Selling With Insights: How Can Sales Provide More Value to Clients? In preparation for a conversation with the client, sales reps must be aware that the client already knows a lot. To differentiate the business, sales reps should bring new value added ideas to the discussion. In this video, Selling With Insights: How can sales provide more value to clients, Richardson’s Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer, offers practical advice to sales about the process of providing value to highly informed clients. (if you have any difficulties viewing this video, please click here) ———————————— Selling with Insights™ Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ is a customized sales training solution that teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, create needs and shape the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ program specifically targets modes of selling that we have identified in our work with top clients and industry experts, especially Create and Shape.  In these modes, reps share insights, but what they share and how they share it depends on the appropriate response to the buyer’s location in their process.  The goal in each mode is to increase your ability to influence decisions and win. To learn more, please click here.   The post Video Blog - Selling With Insights: How Can Sales Provide More Value to Clients? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Selling With Insights: What are the Barriers to Selling With Insights? In our last blog, How Can Sales Provide More Value to Clients, we discussed how sales provide more value to clients through insight selling. But what are the barriers to Selling With Insights? There are several barriers that sales reps encounter when trying to Sell With Insights to their clients, including finding the most relevant insight for the customer. In his video blog, What are the Barriers to Selling With Insights, Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer, discusses what is required of sales and marketing teams to bring value to the buyer from Selling With Insights. ———————————— Selling with Insights™ Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ is a customized sales training solution that teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, create needs and shape the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ program specifically targets modes of selling that we have identified in our work with top clients and industry experts, especially Create and Shape.  In these modes, reps share insights, but what they share and how they share it depends on the appropriate response to the buyer’s location in their process.  The goal in each mode is to increase your ability to influence decisions and win. To learn more, please click here. The post Video Blog - Selling With Insights: What are the Barriers to Selling With Insights? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Focus on Your Average and Bottom Performers to Improve Sales Performance Yeah, I know. Based on the title, you’re already shaking your head, wondering if I’ve finally lost my marbles. Hang with me… I’m pretty sure you’ll see what I mean. In an earlier post entitled "Which Top Producers Should You Study to Develop Sales Training Programs?", I introduced a sales analytics approach that I’ve use for analyzing top producers and placing the sales organization into six major bands. Socrates is quoted as saying, "The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms," so I want to clarify some terms for this post: I typically define "Average" as the group of producers that surround the mean and median averages, for the metrics you are using. The "Above Average" group is simply the group that lands between your upward cut-off for Average and the bottom of the Top 20 Percent. To avoid saying "the Above Average and Average groups" every time, when I say "Average" in this post, this is the combo of groups that I’m referring to. The bottom performers are simply those in the Bottom 20 Percent. Improve Sales Performance with Continue | Start | Stop Coaching In the previous post I referenced, I discussed using a form of task analysis and comparative analysis to create Continue | Start | Stop lists between performance bands, to coach performers in one band, up a notch. I’ve had great success with this approach and the resulting sales coaching. It will improve sales performance. What I didn’t share in that post, was where I encourage sales managers to focus their time and the type of sales coaching support most often needed by band, to get the maximum benefit from coaching time. This is a gross oversimplification and generalization, so I want to clarify that upfront to avoid giving the wrong impression. (It’s "directionally correct," but my recommendations may vary quite a bit based on real-life context.) Having clarified that, here’s what I’d offer, generally: In my experience, you’ll get your biggest lift from two places. And they are (drum roll, please): The Average groups above the Pareto Line (where you should spend the largest percent of your time, when working to improve sales performance) The established low performers (not the new hires or recent trainees) in the Bottom 20 Percent group (where you should spend 10% of your time, appropriately moving these performers out of the organization) To do this, the Continue | Start | Stop work (resulting from your sales analysis and task/performance lever analysis) and sound sales coaching will both help you improve sales performance in the Average groups. This deserves a post (or several) in itself, and we’ll certainly write more about this type of sales coaching. It works. Improve Sales Performance with a Bottom 20% Replacement Plan Your Human Resources team should provide good advice on how to move out these consistent low producers effectively. Do it professionally, with empathy, even kindly. But move them out. In addition to being a heavy drag on your organization’s sales performance, these people deserve an opportunity to find success doing something else (maybe even within your organization). By the way, unless you haven’t hired recently, this won’t usually be the entire 20 percent in this band. Hopefully, some of the reps in this group are newer players who are "just passing through." There’s also big "BUT" with the Bottom group. If you don’t have a solid plan for sourcing, recruiting, selecting and onboarding replacement reps at a higher degree of effectiveness than what you did previously when hiring the incumbents, you risk prolonging the status quo (or making things worse). Obviously, since I’m recommending performance management and replacement, I don’t intend to suggest you shouldn’t release poor performers (or "return them to the community," as a former employer’s CEO used to say). Nor do I want to foster paralysis. But if you don’t have great sales selection systems and processes, it is deserving of significant effort to establish them, and worthy of continuous improvement over time, based on what you learn with each hire. So, if you were scratching your head at the outset, did I redeem myself? Or do you have a different perspective? I’d enjoy hearing either way. To close, here are some questions to ponder and some related reading, if this topic is pertinent now or of interest. Questions Are you analyzing, banding, studying, and doing comparative analysis with your sales organization? If not, why not? If yes, how is it working? Do you spend enough time doing sales coaching? Do you focus on moving up your average and above-average performers? If not, why not? If yes, how is it working? Do you have a compliant, structured way to manage out your low performers who are not improving? Why or why not? How’s it going? Do you believe your sourcing, recruiting, selection and onboarding is as good as it should be? If yes, what are you doing? If not, what are you planning to do about it? Related Reading How Great Sales Leaders Coach Many Happy Returns: The Business Case for Sales Coaching Evaluative vs. Developmental Feedback: Why Sales Leaders Must Understand the Difference Does Spending a Lot to Duplicate Your A Players Work? Do You Want to Improve your Sales Coaching Skills? Try Managing Effort! Where Should I Focus My Sales Coaching Efforts? Using Tailored Post-program Sales Coaching to Get Results from Sales Training ——————————- Sales Organization Change Checklist Click here or on the image below to learn more about how ready you are to effectively implement change within your sales organization with Richardson’s Sales Organization Change Checklist The post Focus on Your Average and Bottom Performers to Improve Sales Performance appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

How to Fix Common Problems with Sales Training Transfer I find it interesting that so many in our profession (and our company leaders) want to talk about how to determine sales training ROI (or Return on Expectations), but don’t want to focus on how to get the learning from courses actually used in the workplace. To me, that’s like wanting to determine the effects of fire on wood and putting your wood in sunlight, hoping it bursts into flames so you can study it. It’s folly. Without transfer, you won’t impact business outcomes and you won’t deliver a return, however you measure it. A Recent Reminder of Sales Training Transfer Obstacles I attended the Dallas ASTD Southwest Learning Summit recently and was in the audience for Steve Lee’s presentation on incorporating gamification principles in scenario-based elearning. It was a strong presentation and Allen Interactions is doing a lot of great work, as are many of the leading elearning/content development companies. A lot of things that Steve shared made sense and were impressive, but one thing really resonated with me, as an indication of our problems with sales training transfer. Describing what one company learned as a result of their experience, he said (paraphrased): "They [the learners] did okay in training, but thought they knew better on the job." In other words, the participants learned the content (knowledge) and could demonstrate judgment to select the right actions in the right scenarios. In terms of teaching the content, the training was effective. Level 2 learning occurred. (We could debate whether you can accomplish true skill transfer with most elearning, when you’re providing answers from which to select, but these students were placed in scenarios and needed to apply judgment about what to do next and choose the right path.) Some of the learning was purposefully heuristic, based on trial and error, but that’s a good learning design and approach for knowledge acquisition. The problem lies in the statement, "…[they] thought they knew better on the job." Even though participants understood the content and achieved the learning objectives of the training, they did not consistently transfer that learning to the workplace, because they thought their way would work better. Why is that? Well, there are multiple possible reasons for this and it’s something that we, as learning professionals and sales performance leaders, really need to understand. Why don’t our participants and employees use what they learned in training, on the job? The list is long, but here are the top categories, in my experience. The Enemies of Sales Training Transfer Failing to Address Attitude: Often, we fail to address attitude and shape motivation. To use a phrase that’s clichéd but accurate in this case, we didn’t "win their hearts and minds" and convince learners that they should change their current behaviors. (For more about this, see: Sales Training Programs: Putting the A back in KSA.) Ignoring Retention: Memory faded. Retention of unused or unreinforced content is unlikely. I’m not going to quote the bogus retention stats that are tossed around so frequently in our profession, but I will offer something from our mobile reinforcement partner: The Science Behind Qstream. Note the research references at the end. Lack of Coaching:  Retaining the knowledge and judgment is the first step, but coaching on how (and how well) to apply skills in a workplace setting, is critical to both training transfer and successful ongoing application. (See Using Tailored Post-Program Sales Coaching to Get Results from Sales Training for recommendations.) Environmental Factors Block Change: Often there are blocks to behavior change, such as lack of clarity or problems with role definition, expectations, feedback, reward systems, organization design, lack of accountability systems and more. No Change Plans: And often, we default to "Hope Mode" when we cannot sell the need for change plans internally, or aren’t sure how to create and execute effective change management or change leadership plans. Culture Still Eats Strategy for Lunch I’ve provided links and additional reading for 4 of the above 5 factors. To further support the remaining environmental factors that can block change (negatively impacting transfer) and address why participants don’t always implement what they’re taught, here are some additional thoughts and resources. Performance Analysis Flowchart One excellent resource comes from Bob Mager and Peter Pipe, from their book, Analyzing Performance Problems. Mager and Pipe’s Performance Analysis Flowchart is legendary and found at various places on the internet today, but is represented officially by The Center for Effective Performance (CEP). On the flowchart, look in the sections labeled Fast Fixes, Consequences, and More Clues, to see how you might address environmental factors. This flowchart is designed for troubleshooting, especially to determine when training may or may not be the right solution, but it works wonderfully for troubleshooting transfer issues, as well. The 16 Reasons The second resource is a book by Ferdinand Fournies, aptly titled, Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do and What to Do About It. The Table of Contents (displayable on Amazon by mousing over the book cover and clicking on the TOC link), says it all. The reasons Fournies lists include: They Don’t Know Why They Should Do It They Don’t Know How To Do It They Don’t Know What They Are Supposed To Do They Think Your Way Will Not Work They Think Their Way Is Better They Think Something Else Is More Important There Is No Positive Consequence to Them for Doing It They Think They Are Doing It They Are Rewarded for Not Doing It They Are Punished for Doing What They Are Supposed To Do They Anticipate a Negative Consequence for Doing It There Is No Negative Consequence to Them for Poor Performance Obstacles Beyond Their Control Their Personal Limits Prevent Them from Performing Personal Problems No One Could Do It As with Mager and Pipe’s flowchart, not all of Fournies’ factors are environmental, but you can see that. It’s primarily numbers 7 through 13 that are environmental factors (and possibly number 16, based on where the unrealistic expectations originate). Put Learning & Training Transfer Before Results & Returns As sales training or sales leaders, we don’t always own all of the environmental factors, but we must address them as best we can in our organizations. I hope that the Five Enemies of Sales Training Transfer listed above and the additional resources for identifying and addressing environmental (and other) factors, offer helpful guidance and support, for ensuring your employees use the knowledge and skills you provided in training. As I said in the beginning of this post, you certainly won’t be affecting business outcomes or delivering a return, without transfer. I’d enjoy hearing your experiences with sales training transfer and any obstacles with the things I’ve mentioned here (or others). I’ll end with some related reading, as always. If we can help you sort through what’s happening at your organization and discuss ways you can increase retention and transfer, reach out and let us know. Related Reading: Making Sales Training Stick: Building a Continuous Learning Environment Human Performance Technology: A Reference Manual Making Sales Training Stick and Extending Knowledge Retention through Mobile Gamification McGregor Meets Gilbert The Evolution of a Performance Analysis Job Aid Updating the Behavior Engineering Model Help Your Sales Reps Move from "The Forgetting Curve" to "Total Recall" ———————————————————————————————————————- Click the following to learn more about improving your sales training transfer with Richardson’s QuickCheck   The post How to Fix Common Problems with Sales Training Transfer appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Video Blog - Selling with Insights: How Specific Should Insights Be? We are living in an age where we are overloaded with information. It is now no longer good enough for a salesperson to simply forward on a whitepaper or piece of data. Please join Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer of Richardson, in this short video clip as he walks us through the process and importance of aligning specific insights to your customer’s challenges. This is a third in a series including: Selling With Insights: How can sales provide more value to clients? and Selling With Insights: What are the barriers to Selling With Insights? ————————————- Selling with Insights™ Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ is a customized sales training solution that teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, create needs and shape the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ program specifically targets modes of selling that we have identified in our work with top clients and industry experts, especially Create and Shape.  In these modes, reps share insights, but what they share and how they share it depends on the appropriate response to the buyer’s location in their process.  The goal in each mode is to increase your ability to influence decisions and win. To learn more, please click here. The post Video Blog - Selling with Insights: How Specific Should Insights Be? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

7 Essential Ingredients in Creating Effective Sales Training  for Sales Teams Adapted from an interview with Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer for Richardson and Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer for Brandon Hall Group Part one our series on applying key practices in learning and development to effective sales training Listing ingredients implies that they are part of a recipe, which of course can be literal or figurative. Without wasting time on prologues and previews, we know you’re hungry to learn about the 7 essential ingredients in effective sales training programs. The ingredients can be easily categorized by pre-training, the training itself, and post-training. Pre-training 1. Align training with your business strategy, goals, and needs. What is your strategy and how does the sales training help to support the organization’s strategic objectives? At the end of the day, what is the behavior that you are hoping to drive? How do you want your sales reps to change the way they do things? What do you want them to actually do in order to achieve the desired outcome? If you can’t easily answer these questions or connect your sales training to the needs and priorities of the company, then you should modify it or scratch it altogether. Don’t waste precious time, effort, and energy on tangential diversions. Instead, be able to connect the dots for the trainees as well as senior management to keep everyone focused on the ultimate bottom line. 2. Have the right mindset. Most sales training programs are viewed, planned, and executed as one-off events as opposed to part of a broader change management program or continuous improvement process. Those who are willing to adopt a broader view of sales training programs along a continuum - seeing the before, during, and after of the training event - will have far greater success towards effective sales training. If we’re thinking about the ingredients for a meal (training), take your planning one step further: It’s not just about preparing one dish or meal, but rather about how to sustain that level of satisfaction until the next meal. Conversely, a one-and-done mindset is akin to fast food - it’s cheap and quick but unhealthy and no way to live. 3. Understand your customers. In addition to knowing your business, you also need to consider what’s going on with your customers. There has been a tremendous shift in buyer behavior in recent years fueled by Internet searches, "showrooming," tighter budgets, savvier buyers, mobile and social habits, and the expectation of instant gratification and what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitudes that can quickly trump customer loyalty. To combat these trends and obstacles, you need to understand why your customers buy what you sell, the value that you bring to them, and how they make buying decisions. While you’re at it, consider other business or environmental changes that could factor into your sales training. Are there any new competitive forces or trends that could cause a shift? Once you’ve dispassionately evaluated these questions, then consider how your sales training programs can help your sales teams circumvent or prevail over these issues. During Training 4. Great instructional design and facilitation makes for great learning. Relevance is critical. There is a premium on sales reps’ time, especially for coming out of the field for training. Therefore, make learning situational, real-world based. Make it practical. Highly situational learners want to immediately apply what they’ve learned. But if what they are learning does not seem immediately applicable, then they disengage. The training loses its impact, the messages are soon forgotten, and learners retreat to their old habits. Instructional designers and facilitators need to be keenly aware of what’s going on in the business and apply their knowledge to helping move the sales team towards their goals. Making sales training relevant is critical, but in addition to that, it must also be actionable. It is not just about transferring knowledge, but helping sales reps to know what you’re asking them to do, why, and how everyone (reps, company, and customers) will benefit. Great instructional design and dynamic facilitation will help to bring that to life in the classroom and create that "just in time, just for me" feeling. 5. Build on your best practices. Build on what you know works in your organization. Think about those best practices that you might want to replicate across the organization that relate to your training needs. Study people in your organization who do it well, then incorporate other practices that will help sales reps execute against your strategic initiatives. Many organizations have deep subject-matter experts in areas that could represent a considerable opportunity for the business. These subject-matter experts work with marketing teams to produce white papers or thought leadership pieces, but that content is not in a format that is easily digestible by sales. The challenge is to unlock the subject-matter expert’s knowledge and experience, package it, and train your team to share these insights in customer conversations. It isn’t always obvious how and when those opportunities are going to present themselves, so having that scenario pre-programmed in the minds of your salesforce so that it becomes very fluent and natural gives them an advantage. That requires mastery of the content as well as the skills necessary to deliver that content in the customer conversations. Create learning principles and takeaways that are highly relevant to real world scenarios. A homerun on content development with a salesperson is "Wow, I just faced that situation, and these concepts and tactics seem to fit perfectly. I took a lot away from what I have just absorbed through learning, and I will do a better job (or take a different approach) the next time I am faced with that situation." Or "I can see where this could happen in my territory. I am glad to have had the opportunity to master the issue before I had to face it." Post-training 6. Leverage technology. It was recently announced that Major League Baseball will formally institute instant replay into all games. Those in favor of it argue that if the technology exists to improve the game, why not use it? The same can be said for training environments. Just because you’ve always done things a certain way doesn’t mean you need to treat your training programs with the same level of sophistication as a one-room schoolhouse on Little House on the Prairie. We’ll cover this in greater detail in future posts, but here are two ways to use technology to make your training more effective: Have your instructors record their lessons in advance and share them with trainees before the training. That way the classroom time can be used for more practical skill building, role plays, and other exercises as opposed to listening to lectures. Keep the training alive by investing in a tool such as QuickCheckTM to engage reps beyond the classroom and increase the odds that they’ll remember what they’ve been taught. 7. Communications campaign. Ever-important, yet always overlooked. If you’re trying to initiate a change, work with your in-house communications experts to craft a communications campaign to reinforce the messages and behaviors that you want to instill in your trainees. Use multiple channels over time to "drip" the message (e.g., email, break room posters, webinar presentations, internal social networking groups, lunch and learns). Finally, identify ways to measure the impact and effectiveness of the training, and make adjustments to your next training initiative if necessary. Does this list of essential ingredients resonate with you? What else would you add to ensure successful and effective sales training initiatives? Tell us in the Comments section. —————————————————- Sales Organization Change Checklist Click here or on the image below to learn more about how ready you are to effectively implement change within your sales organization with Richardson’s Sales Organization Change Checklist   The post 7 Essential Ingredients in Creating Effective Sales Training for Sales Teams appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

What Is the Role of Technology in Sales Training Solutions? Adapted from interview with Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer for Richardson and Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer for Brandon Hall Group Part two our series on applying key practices in learning and development to sales training solutions. It is fascinating to witness the innovation that is taking place across sales and marketing. And we are seeing opportunities to leverage technology throughout the learning process. When trying to improve the effectiveness of your sales training solutions, you must consider how technology can help your efforts. Here are several ideas for how you can do that in your organization: Gather pre-training insights. Collecting data about your reps in advance of the training may seem like an obvious suggestion, but you know there are some out there failing to make this connection. Leverage technology to help identify learning gaps and learning needs among your reps. If they’re already strong in a certain area, don’t bother spending time on it during training; rather, focus elsewhere. Recorded lectures. Most sales training is still delivered by live instructor-led training, especially skills training. Leverage technology to accelerate knowledge transfer so that more of that valuable classroom time is spent on actual skill development and coaching as opposed to digesting new content for the first time. The recorded lectures can also be referred to post-training whenever desired. Videotape training role plays. When practicing to become a better public speaker, most speech coaches videotape students in order to objectively demonstrate areas in need of improvement (watch those "ums" and "ahs"). The ability to record and share video makes it easy to apply this concept to training role plays and other parts of the program. This isn’t to shame anyone, but rather to add another dimension to their experience. Seeing yourself on screen (whether doing something well or cringe-worthy) will have a longer-lasting effect than trying to remember the result of a classroom training exercise down the line. When back in the field, reps will be more likely to recall and try to repeat their success or adjust so as to not fail again. QuickCheckTM. Speaking of making the training lessons last longer, we’ve written about Ebbinghaus’s "Forgetting Curve" and the dramatic loss of knowledge in the weeks following training. After instructor-led training, technology can be leveraged to facilitate learning reinforcement, coaching, and accountability. Richardson’s QuickCheckTM is one such tool, which sends short, multiple choice questions to participants for a period of time after receiving training. The questions are repeated until answered twice successfully and then retired until the reps have mastered the content. Participants are not only told the best correct answer, but why it is the preferred response. And managers can monitor what information has been mastered and what might need more reinforcement CRM and sales automation triggers. Instructor-led training programs should focus on how sales reps actually do their jobs in order to make the training most applicable. One of the ways to do this is to actually embed skill development into technology workflow such as a CRM system, other sales and marketing automation systems, or sales enablement systems - such as Savo. That is becoming a lot more common now. A salesperson who is actually executing a sales process and preparing for a customer conversation can access the precise learning that they will need at that point in time in order to help them execute more effectively. Social media. There’s an opportunity to leverage social media to help your trained sales reps stay focused on what you’ve taught them, extend their interest, and help each other to master the topic. As we’ve noted before, it is essential to view training as a continuous learning process and not a single event. Building a network of trained reps can give them the community they need to sustain the conversation and continue to grow. You can have closed networks for each trained class, or one for all "graduates" of a program. Once you develop such networks, try not to view them as a post-training discussion group, but one that lives and thrives before, during, and after training. This is also another opportunity for sales managers and training leaders to monitor the chatter for training ideas. Allowing salespeople to do their job is a key factor to their success. To what extent can you use technology to leave sales reps in the field while still training and developing them? Can you allow them to do what they are being paid to do every day and really stay in the moment rather than diverting to the classroom? Can technology enable this type of sales training solution to become part of their day rather than out-of-the-field event driven? At some point, you do need to bring people together for learning, but be sure to structure those events as part of a larger program of continuous learning, and don’t overlook the gains to be had by leveraging technology to increase the effectiveness of your sales training solution. Have you applied any or all of these tactics in your sales training efforts? What works best for you and why? Tell us in the comments section below. ————————————————————————- Click the following to learn more about an example of an effective technology in sales training solutions, Richardson QuickCheck(TM) The post What Is the Role of Technology in Sales Training Solutions? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Coaching for Sales Teams: Less Superman, More Clark Kent You know the picture … mild-mannered sales manager has one-on-one meeting with ordinary sales citizen, they discuss an issue, and WHAM, the sales manager makes a beeline to the phone booth (yes, they still exist) and out comes Superman or Wonder Woman, complete with red cape. Faster than a speeding sales cycle, more powerful than a strong quarter, and able to leap tall pipelines in a single bound. In their rush to rescue Metropolis, however, they may not realize that this method of coaching for sales teams is the kryptonite to their team’s performance. Here are some observations from my experience as a sales leader and from coaching sales teams and leaders: Salespeople come to us with a wide range of skills and talent. They know at least one thing far better than we do: themselves. Sales managers often come to the position based on their success as salespeople. They take pride in how they used to help clients. Now, in a management role, they want to help their team by bringing their experience and insights. How managers "help" salespeople often creates unintended consequences: - Being the superhero problem solver is not scalable and leads to burnout. - Solving the problem, while expedient, makes your team dependent (rather than independent), stunts their results and professional growth, and slows down the sales process. - Asking rather than telling takes patience and restraint — not natural strengths for most sales leaders. Effective sales managers realize that coaching for sales teams requires processes and skills that may be a departure from those they used in a selling role. While we work through this in great detail during Richardson Coaching workshops, here are some key reminders. The Three Most Powerful Words in Coaching For Sales Teams The words "what," "why," and "how" — in that order — are far more powerful tools in coaching sales teams than are speed, strength, and leaping ability. Let’s look at how each prompts an important question in an effective sales coaching dialogue: What: What happened on that sales call?  What’s happening with this opportunity?  What’s going on with this client? The "what" question leads, or forces in some cases, self-reflection by the salesperson. For the coach, it provides a data point on the salesperson’s level of awareness. Why: Why did that meeting end abruptly?  Why is this opportunity advancing so quickly?  Why has the client gone radio silent?  The "why" question guides the salesperson to identify the trigger that is causing the current state. As above, asking rather than telling provokes self-discovery and makes the salesperson accountable for discovery. How: How would you change that next time?  How could you replicate this with other opportunities?  How can you change the client’s lack of response?  The "how" question puts the salesperson in the driver’s seat with regard to his or her own development. And working with the ideas they generate increases ownership and commitment to follow through. The sales manager monitors and watches how the plan plays out and is able to move on to other things. Two New Qualities to Harness in Coaching For Sales Teams Patience and restraint are not qualities we seek in our sales leaders; in fact, we want the opposite. A sense of urgency and willingness to jump in quickly can be invaluable when, for example, setting strategy for a struggling business unit and when providing leadership to a team going through industry or organizational change. When coaching sales teams, however, we need to be able to find and draw on these qualities: patience, to allow for the self-discovery of issues, causes, and solutions, and restraint, to hold ourselves back from putting on the superhero cape and solving the problem, missing the opportunity to build the salesperson’s independence and investment in change. Even the least super of superheroes among us have been able to find within them and tap these qualities using eight simple tips: Set a clear objective for each sales coaching session, focusing on outcomes that will gain the change you need to accomplish your goals. Prepare for sales coaching sessions, especially those "what," "why," and "how" questions that will guide the salesperson through a self-discovery process. Provide a safe environment, encouraging honesty and reflection without judging or looking for "right" answers. Listen more, talk less. One of the executives I coach writes two simple words on his notepad as a sales coaching reminder: "Shut up!" Be more curious about each salesperson on your team, and have the courage to ask "why?" in response to their comment. Acknowledge that moving a salesperson out of a comfortable performance pattern will be, by definition, uncomfortable. Expect him or her to struggle. Use silence when needed, and provide support, when appropriate. See how sales coaching benefits your team, including greater empowerment, independence, excitement, and vision to get to a higher performance level. See what you gain by coaching your sales team, including increased skill level and performance from your team and more time for you to focus on higher-value activities. Coaching for sales teams is one of the key performance drivers you control as a manager. Leveraging it requires a process and some qualities you may not have needed to succeed in the past. So, the next time you hear the cry for help from somewhere in Metropolis, hold off putting on the red cape and remind yourself that the ordinary citizen may just be smart enough to save him or herself — and, in the process, free up Superman or Wonder Woman to tackle more important issues facing the great city. COMPLIMENTARY RESEARCH REPORT Download a copy of our newest research report, Content Marketing and Sales Effectiveness  The post Coaching for Sales Teams: Less Superman, More Clark Kent appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Focus Less on Learning Innovation and More on Business Outcomes I’m not a Luddite. Really. I’m a change agent. I support technological progress and the use of technology as an enabler for work performance. Learning Innovation Abounds More specifically, in terms of learning innovation, I’m an ardent advocate of: Authoring systems Asynchronous eLearning Virtual classrooms Electronic simulations Virtual reality Informal and social learning Electronic performance support systems Knowledge management and content curation Mobile learning and reinforcement …and more… not meant to be an exhaustive list What am I not fond of? Well, since you asked… I’m not fond of: Solving the wrong problem with a shiny, new solution A focus on "being innovative" instead of "getting results" or "achieving verifiable outcomes." To avoid a virtual lynching, I want to be crystal clear that I’m not suggesting that everyone in the learning community who touts these solutions or uses them is making such poor business judgments. That’s simply not true. But this is a problem I’ve seen more frequently than I would like. There is plenty of "bright, shiny object syndrome" out there. The solution challenge comes in two forms, it seems. One is the reverse; those who avoid new solutions entirely. And then my pet peeve, those who seek them out as an end in themselves. While those are both problematic, I worry more about the latter behavior. Please Pass the Bright, Shiny Object I won’t share details, but could easily cite a dozen times over the past two years where industry peers or practitioners approached me to discuss how they could create more innovative training solutions, for their companies or clients. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that on the surface. As I dug into the requests, though, and why they were looking for such a solution, in almost all cases they wanted to overcome a poor perception (lack of value) for training that was provided previously (usually to a harshly-judgmental sales audience led by those pesky, demanding sales leaders). Words I heard frequently included, "new, exciting, different, innovative, technology, and fresh." Hmm. A perception problem, in search of a bright, shiny object. What I didn’t often hear about was a problem-solving approach with a focus on results, outcomes, behavior change, or solving strategic business problems through learning, to achieve specific business outcomes. This hurts us all. It hurts our industry and our reputation as a profession. It damages the perception of the business value we deliver, removes any hope of being perceived as thought leaders, erodes credibility, impairs trust, lessens impact, and reduces us to people pleasers who pursue great smile sheet ratings at the expense of business impact. If this is how we want to behave, we might as well be entertainment directors. The Not-So-Merry Go-Round Some among us have been doing this for years now, though, haven’t they? I have a love/hate relationship with learning innovation for this exact reason. All of those innovations that I said I support, listed above at the beginning of this post, are truly awesome innovations, and frankly, very cool (or is that "kewl?"). Some are newer, others have been around for years but still aren’t well utilized. (Remember when elearning was going to kill off ILT? How about Gloria Gery’s first edition of Making CBT Happen?) We need to stop this. We need to get very serious about elevating the learning and performance profession, especially for those of us involved with fueling our sales forces (since no selling = no company). So, I’ll end this post offering two things: To encourage better analysis (aka job, need, gap, and root-cause analysis) of the real issues, so your solutions solve them and you can add real business value. To consider, at a high-level, about how you might combine both concepts (solving the real problem with innovating learning options). Consider it a blueprint of sorts… or ways to weave learning innovations into your solutions as you create great learning systems (that is, when the problem can be solved by training - which is a topic for another post). Ways to Apply Learning Innovation in Support of Business Outcomes With that in mind, here are some suggestions to consider. This list is not meant to be linear, nor exhaustive. But hopefully it will offer and spur some helpful ideas. When you identify a business problem and determine that it can be solved through sales training: In your analysis, study the right top producers and exemplary performers to identify the right content. In your design and development, chunk, sequence and layer the knowledge that is required to perform tasks differently and use asynchronous learning for the knowledge transfer. Deliver, assess, track and report the training progress and results through an LMS. Use virtual classrooms for information that requires voice-to-voice engagement for demonstrations, more complex concepts, or for preparation for upcoming classroom exercises or activities. Focus ILT on creating loops of skill practice with feedback loops/coaching and re-application. Help learners move as far toward mastery as possible, while they are with you. Consider an assessment center approach, using simulations that are as realistic as possible. Use assessment tools to test and report learning along the way and also Level 2 learning (knowledge). Use mobile apps to reinforce and assess learning, post-course. Set-up online communities for discussion, sharing, questions and answers. (Consider a Wiki, Chatter, SharePoint, Yammer and other tools.) Build the changes/learning into workflow. Provide integrated workflow performance support whenever possible. Of course, to make a business impact, even these suggestions require the learning solution to be aimed at problems that training can solve, and a link between the new behaviors and a strategic business objective. Combine those elements consistently but put results first, and you’ll be well on your way to earning that coveted "seat at the table" in your organization. Additional Related Reading: Posts on "problem solving" from Tim Ohai How to Select and Prioritize Sales Enablement Initiatives Needs Assessment in Instructional Design Asynchronous Learning Networks for Knowledge Posts on "virtual classroom" from Roger Courville’s TheVirtualPresenter.com —————————————————————————————- DOWNLOAD OUR COMPLIMENTARY ARTICLE  Please download our complimentary article, Using Verifiable Outcomes in the Sales Process to Change and Track Behavior.  The post Focus Less on Learning Innovation and More on Business Outcomes appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Is Email on Life support as a Sales Effectiveness Tool? A few months ago, I did a blog post on the Top Ten Disruptive Sales Technologies. I did not include email because it was pretty much a given, considering its serious blow to postal mail and phone tag. But it’s worth considering the question: Has the influx of new and more personal technologies put email on life support as a sales effectiveness tool? Let’s look at two examples that suggest email may be on the way out for developing new clients and building relationships with existing clients. 1) New Client Development Symptoms: Over a two-week span, I counted every email I received. The total number was scary: well over 2,300 emails. With 64%, or 1,472 emails, I was being sold or marketed to by either content marketing campaigns, automated follow-ups to campaigns, salespeople prospecting me, or salespeople following-up to their follow-up. Project those numbers over a 52-week year, and that’s well over 38,000 emails—over 100 emails every day of the year—focused on selling me something, providing me with insights, or teaching me something that someone thought I did not know. The effectiveness of these attempts at nurturing me as a prospect suffered greatly from the constant barrage of emails. Diagnosis: Marketing automation companies may not want to hear this, but capturing share of mind with prospects via email has become extremely difficult. The trend reports on email opens and click-throughs all say different things; there’s no consensus. Some say open rates are up, other’s say they are down. Some vendors argue that persuading prospects to click on an email link is based on a variety of tactics. However, in conversations with my fellow senior-level marketing peers, all tell me their open rates are down, and they are having more issues with the effectiveness of email. My own marketing campaigns have seen steadily declining open rates over the past couple of years, from 27% to 23%, now hovering at around 12%. Like direct mail a few years ago, email created a cost-effective mass communications tool for marketers. Marketing automation tools ripped down barriers even further, and now there is a significant increase in reliance on email for prospecting and lead nurturing. With everyone jumping onboard, the flood of emails has made it harder to gain the attention of prospects - and using email to effectively acquire clients will get even more difficult in the future. Treatment: In my blog post, Some Do’s and Don’ts for Better Lead Nurturing and Follow Up, I discuss a multi-channel Follow-up Communication Plan. This is critical. In the client-acquisition phase, you can no longer rely on a single modality to help you drive early-stage opportunities. You have to develop content marketing campaigns, leverage social media, and, most important, get out from the safety of email to network face-to-face, ask for referrals, and - oh yeah - pick up the phone and talk to someone. 2) Building Relationships Symptoms: I am a staunch believer and advocate of the fact that relationships drive sales. I see many salespeople falling into the trap of relying on email to build and maintain relationships. But how well can that work given the sheer volume of email we all get? I was out to dinner with a friend a few weeks ago when he told me about losing one of his biggest clients. The client told the rep that he was not communicating with him. My friend looked at me and said, "I don’t get that. I sent him five emails and he never replied back to me. I don’t know what he is talking about that I don’t communicate." Hmmmm…. Diagnosis: When you think about your closest relationships, how do you communicate with them today? Is it by email? How many emails have you sent your wife, partner, or kids lately? If you sent your spouse five emails and did not get a reply, would you really think everything was OK in the relationship? Today, we have a vast number of tools to reach out with. We can text, tweet, phone, or use any number of social media messaging platforms, including audio and video. I can’t remember the last time I sent an email to one my closest friends or family. Yet, some sales reps are relying solely on email to manage their best clients. Treatment: Change things up. Texting is a very personal communications medium and some clients may find it intrusive. But why not ask them if they mind if you text them? In fact, why not go one step further and actually ask them how they prefer you to communicate with them? Some clients may only want email, but your closer relationships may  be open to texting and more personal forms of communications. Email will not be going away anytime soon. It has become too ingrained in the way we work, operate, and communicate. But it’s important to note that email has lost a lot of the shiny, new technology effect and is becoming less important as a sales effectiveness tool. That means you have to step up your game and find the best ways to communicate with your clients and prospects. It may take a little more time, but you’ll be much more effective if you can adapt a variety of strategies and tactics to identify, maintain, and build client relationships. ————————————- Learn how your sales teams can sell with insights and help shape your client’s thinking, with Richardson’s new sales training solution, Selling with Insights™ The post Is eMail on Life support as a Sales Effectiveness Tool? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.