From College to Account Director: Loni Bernhard

Last week I interviewed a sales executive, we decided to continue the trend. This week I interviewed Loni Bernhard, Account Director at a national hotel and resort chain.

SPI: Hi Loni. Thanks for meeting with us. Last week we interviewed a sales executive who’s been in sales for the past 30 years. This week we wanted to interview a younger sales professional, to get a different side of the story. How long have you been in sales?

Loni: I’ve been in sales for eight years, shortly after finishing my Bachelor’s degree in 2002. I studied advertising in college, but I decided that sales is my passion.

SPI: So you studied advertising in school. Have you had any formal sales training?

Loni: Yes, I have. I believe sales training is crucial to developing your abilities as a sales person. Sure, you learn a lot in the field, but sales training courses help hone your sales skills and knowledge. I also participate in continuing education for sales training annually.

SPI: Over the course of the last eight years I’m sure you’ve grown a lot as a salesperson, from starting fresh out of college to becoming an Account Director. Do you have a sales philosophy?

Loni: People buy from people. There’s no way around that. I know the Internet has changed the way people interact, but we still need to develop relationships based on trust and integrity. That is where you will find your most lucrative opportunities.

SPI: What would you recommend for people who want to go into hotel sales?

Loni: You will have to start as a sales coordinator to learn the business. Do as much as you can for your Manager and ask lots of questions. Continue to improve your customer service skills and you can move up very quickly in hotel sales.

It’s an exciting industry. My job takes me all over the country, and I get to meet some really wonderful people.

SPI: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered in sales?

Loni: Like I said earlier, the most important part of sales is building relationships. I feel confident in my ability to do so; however, I have to say that the “down” economy has been my biggest challenge. And that is something that’s difficult to navigate, despite how skilled you are at building relationships, and no matter what field you’re in.

SPI: What do you do to continue to improve your sales skills?

Loni: I take online courses, read sales books, and take classes. My company provides access to all these things, and I seek it out on my own, too.

Also, I belong to professional associations that are constantly working to provide their members with valuable information.

I also try to learn from those around me, both clients and sales mentors.

SPI: Loni, thank you so much for taking a moment to talk to us! We really enjoy speaking with professionals across the country to find out what inspires you to grow as a salesperson.

Loni: Thank you!

30 Years of Experience and Counting, An Interview: John Winslow

For our blog this week, I interviewed sales executive, John Winslow. John is currently the Vice President of International Sales for a billion-dollar orthopedic company. Since 1982 he’s worked in domestic and international sales for several Fortune 500 medical supply companies.

I was particularly interested in talking with him about his experience in international sales. We sat down over a cup of coffee so he could share with me a little bit of the knowledge he’s gained over the past 30 years in sales.

SPI: Thanks for talking with us, John. First, I’d like to ask you why you got into sales in the first place. What inspired you?

John: Thanks for having me! I can actually identify the moment when I decided to become a salesperson. It was 1977 in New Orleans. My sister’s partner was attending a wine convention, and he invited us to come along. He was offering a presentation on a wine taster’s workshop he was selling, and I was quite impressed with the relationships he built with his potential clients.

I realized then that I wanted to do that. I wanted to build relationships with people, build connections. To this day I credit that moment in New Orleans as the foundation of my success in sales.

SPI: Have you had any formal sales training over the years?

John: Yes, definitely. While every salesperson has different personality traits, sales training programs can be incredibly beneficial. Integrating what you learn in a sales training with your personality can lead to strong sales skills. I continue to refer back to sales trainings I participated in 10, 20, even 30 years ago.

SPI: What is the hardest part of international sales?

John: Well, the first difficulty is the travel itself. While I travel to Asia and Europe several times a month, I’ve also been on some very long and difficult around-the-world trips. The most strenuous of these was a trip from the U.S. to East Asia, to Australia, back to East Asia, to the Middle East, to Europe, then back to the United States, in fifteen days.

The other difficult part of international sales, which I actually enjoy, is communication. I don’t mean simply the language barrier, but all the nuances of communication that we take for granted when doing domestic sales. American slang is a big no-no. We’re accustomed to speaking in metaphors, but doing that in an international setting can lead to some enormous misunderstandings!

SPI: Do you have any advice for people who are interested in going into international sales?

John: There are three things I’d recommend.

1. Make sure you have a burning desire to do so. International travel is exciting, but it’s difficult. You’ll be recovering from jet lag while making presentations. You’ll be away from your family for extended periods of time. And everyone is familiar with how uncomfortable air travel has gotten!
2. It helps to have a working knowledge of another language. It’s not crucial, but it does help. If you don’t speak more than one language—actually, even if you do—you must spend time researching cultural norms, etiquette, and courtesies. Sales training programs will help you with your sales skills, but you still need to research how people in other cultures communicate, and how to be polite.
3. Going into international sales is easiest if you’re already successful in your sales career. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to apply for another company’s international sales position if you’re just starting out in sales or have no experience in international sales. Work hard at domestic sales. Do your research. Continue learning—reading and participating in sales training programs. International sales is hard, but highly rewarding.

SPI: Thank you for talking with us, John! We appreciate hearing the perspective of highly experienced and well-trained sales executives.

John: Thank you!

Executing on Competitive Differentiators

It’s easy for a sales rep to talk until they are blue in the face about how they are “better and different”. Recently, my company launched a new sales initiative that was a bit of a surprise to me: Our CEO would be taking to the phones to personally call some of the sales leads and opportunities in our sales pipeline (or any deal that we would ask him to take a swing at, for that matter). Additionally, he would even be calling a few of our leads to get some first-hand exposure to the customers that were interested in our services.

This initiative got me thinking to back to when I was in the market to buy a new car. I spent a lot of time with many different salespeople and visited  each company’s website. But, despite being a ‘hot lead’, I never got a personal introduction to Takeo Fukui, CEO of Honda, Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota, or Takashi Yamanouchi, CEO of Mazda. So, why does this type of sales approach resonate so well with our customers and our sales team?

For us, the answer is that it shows our customers how truly valued they are to us – not just to get their business, but especially after we get it. It shows them a living, breathing, and tangible example of our company’s leadership and it is a reflection of our corporate culture. This initiative is already generating positive feedback and is proving to be a very strong competitive differentiator. In fact, several of the customers who spoke with him were favorably impressed enough to move ahead to not only trial our product, a few even signed up on the spot.

But there’s more to it than just having your CEO make sales calls.

Differentiation is about showing the customer that they’re going to be served with the right solution – the one that makes their job easier, or faster, or less painful. It’s easy for a sales rep to talk until they are blue in the face about how they are “better and different”. It’s another thing when you can show a customer a concrete example of how being better and different applies to their needs and sensibilities.  For example, instead of telling a client that your solution is “quick and simple” to implement, why not show them by quickly and simply building them a custom demo and use for their evaluation?

We should never be afraid of proving our capabilities, or naïve enough to think that our customers are not interested in this proof. The following are a few examples of executing on competitive differentiators:

• Let your customer take a ‘tour’ of your company. If you brag that your organization has excellent support, and this is something that resonates as a point of interest for your prospect, have them call support and ask some questions.
• Show by example – don’t just talk about it. If you claim to offer a personal touch that only a mid-sized company can provide vs. a colossal, impersonal corporation, show them! We introduced our CEO to a few of our customers and it’s working great for us!
• Prove what you can do. If your product is able to offer your client an effective ROI, be sure you have a easily understood ROI calculator on hand and demonstrate this to your prospects.

There are many different ways you can show your customers how you’re better and different. You’re not just trying to get their business – you want them as a customer. While the difference is subtle, never forget that it has a major impact on how you approach the sales process and the effect that your customer feels.

Upon original publishing, Ken Cross was working with Landslide, but is now a part of Sales Performance International’s Business development team. We welcome him aboard.

How Not to Learn

Many of you, especially aspiring golfers, will recognize the cartoon below illustrating appropriate “swing thoughts.” In fact, anyone who has attempted to learn the fundamentals of golf at some point in life will no doubt quickly relate and probably laugh out loud. Conceptually, golf involves a pretty simple idea. Your goal is to strike a stationary ball with a flat-surfaced club and advance it to the green and into the hole – in as few stokes as possible.  

That’s where the simplicity stops. Because anyone who has tried the game quickly gains an appreciation for how difficult it is to hit that stationary object with any degree of control.  Having been around for a few years (the first documented mention of golf in Scotland appears in 1457) there has been ample time for literally hundreds of ideas and theories to develop on the best way to master the golf swing. In fact, if you Google “golf training” more than 500,000 results return. The joke here is obvious, and so are the parallels to sales training. Like selling, golf is a complex discipline – and there is no shortage of ideas on the best way to succeed at both. There are tapes, books, boot camps, classes, DVD’s, Internet programs … sound familiar? 

The golfer in our cartoon has the best intentions – he’s just trying to apply every piece of good advice he’s heard about a perfect golf swing. While none of the ideas are necessarily bad, the probability of remembering and applying even a small subset of them is highly unlikely. No realistic golf school would try to teach this much content in a short period of time. In addition, it’s not considered unacceptable if mastery takes more than a few months. But a lot of sales training still reminds us of the cartoon. We want to infuse as much knowledge into our salespeople as possible in the shortest period of time. Maybe that’s why only 15% of companies seem able to get to “world-class” levels of sales process and methodology adherence.

But like golf (or any complex discipline), a more realistic approach would entail a “staged” learning process that begins with basic concepts, and then involves ongoing practice and application – followed by more advanced learning, practice, and reinforcement. And many golf (and tennis) schools work this way. Even the top tour golfers still retain swing coaches, and are constantly seeking refinement of their craft through continual learning. Their livelihoods depend on it. We think sales training can work better this way too.

On Wednesday, January 19 we’ll be cosponsoring a webinar with TrainingIndustry.com called Re-Thinking Sales Training – 2011 and Beyond. We’ll be exploring key barriers to sales training success and provide a new model for sales training to incorporate into your 2011 plans. This webinar will change your perspectives on how your company invests in sales training, and provide insights into taking a new, sustainable approach to performance improvement.

To Register, CLICK HERE>>>

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.