Are You Ready For 2012? A Quick Look Back At 2011.

Top Articles of 2011

New to the Solution Selling Blog? Or are you a committed reader? Welcome and welcome back. At SPI we are more committed than ever to be the go-to thought-leaders of the sales performance improvement industry. We are consistently looking ahead to changes in the marketplace, trends, tools and learning methods to influence our practices and programs. We incorporate research and feedback into our decisions and work diligently to forward the knowledge and skills we pass on to our clients. So in with the new year and out with the old. But… before we move forward with a wealth of new sales knowledge in 2012, let’s take a brief look back to see what mattered most to readers in 2011.

	Do You Really Understand Your Customer’s Problems? One common sales challenge I have been hearing a lot lately is that sales people are not having consultative dialogues with the customer. As a result, sales cycles become longer or win rates drop. Let me paint the picture…
	Rumors of Solution Selling’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated You can’t really blame our competitors for trying to do and say things to tarnish our brand, Solution Selling® - it’s the nature of the beast when you are among the market leaders… we take it as a confirmation of a leadership position…
	Re-Thinking Sales Training - 2011 and Beyond To maximize an organization’s return on sales training investments, sales leaders and managers need to consider three key issues before investing in a sales training initiative, as illustrated in the article…
	Selling Styles: Art or Science(A Love Story) I love my job. My primary responsibility is to create LEADS. In my career, I’ve created a few hundred thousand quality leads to be distributed across an array of sales teams. With numbers of this scale, the main issue that kills me is not necessarily the lead source, cost per lead, OR lead quality…
	Column Fodder My favorite locale is the (gold standard) that defined the qualities that I truly enjoy in a burrito - everyone else that I consider, well, they have a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, the ‘other’ restaurants offering burritos have become columns B, C, and so on in my evaluation…
	Winners Versus Losers - What Does Research Tell Us? Of more general interest is what we learned about top performing companies – companies that have significantly higher quota attainment and revenue attainment. The “best-in-class” companies outpace laggards in a number of areas, including…

Winners Versus Losers – What Does Research Tell Us?

In our prior installment, The Sales Training ROI Gap, we discussed some of the potential reasons that sales training fails to deliver the expected ROI. In the past year, we commissioned independent research (through Aberdeen Group) to help us better understand several important things:

1. How well are our (SPI’s) customers attaining improved outcomes?
2. What do top performing companies do differently than laggards?
3. What can these lessons contribute to a better strategy for sales training?

What sets apart the winners in sales performance?While the results for our customers were very positive, we won’t spend time here on that topic (we’ll have a full release later in January). Of more general interest is what we learned about top performing companies – companies that have significantly higher quota attainment and revenue attainment. The “best-in-class” companies outpace laggards in a number of areas, including:

• They have a defined process to objectively assess specific skill or competency gaps (they want to know the truth)
• They provide significantly more formal post-training reinforcement of best practices (they don’t leave this to chance)
• The provide a dynamic library of learning and reinforcement assets for marketing and sales teams (they provide extensive access to the right learning assets)
• They provide internal social collaboration tools and a central repository of best practices (they provide scalable ways to communicate and perform “self-coaching)
• They continue to provide instructor led training and complement that training with virtual and on-demand learning (they still need us humans to teach, but they repeat (and repeat) in multiple forms)

So your reaction is probably a resounding DUH! These ideas may seem incredibly obvious as methods to improve sales training effectiveness, but top performing companies seem to apply them much better and more consistently than their peers. If what you need to do is so obvious, why is that the case? From our observations, there is something more subtle at play here. Just listing out things to do to improve training results is helpful, but it doesn’t really provide an integrated strategy that can be put into consistent execution. Have you ever noticed that some professional sports franchises always seem to be in contention year after year, and others never can seem to create consistent results? They have the same access to talent, the same financial constraints, and strikingly similar organizational structure – but year after year some seem destined for another losing season.  

From our observations over nearly two decades, the top performing companies understand one thing really well - “programmatic” thinking. They just get it. In other words, they understand the difference between a collection of Ferrari parts and an assembled Chevrolet. Their sales and training organizations understand the difference between checklist compliant training events (and technologies) and on-going professional development that relates to business outcomes. The top companies have both the requisite parts and a coherent integration of the parts into a model for on-going improvement. They’ve organized the right intellectual property around a planned sequence of on-going learning and reinforcement - a continual learning program.

But programmatic thinking and execution can be difficult in sales, because sales organization can be very volatile and prone to change (the average tenure of a CSO is about 22 months). It can be very difficult to “wire” together a comprehensive, programmatic approach to continual learning and performance improvement. We think more companies can join the “best-in-class” attainment levels. Next week we will explore a fundamentally new approach to sales training – for 2011 and beyond.

The Sales Training ROI Gap

The ROI GapIn our prior installment, Time for Sales Training to Grow Up, we discussed how companies over the past decade have struggled to achieve and sustain sales performance improvement – this while spending billions of dollars annually on sales training and improvement initiatives. As a sales training organization, we felt compelled to identify why companies aren’t attaining a higher return on their educational investments in sales. Interviews with multiple customers and experts, as well as industry research provided a number of insights. We identified five key contributors to the ROI dilemma:

1. Too Much Too Soon – The Sales Training “Event” - It is virtually impossible for sales professionals to learn, retain, and apply more than a small percentage of what is typically offered in intensive, multi-day training events – unless there is a systematic reinforcement approach across an extended period of time.
2. Training Not Aligned Around a Proven Sales Process - Training efforts focus exclusively on skills and techniques.  If there is no process “backbone” to attach new practices to, the new methods are applied sporadically and soon fall into disuse.
3. Fragmented Training Approaches - Many initiatives apply a partial or fragmented training approach that fails to provide an engaging, planned learning experience - across time.
4. Gaps in Curriculum for Specific Roles and Competencies - Even when there are attempts to define skills gaps with some level of rigor, some of the most critical competencies are often omitted from training initiatives.
5. Sales Management is Overwhelmed - In the high pressure environment of, “make your numbers this quarter,” most sales managers simply don’t have time to address the overall coaching and mentoring needs of their direct reports.

The illustration below is based on actual learning research that reveals the erosion of newly learned methodology content because of the factors cited above. As a result, most sales training dollars do not realize the expected return on investment. Research indicates that without systematic, ongoing learning and reinforcement, approximately 50% of the learning content is not retained within five weeks, much less applied. Within 90 days, 84% of what was initially learned is lost.

The ROI GapBut a continual learning approach, if well designed, can overcome many of the shortcomings of conventional training methods. So what can your organization do to combat the ROI gap and maximize the “return on training?” Next well we’ll take a closer look at what sales training research tells us about “best-in-class” practices, and begin to formulate a strategy for 2011 – and beyond. 

Time for Sales Training to Grow Up

Copyright ShutterStock Images, LTD 2010It’s time for sales training to grow up and face the metrics. A remarkable amount is spent annually on sales training initiatives – some industry experts estimate that as much as $7 billion per year is spent annually in the US market alone on sales training. A fair question then; to what extent is this investment paying measurable dividends for corporations? The first decade of the new millennium has essentially been a treadmill from a sales performance perspective. Industry research provides limited evidence that these training investments are attaining sustainable results for most companies. In fact, most aggregate metrics for sales effectiveness have failed to reach pre-2000 levels at any point in the last decade.  

Case in point, in annual research from CSO Insights, at no time in the last ten years has quota attainment returned to pre-2000 levels.  And in 2009 quota attainment saw its largest decline in the history of their research. While general economic trends clearly contributed to these difficulties, 2009 simply amplified what has essentially been a decade of non-improvement — in spite of billions of dollars of corporate investment. Here’s the bottom line; year in and year out less than 15% of global companies attain a “world-class” level of sales process and methodology adherence. And that’s in spite of an avalanche of empirical data that illustrates these companies significantly outperform their peers.   

It’s a Diet Pill, Silver Bullet, Lone Wolf, Rock Star, Self-Proclaimed Guru, Cowboy Culture…

So why have sales training and improvement efforts hit the wall? It’s not like revenue growth isn’t job number one at most companies. Try to name a more visible goal. And it’s not as if no one has thought about revenue growth and selling methodologies. If you don’t think so, just enter “sales book” into Google and spend the next ten years researching the available material. There are probably more books and ideas on how to sell than on how to lose weight. In seriousness however, part of the problem may reside in the fragmented, quick fix culture that seems to be inherent in solving sales problems. In some respects, there may be too many ideas, opinions, and approaches for companies to implement a working model.

Research indicates that there are at least 600 “sales training” firms in the US alone. Depending on their origins, each has a different perspective on what conceptual and enablement approaches are the best.  Some are methodology driven, some technology driven, and some both. In fact, this flood of potential “solutions” can be overwhelming. As a result, it can be daunting for companies to wire together a coherent, sustainable approach to sales performance improvement. And even when they do, new leadership and opinions can quickly dismantle the overall approach.

Diverse Conceptual Focus + Diverse Enablement ApproachesSo what actually works? Over the past 18 months, we commissioned research on what “best-in-class” companies actually do, conferred with customers, and had discussions with industry experts. We also looked at how people learn to apply complex skills — like athletic skills.  And what did we learn? We learned a lot about the types of content and enablement approaches that provide the right type of learning experience. Next week we’ll explore these ideas in greater depth as we begin to re-think sales training for 2011 and beyond.

Why Solution Selling® Playbooks for Kadient (CRM) Work:

As CSO Insights reports, on average, over 50% of a sales reps time is already spent on non-selling activities. When sales people are sent hunting for information, they find themselves sifting through interviews, weaving through web pages, relying on user ratings and lost in a sea of links to over-tagged search results from a company intranet or portal. Even with more sophisticated portals that provide search options to narrow results, it’s still a job within itself for a sales person to find what she needs. But more than time lost, is the fact that salespeople are often not properly equipped for the complex selling situations of today’s educated buyer. They don’t have command of the knowledge they need to sell to specific buyers. And when sales teams introduce new products, hire a team of new sales people, or set stretch expansion goals, there is an even greater lack of preparedness for the task at hand. 
 
Simply put, the answer to these business challenges is not a better content portal. Content portals are focused on solving a content problem, not a sales execution problem. What reps need to sell smarter, is the right knowledge for specific selling situations pushed to them when and where they need it.  This is where an interactive solution selling playbook can make all the difference. Kadient’s Interactive Sales Playbooks are designed to maximize sales productivity by delivering situation-specific messages, content and tools, at the right time all within the system where reps work their deals – their CRM.  Situation-specific Sales Playbooks align all the knowledge a rep needs to move an opportunity forward with a proven sales process like Solution Selling®, giving them the coaching they need to have the meaningful conversations required to effectively move through and close deals.
 
With Solution Selling® Playbooks, reps have more time to sell because they have what they need to do it but, more so, they have the confidence to sell because they have the specific knowledge they need in the context of the opportunities they are working. Knowledge transfer is critical for a sales rep to be successful; sales and product training only goes so far in arming a sales rep with what’s needed for a specific selling situation. Delivering what they need contextual to when they need it has measureable impact on overall sales performance.
 
Three Key Benefits of Embedding Solution Selling® Playbooks in Your CRM System:
 

• Sales Playbooks Maximize Your Investment in CRM
• Integration Makes Situation-Specific Playbooks Possible
• Playbook Analytics Open a Whole New Window into Your Pipeline

 
Salespeople need more than access to the latest and greatest content to succeed. They need proven process, married with content and all the other tools available to them. They need it when and where they are selling and they need it to be very specific to the buyers they are selling to. Sales leadership needs a better understanding of what is really working to move opportunities through the pipeline, so they can do more of it. That’s what Solution Selling® Playbooks will do. Sure, they will solve your content problem, but they will bring you much more value than content portal alone ever could.

Read more about Solution Selling® Playbooks for Kadient in a recent blog by Dave Stein...

Learn more about Kadient’s offerings…

Blog written by:   Rich Berkman | Vice President, Sales Enablement Strategy

www.kadient.com | www.santcorp.com