I don’t usually use this blog to promote or announce things, but I think that you’d probably want to here about this fundamental change in the sales effectiveness industry.  Here’s the press release in its entirety.

Dealmaker^® Partner Network to Fundamentally Change the Sales Effectiveness Industry

The TAS Group makes the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform available to selected partners Huthwaite, InfoMentis, and Think! as the industry standard for automation of sales methodology, process, and skills

SEATTLE – Sept. 29, 2009 – The TAS Group (www.thetasgroup.com), the world leader in Sales Performance Automation, today announced the formal launch of its Dealmaker^® Partner Network (DPN), an industry initiative to dramatically improve the benefit customers receive from sales effectiveness investments.  Leveraging the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation Platform (www.thetasgroup.com/dealmaker.html), already in use by more than 15,000 sales professionals, the DPN is the first initiative of its kind in the sales effectiveness industry.

By using the best-in-class sales methodology, process, and skills intellectual property from the DPN Solution Partners and The TAS Group, customers will have access to a comprehensive range of sales effectiveness solutions. All delivered through the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation software platform, these capabilities offer sustained and predictable improvement in sales effectiveness. The DPN is further augmented by capabilities from additional partners to ensure that customers get the complete solution along with expert sales training, integration and support services.

The DPN offers the following categories of partners:

• Solution Partner. Companies that have top-tier, market-proven intellectual property that helps sales people sell more effectively. This includes the sub-categories of:
  • Sales Methodology
  • Sales Process
  • Sales Skills

• Authorized Resellers. Companies that have strong go-to-market capabilities in their local market and are able to advise customers on the best approach to their specific Sales Performance Automation requirements.

• Systems Integrators. Companies that have proven expertise in integrating technology solutions into customer environments.

• Strategic Partners. Companies that provide enterprise-class CRM applications, global social networks, sale productivity, marketing automation and other capabilities. The open architecture of the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform facilitates integration with a wide range of solutions to serve customers’ sales effectiveness requirements.

“It hasn’t been easy for customers to get the most from their sales productivity investments. Bringing the best-in-class providers from the sales effectiveness market together with leading CRM providers through the Dealmaker Partner Network can radically change that,” said Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group. “We’re proud to make our Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform available to this initiative.  We continue to invest millions of dollars in the platform each year, and we’re delighted that these high-caliber Solution Partners have chosen to invest in this program to deliver more value to a broader range of customers.”

Alongside The TAS Group, the three founding Solution Partner members of the DPN are:

• Huthwaite (www.huthwaite.com), creators of SPIN Selling, and one of the world’s leading sales training, coaching and performance improvement companies
• InfoMentis (www.infomentis.com), the global revenue collaboration leader that helps companies sell the way their customers buy

• Think! Inc. (www.e-thinkinc.com), the foremost provider of strategic negotiation solutions

Additional DPN founder partners include Bee Group (http://www.beegrp.com), a Dealmaker Authorized Reseller Partner, and Statera (http://www.statera.com/), a Dealmaker Systems Integrator Partner. Strategic Technology Partners include Oracle, salesforce.com, and Microsoft through their respective CRM partner programs.

“We’re excited about what the Dealmaker Partner Network means for our CRM customers,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president of CRM Products for Oracle. “Bringing these vendors and capabilities together means our customers will have a broader array of choices and a more comprehensive sales effectiveness solution to complement their Siebel and Oracle CRM On Demand applications.”

“Sales effectiveness initiatives should make it easier to manage your business to grow revenue. Combining the proven value of SPIN Selling, and our other intellectual property with the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform, will enable us to further accelerate business growth for Huthwaite customers.” said John Golden, CEO of Huthwaite Inc. “The moment is right for the convergence of methodology, skills and process which can now be achieved by combining our expertise and research-based methodologies with the Dealmaker platform. We’re also very excited about the ecosystem aspect of the Solution Partners’ cooperation which represents real though-leadership and customer-centered innovation within this industry. This is a fundamental upgrade for the sales effectiveness market.”

“The biggest challenge that our customers have is the significant amount of human interaction needed to ensure adoption. By leveraging Dealmaker, our customers will be able to shift their time from inspection to coaching.” said Wendy Reed, CEO of InfoMentis. “This is an important development for the sales effectiveness market. We believe the standard being set by the Dealmaker Partner Network will become the ‘new normal,’ and the benefits that accrue to customers adopting the sales effectiveness platform will be dramatic.”

“The sales effectiveness market has been crying out for collaboration and a systematic approach to improving revenue,” said Brian Dietmeyer, CEO of Think! Inc. “Working with the other DPN partners, we’re excited to be able to bring our Strategic Negotiation solutions to a broader market, delivering sustained and predictable revenue improvement through the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform.”

The benefit of the DPN to customers has also been recognized by analysts that monitor the sales effectiveness industry.  “This initiative from The TAS Group leapfrogs what others in this market have done,” said Dave Stein, CEO of ES Research Group, Inc.  “For the first time, customers can get the benefit of offerings from multiple top-tier sales effectiveness vendors, all seamlessly integrated with the automation that we believe is critical to long-term success.”

“Customers are increasingly looking for a well-rounded, on-demand system to help them achieve their sales performance automation objectives, and the Dealmaker Partner Network gives us the unique ability to offer them that,” said Bruce Ellis, CEO of the Bee Group, Inc.  “We now have a palette of solutions to offer our customers, and do a more complete job of meeting customers’ rapidly evolving needs, including virtual delivery, automated coaching, objective metrics, skills training, all integrated with the CRM system they’re already using.”

The TAS Group plans to further expand the Dealmaker Partner Network in the coming months to further round out its suite of capabilities. Companies that have an interest in joining the Network are encouraged to contact the company to enquire further and discuss their potential fit in detail.

I’ve just returned home after a week on the road, visiting with my sales team, some customers, and few of our partners.  I love spending face time with each of these constituent groups.  Perspectives and viewpoints vary, buy I never fail to learn something new. Distilling the inputs and insights I gathered during the week, I’m struck by the unusual alignment of thought amongst these groups, who usually have more diverse opinions. Two main conclusions emerge.

The first is that new market drivers will materialize from this economic volatility to force unusual partnerships; internal organizational partnerships, extreme partnerships between customers and suppliers, and creative partnerships between companies, who on the face of it, might first be considered to be competitors.  I will come back to this notion of unusual partnerships in a separate post. In this one, I want to comment on the second conclusion.

There is a unanimity of opinion that the sales effectiveness industry (in which we, The TAS Group, operates) has fundamentally changed.  As the sales leadership in companies struggled with the challenges imposed on them by the constraints of the recent economic environment, many new questions arose. Among them, the following was commonplace:

“How do I improve the productivity of my sales team, now that I’ve less money to spend, travel is greatly restricted, and I must be able to demonstrate real ROI for any [sales training] I want to have approved?

In the past, most sales training was of a single event type. Get everyone in the room for three days, teach them the sales methodology, and send them on their way.  There were always some problems with this approach.  Without adequate executive alignment, and post event knowledge application and reinforcement, the learning faded over time, and the anticipated benefit quickly evaporated.

As the purse strings tightened, sales leaders recognized that once the cost cutting was over, the only way to emerge intact from this economic phase, was to increase the productivity of their existing sales people.  However, with travel bans, and reduced budgets constraining their options, they had to look for more cost efficient ways to up-skill their teams, and methods that could deliver the required productivity enhancements, in a measurable and predictable way.  Many sales effectiveness providers responded to their customers’ needs with technology supported solutions for remote or virtual training delivery, and an increasing emphasis was placed on on-going knowledge reinforcement, and some embedded the knowledge into software applications for on-going knowledge application.  Perhaps it should always have been that way, but the old model was in place for so long that few had thought to consider a new paradigm.

Now, this is the ‘new normal’. An enlightened consensus has emerged. Things will never return to the ‘old way’. Even if funds flow freely again, a new set of criteria has been established. (See previous post – The Top 10 Requirements of Sales Performance Automation.)  This is, of course, a good thing.  Customers can now expect to gain, indeed demand, sustained and measurable value from their sales effectiveness investment.  Consider this unsolicited comment from one sales-person who is using our Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation solution. (This is the verbatim comment from the sales person to his sales manager).

“I just wanted to drop you a note to say how impressed I was with this training system. It is without a doubt the easiest to use and most informative course I have ever seen. Also, in the future, you will be able to go back and get a refresher on any part of the methodology. The best part is how Dealmaker is now integrated with the SalesForce opportunity. This brings the methodology to life – and the ‘hover tips’ keep you on the right path. Kudos to the team who implemented this.”

This is a refreshing change.  It’s how it should be.  Usage and methodology adoption is being driven by the sales person, rather than being forced by sales management. The key of course is that the sales person wants to use the sales effectiveness solution because the return for effort equation has been solved. He gets more out of it than it takes. This then self-perpetuates.  It doesn’t require a major behavior change initiative, or depend solely on executive sponsorship.  While not devaluing the worth of these practices, good design, the delivery of a product or solution that is truly ‘fit for purpose’, can on its own engage and entice usage. Consider the minimal effort required to use Google, or the exquisite design of Apple’s iPod products. In a short period of time we have changed how we search for information, or listen to music. In Apple parlance ‘It just works”.

Good things often come from stressful situations.  So it is with the ‘new normal’ of sales effectiveness solutions. The adage “Necessity is the mother of invention” applies to the evolution we’ve seen. Customers and providers alike (at least those who rise to the challenge) will all benefit, and the industry may at last begin to have a set of standards against which we can all be measured.  And that can only be a good thing.

As they say, it feels a bit like déjà vu all over again. I remember, at the start of this decade, debating the potential impact of the Internet on business. Everyone ‘got it’ for the consumer world, but many struggled to believe that mainstream business would be impacted. Now, seven or eight years later, there’s not an industry untouched – but I find myself once again in animated parley about recent developments in technology; social media, social networks, blogging, tweets, tele-presence, collaboration, wikis, and – as it pertains to the subject matter of this blog – sales performance automation.Of many of these new developments, the naysayers’ mutterings are carbon copies of their forerunners who were in denial about the Internet.

“My kids use it, but I don’t see the applicability to business, we don’t need to worry about it.”

“Yeah, one of the new sales guys was saying to me that our competitor has a blog and is active on Twitter, and it’s costing us business. I’m not sure I’m convinced.”

“How much automation can you really provide for sales people? Surely it’s all about the relationships they have.”

In 1984 I wrote a book called “Expert Systems Introduced”.  The main thesis of that book was that automation and software intelligence, having being applied primarily to manufacturing and other ‘blue collar’ tasks, would now enter the domain of the white-collar professional, and increasingly supplant or support many of the functions of the knowledge worker.  My contention was that expert systems (the commercially acceptable face of Artificial Intelligence) would have a role to play.

Since then we’ve seen tremendous changes, the Internet has fundamentally changed how all business operates. The pace, the depth, and the breadth of metamorphosis have been astounding, and the only certainty is that the rate of change will increase.  The continued growth in the presence of digital natives will, alone, force that movement.

According to Forrester’s North American Consumer Technology Adoption Benchmark Study 2007, Gen Y uses social networking sites almost 3 times more than the rest of the population, reads blogs 2 times more, and utilizes instant messaging 1.8 times more. The only technological advancement that Gen Y has not embraced as its own is email. Email is not the primary way the younger generation communicates with its peers.

That was two years ago, and the trend continues in this direction every day.

So what does this mean for the sales professional, manager or executive leader? What’s the role of technology in increasing productivity? What are the factors that you should be looking for in a Sales Performance Automation platform? Well, I think you need to set the bar pretty high.  It should be a ‘Shoot for the moon, at least you’ll land in the stars’ aspiration.

Here are my top ten attributes of the Sales Performance Automation system you should be looking for:

1. Intuitive and context sensitive – easy to use for sales person and sales manager alike, ‘reacting’ to the need of the user
2. Built-in collaboration capability – sharing data, opportunity plans, account plans, sales forecasts, should all happen automatically
3. Incorporates blogs and other social media feeds – leverage the knowledge of the community, and the wisdom of crowds;
4. Supports on-going on-line learning, assessment and certification – to teach and reinforce concepts – in the first instance as knowledge transfer, and then through on-going application
5. Includes proven opportunity management methodology – to help win more deals, and increase average deal value
6. Incorporates configurable sales process(es), to map to your buyer’s sales processes
7. Includes account planning and management - to plan and manage key accounts in a team framework, with a live and dynamic account plan that’s easily shared and managed
8. Integrates deeply with CRM – for contacts, opportunities, accounts and sales team hierarchy and quotas – to leverage the CRM information (no re-keying of data) and to become a complete business management solution
9. Produces Intelligent accurate sales forecasts and insightful pipeline analytics – heuristics-based forecast systems can remove the subjectivity of deal closure probability, and therefore increase accuracy
10. Auto-learning system to expose sales best practices based on actual results – with all the information gathered from all the deals going through the system, it should learn what works and what doesn’t, identify your real sales cycle, funnel velocity, and sales best practices.

All of this is available today, and you shouldn’t settle for less.

When The Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded the Axis: Bold as Love album in 1967, the song most often picked from that album  – apart from the title track and the beautiful “Little Wing” (subsequently covered by numerous artists including Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Pearl Jam, Toto, Sting, The Corrs, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Paul Rodgers and many, many others) – is Jimi’s individualistic anthem “If 6 was 9″. With Hendrix epitomizing the existentialist voice of the 1960s, the lyrics refer to constant change, counterculture, and things not being what they appear.I was reminded of this song recently when on two separate occasions I encountered business situations where, with the benefit of hindsight, the situations were not as they first appeared, and where the protagonists involved learned once again the need for evidence and leading not lagging indicators of change.I’ll recount the first situation – a win/loss review we conducted for one of our customers – as I think there are a number of great lessons to be learned.

The target account was a Fortune 500 technology company.  The opportunity was a significant one, that if played out as expected, was enough for the sales person Mark (not his real name) to make his annual quota from just this one deal.

On the surface everything seemed to indicate that Mark was well positioned to win the sale. Mark’s solution was a great fit for the customer.  His company’s technology would reduce the customer’s costs in delivering HR services. Mark had two contacts within the customer’s organization who he felt were giving him great insight into the decision criteria that the buyers would consider.  Dan worked in the IT department, and outlined for Mark the performance factors that were being evaluated. Charles in HR (the ultimate business department who would use the system) was very open to discussing Mark’s solution with him, and said that he considered Mark’s product to be unique, with a number of very competitive features.

As Mark discussed the opportunity with his manager Suzanne, he identified Dan and Charles as supporters, and felt he could rely on both of them to coach him through the deal. When Dan said that the technology was leading edge, and Charles indicated that there was nothing else he needed to do, Mark felt pretty good.  He knew that the customer had a compelling event to buy a solution as the contract with their existing supplier was coming up for renewal.  The project was approved and the budget was allocated and authorized.

As he compared his solution with his competitor’s offering, he felt that he could differentiate and, through his interaction with Charles, was confident that he had demonstrated the unique business value that Mark’s company could provide.  There was no doubt that he could offer a better solution, and with the support he had from Dan in IT, and Charles – the business sponsor, all appeared to be good. Mark put the deal in his forecast, and chuckled as he teased his wife about whether he would bring her to President’s Club.

When we got a call from Suzanne, she was pretty upset. They’d just lost the deal, and Suzanne, having included it her forecast as part of her presentation to the Board, was mad: Mad at herself for believing Mark again – this wasn’t the first time, mad at the customer for making ’such a stupid decision’, and really mad at Mark for landing her in hot water again.

So, here’s what we learned about the deal.

Mark was right about Dan. He was a supporter, and wanted Mark to win the deal. The advantages of the technology that Mark offered meant that his support overhead would be dramatically reduced, and the advanced automation would reduce the headcount needed in HR, he felt it would be good for his company. But here was the problem.

Charles, who you’ll remember was the business buyer, didn’t want to reduce his headcount.  For him automation was not a good thing.  It threatened his very reason for being, and Charles did not believe that ultimately technology could provide a solution that was as good as the service he and his team provided. In fact, while engaging with Mark, he was working closely with Mark’s competitor to guide them to compete.

With Suzanne’s help, we were able to show Mark that in fact Charles did not overtly mislead him.  He answered questions when asked, and never really indicated that he wanted Mark to win.  This was a classic case of ‘happy ears’ – Mark hearing what he wanted to hear and never seeking the independent verifiable evidence that would support his assessment of the situation.  Charles was a 6, but Mark treated him as if he was 9.

There were some fundamental issues to address because, as Suzanne wasn’t slow in telling Mark – this wasn’t the first time this happened.  It was time to revisit the whole concept of Inside Support.

- – - – o – - – -

As each sales campaign progresses, you’re either making progress or you’re sliding backwards – things never stay the same.  The customer’s buying process rolls ahead relentlessly and the majority of buying happens when you are not with the customer.

To keep things on track, and moving along the path that you want, you need to have inside support.

Your challenge is to determine:

1. Who in the customer’s organization wants you to win?
2. Are they willing ­and able to act on your behalf?
3. Do they have credibility and influence in their own organization?
4. What’s their motivation – their personal win?
5. What have they done to indicate their support – or how do you know they’re a 9 – not a 6 masquerading as a 9?

In Mark’s situation, he’d have failed each and every one of these tests. And the worst thing is – he was acting on the basis that Charles was on his side without understanding his personal motivation, or without ever testing his support by looking for objective evidence that support his opinion (or desire).

Sales is tough – and trust is important.  The problem in this situation was that Suzanne trusted Mark, and Mark trusted Charles, but neither employed objective criteria to test the trust. This deal was at best a 6, but Mark and Suzanne treated it as a 9 – and that’s fatal.

Things might have been different in Jimi Hendrix’s world. “Now if uh, six uh, huh, turned out to be nine, Oh I don’t mind, I don’t mind uh ( well all right… ).”  But unfortunately, it never turns out that way. 6 looks pretty like 9, but it can turn you upside down.