportunities.  I don’t mean leads, I mean opportunities.  I can’t get access to C-level executives. Is that me, or is it our messaging.  As you know, I’m doing ok YTD, but I’m worried about H2.  You done Trojan work putting all of the marketing materials on the marketing portal, but I’m not sure what to use or when to use it.  I’m not looking for a silver bullet (well, I am but …) but how can you help me solve these specific problems; more opportunities (not leads), C-level access, what marketing docs to use, and when to use them.  If these are my problems, what’s your value proposition to the sales team?

Insert your answer here: ____________________________________

*****

I’ve been thinking about this issue for quite a while, (in fact, we will shortly announce a new edition of Dealmaker that improves overall organizational alignment around sales) and I’m a firm believer that once (1) you get the whole organization aligned around sales, (2) and sales values that fact, and (3) everyone realizes that effective sales starts from the customer’s perspective – then you can achieve uncommon organizational productivity and velocity.  At The TAS Group, we call this rightful impatience, and I think it’s at the core of whatever success we achieve.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, particularly if you share it with your colleagues, I’d be really curious to know if it makes a difference.

When speaking to a chief procurement officer recently, we were reminded of how professional buyers have become. He had a very structured buying process. He invested heavily in educating his team how to handle vendors; counseling never to build too close a relationship with the sales person; using competitive pressures to keep suppliers focused; and managing the communication, to make sure that he could control the process.

And here’s the thing: If you don’t have a sales process that’s mapped to the customer’s buying process, you will struggle to succeed.

To help companies get started on this journey, we created a free resource called Dealmaker Genius that allows anyone to build a sales process for their company.

I will tell you a bit more about that in a minute – but first let’s look first at the steps a buyer takes as they embark on a buying process.

1. Identify Need (What’s the business problem they want to solve?)
2. Visualize Solutions (How is the problem addressed?)
3. Evaluate Alternatives  (What’s the best option for us?)
4. Negotiate Terms  (The details of the deal)
5. Purchase, and
6. Re-Evaluate (How is it working for us?)

If these are the steps that the buyer goes through, doesn’t it make sense that your sales process should align to the buying process? Let’s map a sales process to the customer’s buying process:

In all of the analysis we have done of deals lost, one of the common factors for the loss has been a lack of understanding of the customer’s buying process. There is lots of evidence to suggest that, unless you understand the customer’s plans, their real business needs, and can develop their needs to show your distinct competitive advantage and real business value, success is unlikely. It’s much easier to design your selling plan, if you know the customer’s buying plan.

Our focus is to help sales professionals succeed, and Dealmaker Genius removes one of the critical barriers by enabling anyone, anywhere, to create a high-quality sales process for their business and elevate their performance. Through over two million sales cycles, we’ve seen successful patterns emerge, and that continuously informs our insight.  We believe Dealmaker Genius will add considerable value to our customers and sales professional everywhere, and will help raise standards in the sales effectiveness market.  And the best news – it’s free, and you can get started now.

Click here for an overview of Dealmaker Genius, or go to www.dealmakergenius.com to get started.

I recently conducted a survey on LinkedIn to determine what sellers view as their biggest problem at the moment.  The result is pretty definitive.  It’s all about the pipeline baby!

So, I’ve revisited a post I did about a year ago which was called The 10 Truths of Pipeline Management. I’ve updated it to reflect the impact of Social Networks, and now there are 13 rules!

At the end of this post – after the 13 rules – I include a graphic of the Dealmaker Pipeline Snapshot, that we use here at The TAS Group, and with many of our customers, to effectively manage the sales pipeline.

1. Maintaining a strong sales pipeline, with enough qualified opportunities at each phase in the pipeline, is the only way to avoid the quarter-end crunch.
2. Pipeline Velocity is a lot more important that Pipeline Volume.
3. Your pipeline is a better predictor of the medium and long-term health of your business than your sales forecast – and they are two very different indicators.
4. Having too many stages in the pipeline is counter-productive. Six is the optimum number of stages in the pipeline.
5. It is futile to determine the value of a pipeline by multiplying the value of each opportunity by the probability of it closing. You rarely get a % of a deal.
6. You can’t depend solely on marketing to fill the funnel. You must generate your own leads. If you don’t look constantly for new opportunities, you lose control over your destiny.
7. A healthy pipeline will have the right blend of deals, in terms of size. If you want to fill a barrel with rocks and maximize the usage of the capacity of the barrel, you have to fill the gaps between the rocks with stones or pebbles. It’s the same with your pipeline.
8. Pipeline stages have no inherent value in terms of deal progression. It’s only the customer related actions tied to each stage that gives meaning to the progression of deals through the pipeline. Clear deliverables (based on evidence of customer actions) must be linked to each stage.
9. You need an algorithmic measure for each stage of the pipeline to determine whether you have enough opportunities at each stage. Consider the time to close, the probability of closure, and the target revenue to calculate the value you need.
10. Deals that are inactive (have not been worked on for more than 60 days) should be cleared out of the sales funnel and sent back to marketing. Otherwise you’re given a false sense of the value of your sales pipeline.
11. Customers (or prospects) are entering the sales cycle further down the funnel now as they are using Social Networks to research solutions before they invite sales people into the conversation.
12. Unless you’ve established yourself as part of the ‘recommendation chain’ many of these opportunities will never enter your funnel, they will be closed by someone else before you even know about it.
13. Networking has always been the best way to fill the funnel – now with Social Networks you can use OPM (other People’s Money) to generate buyers – not just opportunities.

For more info on the how Social Networks can be used to impact sales, you might want to visit this other post: 10 Steps to Intelligent Social CRM for Sales.

For those who care about CRM, Social CRM is one of the hot-topics of the moment. Indeed there is so much written about Social Anything, you’d be forgiven for wondering how you ever survived without Twitter.

However, as with many new technologies – on their way to ubiquity – the applications that are most readily identifiable relate almost exclusively to B2C engagement, and there’s little written that is readily applicable to B2B interactions.

It’s fairly easy to see how both consumers and brand owners can impact buying behaviors and customer engagement with Twitter.  On Facebook, if you’re in the business of selling fizzy drinks, then it makes sense that you’d rather be Coke with 5 million fans than Pepsi with 600,000.  Facebook can be used effectively as an interactive billboard, cultivating and engaging consumers as part of the holistic brand experience.

But what of the B2B SCRM problem? If you’re a B2B sales person – already fed up with using your CRM system – what can you expect?  Or what should you request?

There’s been much brouhaha from the traditional CRM vendors about the importance of Social, but their own practices don’t give much evidence of SCRM at work.  On their Facebook fan pages, they’ve fewer fans that they have employees.  Even salesforce.com – with its stated position of “The Facebook Imperative” – has less than 1,000 fans of Chatter on Facebook (May 4, 2010).  That’s a fraction of the company’s own employee base. Maybe they’re not all fans!

Something is amiss. What’s a B2B sales person to do?

At the R&D facility at The TAS Group, our goal is to help B2B sales people sell more effectively, and then provide intelligent solutions to help them manage their business. We will shortly announce a solution that we think will leverage social networks to further that goal in a way that supports everyday selling activities and encourages buying activity.

With a paradigm that is evolving as quickly as Social Networks, I think it’s too early to have established ‘best practices’. But I do believe we have learned some lessons on our own journey, and we’d like to share those here.  Think of these 10 steps as a guide that might help you to establish your own roadmap, or provoke some thinking about how you can leverage this (yet immature) movement.

1. Empathize – Put your finger on the pulse: Social networks are a wonderful way to ‘get a sense’ of what’s going on in your marketplace, with your customers, and with your competitors.  Use Twitter (or other social network) to listen to the conversation by selecting some key influencers in your market that you might follow.

2. Engage – Cultivate the customer ‘where they are’: Where do your customers ‘hang out’ online? In the traditional world you’ve learned to socialize at the industry events, participate in trade associations, and network with influencers.  If you’ve worked hard at it, you’re probably quite successful at what you do.  But now those events will change. You’ve got to figure out where your customers ‘hang out’ in the Social Web, and engage with them there.

3. Be generous – Give something first, expect nothing in return: I think the correct ratio is nine parts giving to one part getting. Or put another way, you need to love your customers a lot first and then look for a little love in return. What can you do to help your customer? Are there resources in your company that you can provide?  Can you share how other customers have learned how to best apply your product?  Have you insight into trends in your customers’ industry? This is about your establishing yourself as the go-to-person when the customer is trying to figure out where to go next.

4. Influence – Be part of the “Recommendation Chain”: Remember when you used case studies and client reference calls to sell? Well now, customers will use the Social Web to ask “Does anyone out there know anything about [YourCompanyName Here]?  You need to be part of the “Recommendation Chain”. (Credit: In this context, I read that term first in a post by Axel Schultze.]

5. Authentic – Be yourself, Stay the course: This is not a one shot marketing program.  Return is not short term.  If you’ve something to say, speak your mind. If your opinion is worth something you will begin a conversation.  Above all else – be authentic.

6. Collaborate / Co-create – Play in (or start) a community: The playground is more fun if there are many people playing.  Invite conversation, collaboration and idea co-creation.  Consider first your immediate community – your peers, your manager, your customers – and learn what community means to them.

7. Follow – People, networks, opportunities, and accounts: Follow John, the LinkedIn group, the 100k deal you’re working on, or the key account you manage.  This is important.  It’s not just about who you know. It’s equally about what you know.

8. Integrated Resonance – Community, CRM, Methodology: Seek out integrated resonance – the space where what you know from your social network, integrates with what you’re told by your [traditional] CRM data, and is informed by the expertise of a sales methodology, to strengthen the relationship and progress the sale -or more aptly put – the purchase.

9. Measure – Use Klout, Grader etc., to monitor progress: I don’t need to tell you that if you don’t measure progress that you’re wasting your time.

10. Learn – impossible to predict all dynamics: It’s still uncharted territory, and remember that one year ago we didn’t know about half of the social networking products that exist today.  Listen, engage, and learn.

As I mentioned above, this post is a precursor to a solution we will shortly announce that we think goes some way to providing Intelligent Social CRM for Sales. We will also publish a much more detailed framework that will document the business challenges that we believe such a solution should address, and suggest approaches that might merit consideration.

If you’re interested in learning about either of these please check back here, follow me on Twitter for updates @sales20network, or email me directly at ddaly@thetasgroup.com.

Better still, we’d love to hear from you to help guide the final shape of these two items.

1. What’s important to you?
2. What Social CRM challenges are causing you most trepidation?
3. What’s your experience with Social Networks so far?
4. Do you have specific requirements that you think are mandatory for a Social CRM solution?

Our decisions thus far have been informed by our own usage, interaction and brainstorming with our customers, and consultation with other subject matter experts. But we’re not finished, and the dynamics in this area continue to accelerate – so we’d be very grateful for your hindsight, insight or foresight.