Challenger Selling: "Courageous Questions" Differ from "Grenades" Many sales leaders are urging their salespeople to adopt a challenger selling methodology and ask "challenging" questions to have effective sales meetings with prospects and clients. The intent is to be more provocative, create differentiation in a crowded market, provide insight, and hopefully add more value to the conversation. This post is designed to share some mistakes I have been seeing with this approach and to offer suggestions for properly asking "courageous questions" in an effective sales meeting. First, what is a courageous question? Many questions can take courage, including ones that are: Direct Delicate Challenging to current thinking Seeking commitment Insightful Thought-provoking Courageous questions — relevant to the client and well asked — can take a relationship in a new and positive direction as part of an effective sales meeting. Yet, why are some received as "grenades?" The movie equivalent is Bruce Willis walking away from the villains’ hideout, pulling the pin on the grenade, tossing it over his shoulder … BOOM … causing a huge explosion in his wake. Throwing a grenade question on the table is not courageous, it’s a selling mistake. On this topic, I have been seeing different problems from two categories of sales professionals. The first group of salespeople — long on confidence, armed with industry marketing intelligence, and feeling empowered by their leaders — are more than willing to ask challenging questions in prospect and client meetings. Of course, challenging current thinking is likely to cause resistance. Instead of getting either mild resistance or the "wow" factor that they are expecting, they are met with significant blowback or stunned looks. Rather than marking an inflection point from which the relationship advances in a new and positive way, it now marks the fall-away point. The second group of sales professionals, not as long on confidence and without a process to challenge thought, avoid asking the courageous questions. And, while competitors start to make inroads in the relationship, these salespeople wonder why the client relationship has stalled. So, how do you ensure that your courageous question is received well and not as a grenade? Here are eight best practices for integrating courageous questions into an effective sales meeting: Know where you stand: If you are at all unsure that the foundation upon which your client relationship is built is solid, seek feedback, and know where you stand. No assumptions, as courageous questions are best delivered from a position of strength. Establish trust: Look for signs in your interactions that trust has been established. These can include kudos for positive past dealings, an open exchange of information, responsiveness to calls and meeting requests, and client-initiated calls. Establish credibility: This does not require you to be all-knowing on all subjects. It does mean that, because of your background, your work, and the organization behind you, the client sees value in engaging with you on this new topic. Prepare and practice: Preparing and then practicing with a colleague tends to ground the over-confident and build conviction in the should-be-more-confident. Both language and delivery matter, so prepare to receive feedback on both prior to the client meeting. Choose an appropriate setting: Challenging a client’s thinking can feel awkward to you and threatening to the client, especially in front of others. Choose a meeting location and time that puts folks at ease rather than on edge. And, think carefully about how your question impacts not just the intended recipient but also others who may be present. Set the context: Courageous questions are relevant to the recipient. A relevant question reflects your knowledge about the client, as well as his/her organization and the industry/market in which it operates. Structure the question skillfully: Combine a good preface, which expressly states why you are asking the question and/or why the customer should reply. Use an open-ended structure to invite discussion. Allow silence, and listen: It is not tough to tell when someone is genuinely interested in your thoughts. What is tough for many salespeople is taking a breath, engaging silence and listening, being attentive to language and cues, and being curious enough to continue the dialogue by asking deeper questions based on the client’s reaction. The same guidelines go for colleagues who may join you at this meeting. Inform them about this part of the meeting, and, if they have a tendency to "ease the tension" and fill the silence, practice with them both the delivery and the silence that follows. Remember the movie "Top Gun," starring Tom Cruise ("Maverick"), the classic 1980s film that glamorized navy pilots? In a practice drill, Maverick locks onto an enemy fighter, and his flight instructor coaxes him to "take the shot." Grenade questions ignore the best practices above, and taking the shot may result in a crash-and-burn, eroding trust and credibility. In cases where you’ve earned it, leverage the best practices above in an effective sales meeting, take the shot confidently, and enjoy the new dialogue stream — and opportunities — created by your courageous question. ——————————————- Complimentary eBook - click here, or on the image below to download our latest eBook, A Leader’s guide to Successfully Sell with Insights.  The post Challenger Selling: "Courageous Questions" Differ from "Grenades" appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

How to Create a Sales Training Budget to Support Sales Skill Development According to a July 2014 report from Bersin by Deloitte, year-over-year change in training spending has not only recovered since the downturn, it more than doubled between 2006 and 2013 (up 7% and 15%, respectively). With that level of investment, the exercise and process of setting next year’s budget in support of sales training and skill development presents an opportunity that should not be squandered. Don’t just take last year’s budget and add 5% or 10%. Unless you’re perfect in every way, doing more of the same will get you the same results. Take a strategic approach to creating your sales training budget. Depending on your needs, it could be dramatically more (or less!) than last year’s. Here are a few suggestions to maximize your sales skill development budget and training efforts. Organizational Strategy and Goals Start by thinking about the big picture: What is your business trying to accomplish? How has that changed in the last year? A SWOT analysis can help you start to narrow your focus on what you need to do differently. Now, based on organizational goals, what sales training is necessary to support these objectives? Your training should help you build on strengths, fortify weaknesses, capitalize on opportunities, and mitigate threats. For example, a common threat is changing buyer behavior. Functional buyers now have more authority over technical buyers, which requires a different sales conversation than your sales reps have had in the past. Another scenario is the introduction of new products or solutions, which requires sales reps to understand not just features, but also to know how to position the product with buyers. At this high a level of analysis, it’s about tradeoffs: you likely have numerous strategies and goals, but you must prioritize them and address the most important ones. If you can’t do everything, what will have the greatest impact toward aligning your training strategy with your organization’s goals? Individual Competencies and Capabilities Now, take your focus down from the organizational to the individual level. What do your sales leaders, sales managers, and sales reps need to do differently to achieve your objectives and goals? How significant of a change is that? The degree of change will dictate the intensity and direction of your developmental efforts. Before you know what training to tackle, you need to know their capabilities. Assess your sales reps’ strengths and weaknesses against your selling needs, and then, look for training opportunities to build skills and bridge knowledge gaps. Determine Needs and Sales Training Budget There are a number of factors and details to include when preparing your formal budgetary request: Scope — Consider all of areas that you will address through training. It could be some aspect of customer dialogue skills, opportunity or account management, presentation skills, and negotiation skills to name but a few. Typically, the broader the scope, the more you will need to budget. Scale — Consider the number of people you’ll train, noting the level and breadth across the sales organization. In addition to sales reps, consider training for sales managers and leaders to help drive the change. Clearly, the more people that will require training, the more you will need to budget. Pre-, mid-, and post-training assessments — To get where you’re going, you need to know where you are. Assess your team’s current capabilities before, during, and after the training to ensure that it has had the desired effect. Measurement — Just as you need to assess individuals, look for organizational benchmarks to monitor before and after the training. It could include the number of sales calls, meetings held, sales funnel status, length of sale, size of sale, win/loss, and others. Communication program — Let your sales reps know why you’re doing things differently this year and what you expect them to get out of it. Reinforce the mindset, behaviors, and approach that they should be taking when prospecting and selling as a result of the skills you want them to learn. Carry on communicating long after the training, and connect it to the big picture. Hard costs — These are the quantifiable costs of training, including travel and meals, conference rooms or centers, outside facilitators, training materials, equipment rental, and related expenses. Justify the Value of the Training After going through such a rigorous planning exercise, it would not be surprising that your budget request to fulfill next year’s sales skills development training needs could be markedly different than in previous years. This will likely raise a flag with not only your higher-ups but also leaders in HR and Finance. Be prepared to outline why the approach and investment make sense given the potential benefit. "If we continue to do ABC, the results will be predictably like last year’s. But, if we do XYZ, the outcome will more closely align our selling activities to support the goals of the business." Be transparent and realistic so that your credibility isn’t questioned, and don’t overlook the need to "sell" the new training approach to the sales reps who will go through it, as well as your superiors who need to approve it. ———— Complimentary eBook - click here, or on the image below to download our latest eBook, A Leader’s guide to Successfully Sell with Insights.  The post How to Create a Sales Training Budget to Support Sales Skill Development appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Quick Tips to Better Align Sales and Marketing Obvious fact: If you align sales and marketing teams, you will drive better leads, close more business, and reduce internal conflicts that may stand in the way of meeting objectives. Survey Reveals Breakdown: The annual CSO Insights survey reports that major issues still exist between these two essential teams. Findings include the following: 63% cited the need for improvement in marketing-generated lead quality and quantity Only 43% said they had a formal process for qualifying a lead 45% said supporting materials needed improvement What can be done to improve these numbers and better align sales and marketing? Create a Mutual Service Level Agreement (SLA) — With an effective SLA, both teams agree on priorities and accountabilities for deliverables. They commit to collaborating on programs and to discuss challenges openly. Quick Tip: SLAs should include joint goal creation, meeting cadence, sales responsibilities, and marketing responsibilities. KPI Alignment — Key performance indicators for both teams must be in sync, with marketing supporting sales and vice versa. Lead Criteria — Sales and marketing need to agree on the definition of a good lead vs. a bad lead. Quick Tip: Define the elements of a qualified lead, allow marketing to do the initial follow-up and qualification if it is a marketing-generated lead, sales must close out wins and losses with relevant information, and make sure contacts are added and updated in the CRM. Leverage Content Effectively — Sales and marketing both play a critical role in content-based marketing, using and sharing the insights and content created within the organization. Quick Tip: Embrace and share social selling tools, including mentions and links of company articles on LinkedIn, tweeting or re-tweeting ideas or company tweets, creating circles and sharing information on Google+, and reaching out to prospects and clients to share relevant articles with an "I thought you might find this interesting" note. Sales Enablement — Marketing needs a clear view into how they can support sales at each stage of the sales cycle so that they can deliver the appropriate tools and materials to drive prospects through the pipeline. Quick Tip: This generic sales process can offer a starting point for what marketing can help support. It also may help to define triggers that signal when to really move a lead into the sales cycle. Qualification: E-mail templates, product playbooks, brochures, case studies, fact sheets Discovery: Industry information, white papers, validation letters Proposal: Updated proposal templates, RFP resources, solution outlines Presentation: PowerPoint template, demos Close: Contracts, master service agreements, implementation plans Now more than ever, sales and marketing teams must work together to achieve a common goal. No longer can either succeed in a silo. True alignment will take time, commitment, and strong leadership to ensure that changes occur. When they do, and both teams are aligned and working toward the same goals, the whole organization will benefit. Do you have more tips? What have been some of your challenges with aligning marketing and sales? Let us know! ———————————- Complimentary Industry Brief Download our newest Sales Training Industry Brief - 5 Keys to Insurance Sales Success The post Quick Tips to Better Align Sales and Marketing appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

2015 Sales Challenges Richardson is conducting a research project on the 2015 Sales Challenges that you feel you may be facing in the upcoming year. Please click on the link below to participate in this short survey. Your input is critical to the success of the study and we appreciate your time and honesty in responding to the questions. Click the following to complete the Survey (http://bit.ly/1yRT3lk) If you are not currently a sales representative or sales manager, we would appreciate if you could forward this e-mail to your sales team to complete. For submitting the survey, you will receive a free copy of the final report and become eligible to win a new Nike Fuel Band. Thank you in advance for your consideration. Jim Brodo   The post 2015 Sales Challenges appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Strategic Use of Assessments to Identify Sales Talent and Build Sales Dialogue Skills Often in sales, it is the intangible qualities that separate a high-performing salesperson from an average one. These intangible qualities include some combination of a high-performer’s natural sales talent and the sales dialogue skills they actually demonstrate when interacting with clients and stakeholders. How do you accurately identify this mix of sales talent and selling skills to ensure that you know the "secret sauce" that makes someone a high-performing salesperson in your organization? Begin with Your Strategy It has to begin with your go-to-market strategy. A go-to-market strategy that is based on bringing in net new clients with a large national or global footprint by offering truly innovative solutions is different than a go-to-market strategy that is focused on harvesting a broad array of new opportunities through deep customer intimacy. Both strategies are equally valid ways to achieve your revenue target but the sales talent and selling skills needed to execute them successfully will be different. This is crucial to get right - the mix of sales talent and selling skills that makes someone a high-performer within the context of the first go-to-market strategy will probably make them only an average performer or even mediocre in executing the second go-to-market strategy. If your sales organization is pursuing a hybrid go-to-market strategy, make sure you know which of the mixed strategies you are trying to enable at a specific time. Figure Out Your Team’s Natural Strengths Sales is about playing to the strengths of your salespeople in order to win in a competitive marketplace. If your go-to-market strategy is changing or you are a new sales executive coming into lead a sales organization, you need to understand your team’s natural strengths. Over time, sales organizations tend to hire sales talent similar to the talent that already exists in the organization simply because people like to hire people that are similar to themselves. As a result, the salespeople in many organizations tend to be highly concentrated in a specific part of the sales talent spectrum and this can be limiting. If you are changing your go-to-market strategy or you are a new sales executive, you need to know what your team is inherently good at even if you do not spend time and effort to train them - the team’s raw sales talent. Conducting a sales talent audit using a highly valid and reliable assessment will enable you to make this raw sales talent visible and quantifiable. You can then determine if there is a misalignment between your go-to-market strategy and your team’s natural strengths. If there is good alignment between your go-to-market strategy and your team’s natural strengths, invest in training to super-charge those strengths. If there is misalignment between your go-to-market strategy and your team’s strengths, you have to make some hard talent management decisions about how to get alignment. Identify Key Interactions Sales is not B2B, it is people to people. That means most of your sales team’s wins and losses are going to occur in their sales dialogues with clients. As a sales executive, you are going to focus on the quality of these sales dialogues like a laser. This is often where you will want to invest time and resources to refine and develop specific skills such as: resolving objections, exploring needs, and positioning insights. But in any sales organization there are going to be more "skill gaps" than you have time and resources to develop in a single training program. So you will need to prioritize which "skill gaps" are having the greatest negative impact on your results and address those first. In order to not degenerate into factional fighting about what is and is not emphasized in the training, conduct a skill assessment that benchmarks your sales team’s dialogue skills again a robust database. Not only will you see how your team compares to other sales teams’ dialogue skills, you will be able to identify those "skill gaps" that fall significantly below the benchmark and invest heavily in training on those specific skills in your first training program. As a bonus, the skill assessment can measure the results of training by comparing pre-training scores on specific skills with post-training scores on those skills. Measuring behavior change is critical in order to know that your investment in training is paying off. Where to Start Sales talent and selling skills are two sides of the same coin. Inherent strengths that naturally exist and dialogue skills that can be developed both "co-habitat" in the same salesperson. They are different and require different assessments. However, sales talent and selling skills are also both necessary to sales performance. If you are changing your go-to-market strategy or have inherited a sales organization that you do not know well, the first best move is to check the alignment between the sales team’s talent and the go-to-market strategy so that you can make wise talent management decisions. If your go-to-market strategy is stable or you have been leading your sales organization for a while, assessing your team’s dialogue skills should be sufficient to wisely invest in their skill development. Most sales organizations need to clearly understand both the talent and skills that are in front of clients every day. By properly sequencing both talent and skill assessments over the course of multiple years, a sales executive gets a complete picture. The strategic decision is to know where you want to start. Learn More about how Richardson’s TalentGauge and SkillGauge can help you improve sales performance.  The post Strategic Use of Assessments to Identify Sales Talent and Build Sales Dialogue Skills appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Closing: Winning Sales Tips for Closing Effectively in 2015 As 2014 rapidly comes to a close, this is a great transition point to reflect on past, present, and future. Among the things that deserve some focus is closing. Whether the close is a client call, meeting, contract renewal or extension, or a new partnership or business agreement, each is an important transition point from the end of something to the start of something else. Done well, closing positions you for success, reinforces client confidence, and sets you up to execute on client expectations. In my coaching and classroom work this year, I continued to see confusion and struggles around the topic of closing. To help you or your team close sales meetings more effectively in 2015, let’s look at: A readiness to close checklist Winning practices A process for closing any meeting effectively READINESS Closing a meeting or deal often gets fumbled due to several common missteps. See how many of the following questions you can check off with a "Yes." Have you: - Defined the close or the commitment(s) you will be seeking at this meeting? - Shared and validated the close with your team? - Decided who will close? - Overcome self-limiting obstacles, such as: Concerns about coming across as pushy, confrontational, or icky (sure, that’s a word)? Believing that clients close themselves? Using a presumptive close? Rushing to close based more on self-confidence than on client-based facts and feedback? - A full appreciation for the importance of closing well — for you, your organization, and (often forgotten) for the client? BEST PRACTICES If we can agree that business relationships are advanced when every client or prospect interaction is ended professionally and completely, here are some reminders on best practices that lay the groundwork for an effective close that you, your team, and your client can feel good about: Prepare: Define the team’s goal for this meeting — i.e., ask for the business, a referral, or a next meeting, etc. Be specific, put timing around it, and don’t keep it to yourself. Winning teams arrive at key sales meetings fully informed and aligned on the mission. Assign lead responsibility for this part of the meeting or pitch. Once accepted, be willing as a team to role play this a few times and share feedback. Even if the person making the ask is your CEO? Especially in the case of a senior, many of whom don’t receive the honest feedback they need to accomplish the team’s mission. Mindset: Clients not only expect you to close the meeting you requested, they need it so that your execution meets their expectations. Avoid the presumed close. Example: "We are ready to get started. Can we send you an agreement?" Client agreed that you could do some (free) work in producing documents that they may or may not choose to sign. This skips the close with no commitment conveyed.  Feedback: Seeking client feedback throughout the process and conversation ensures that you stay aligned. It also ensures that the client is as confident in your team as you are in asking for an important commitment. PROCESS: THE NEW "A-B-C" When prompted to close, many of us immediately remember a young Alec Baldwin in David Mamet’s "Glengarry Glen Ross," coaxing a group of weathered salesmen to "A=Always, B=Be, C=Closing." A good close is not heroic or chest-thumping — it is a natural step in a conversation, is polished, and gains clarity on commitments and next steps. The new A-B-C of closing that is fully in line with today’s market dynamics is: A=Ask, B=Be Clear, C=Chronicle: 1) A=Ask about remaining issues, concerns, or needs. Asking an open-ended question, such as, "What issues are still on your mind?" can surface both new opportunities and doubts, both of which are best addressed in person. 2) B=Be clear on what commitments are being made. Ask a closed-ended question. Modifying one from above: "We are ready to get started. Are you ready to begin working with us?" This enables the team to leave that meeting with a better sense of clarity on what, if any, commitments were made. If this feels too direct, consider prefacing the ask. Example: "So that we can properly plan next steps, are you ready to hire us for this work?" 3) C=Chronicle next steps. Inventory the follow-up plan, including who is going to do what by when. A crisp and complete recap reinforces the client’s commitment to you. Open-ended questions here can convey client empowerment. For example, "How would you like the kickoff meeting to be structured with your team?" In summary, approach your close methodically — with preparation, a positive mindset, and client feedback. And, follow the new A-B-C to close that next dialogue confidently and completely — and with clarity! ——- Learn More about how you can close more with Richardson’s Consultative Selling sales training solutions. Click here. The post Closing: Winning Sales Tips for Closing Effectively in 2015 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Content Marketing: How the Marketing Team Should work with Sales  - Part I Content marketing — it’s all the rage. A reported 93% of B2B marketing teams in North America are using a content marketing approach, according to B2B Content Marketing 2014 research. While that’s an impressive number, only 9% of survey respondents felt it was "very effective," while 33% said "effective." That tells me people are jumping on the bandwagon without clear strategies, tactics, or implementation. So that we’re all on the same page, let’s start with defining what we mean by content marketing. Or, more appropriately, how Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which publishes the annual B2B survey, defines it: "Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action." This content can take any number of forms: blog posts, videos, white papers, printed or electronic books, infographics, case studies, emails, newsletters, articles, and so on. Even though it plays a valuable and critical role in today’s marketing mix, content marketing is often misunderstood by those in sales. I would be rich if I had a nickel for every time a sales rep has said: "That’s just a download; what am I supposed to do with it?" Given all the investment and focus being spent on content marketing, the only way to make an impact — to drive profitable customer action — is for marketing and sales to be in sync and supporting each other. Here are a few tips to better align marketing and sales to optimize a content-based marketing approach. Marketing should: Survey the sales team to get input on what support materials they would like to see from marketing and to glean insights from their daily experience with clients, prospects, the market, and even competitors in the field. Not only will you get more buy-in and alleviate a "throw-it-over-the-wall" approach, but the marketing team also will benefit from greater exposure to the overall business environment, enabling them to create more relevant content. Communicate the content strategy and publish an editorial calendar. Sharing your strategy is a critical step for successful alignment with sales. Give them a copy of the editorial calendar so they can plan related activities around the launch of specific content. Create relevant content. Make sure to feature content that is relevant to your company and products and services. Don’t make it hard for the sales team to relate the value of marketing content to their targets; even the best content can distract from the sale if it’s not relevant to what the company offers. Make sure sales can find the content. If the materials are just thrown into a folder on a network, no one will know where it is or what a specific piece is about. At Richardson, we use SAVO’s Sales Content Pro to house and manage all of our content. This is a great tool to tag and provide information about the content, which is linked to the appropriate stage in the selling process, which brings me to the next point… Have a strategy that creates content appropriate for each stage of the selling process. Content should be different for each stage of the sales process: qualification, discovery, proposal, presentation, and close. What’s relevant for prospecting is not the same when sales is presenting or expanding a relationship. Make sure marketing fully understands the buying and selling process to ensure the content will support the acquisition of new customers and growing value with existing ones. Stay tuned for "Content marketing: Part II; How the sales team should work with marketing."  The post Content Marketing: How the Marketing Team Should work with Sales - Part I appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Content marketing: How the Sales Team Should Work with Marketing In Part I of this series, we talked about the rising popularity of content-based marketing. A reported 93% of B2B marketing teams in North America are using a content-marketing approach, according to B2B Content Marketing 2014 research. While that’s an impressive number, only 9% of survey respondents felt it was "very effective," while 33% said "effective." That tells me people are jumping on the bandwagon without clear strategies, tactics, or implementation. I shared a definition used by Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which publishes the annual B2B survey: "Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action." While Part I focused on tips for how marketing could become better aligned with sales, now let’s turn to what sales can do to align with marketing in order to optimize a content-marketing approach. Sales should: Share content broadly. Salespeople who share good content add to their credibility and position themselves as trusted advisors or go-to resources. Such sharing takes the form of regularly posting content on LinkedIn, tweeting about it, emailing it, snail-mailing it, using it as a post-meeting take-away — whatever method works to get content in front of the client. Communicate with the content development team. Don’t wait for marketing surveys or the editorial calendar; take an active role in helping the marketing team deliver the content that sales reps need to engage prospects and clients. If one rep is thinking about a certain topic that would be helpful for a blog post or other marketing material, other reps are surely thinking the same thing. But, marketing will never know unless someone in sales tells them. Follow up, and then follow up some more. Effective follow-up and nurturing of a lead who has downloaded a piece of content is vital to the success of that particular marketing campaign. Even if the prospect doesn’t have an identified need or isn’t a hot lead, it’s likely there is some interest in the company’s products or services related to the download content. Use the content as a way to connect and build credibility. It may take time, but the only way anything will happen is if sales reps reach out, follow up, and nurture the lead. While it may be tempting to give up and move on to the next lead if there’s no immediate callback or response, slow and steady wins the race — especially with content-based marketing. Content marketing is here to stay. A projected 35% of every company’s marketing budget will be spent on content-based marketing development and campaigns. But marketing just can’t develop good pieces and send them out. And sales just can’t discount the longer-term effects of a good content-marketing strategy. Both must be aligned with the strategy and implementation. Together, marketing and sales can drive much higher returns on marketing investments and, ultimately, achieve business outcomes. ——— New For 2015 - Complimentary Research Paper Best Practices for the Design and Delivery of Sales Training - Click here to download The post Content Marketing: How the Sales Team Should Work with Marketing appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Social Selling Made Easy Social networks represent a huge lead generation opportunity for sales professionals. But taking full advantage of this opportunity - using the right social sites, connecting to the right people, posting with proper etiquette, and following company policies - can seem overly complex and overwhelming. That’s why I’m so impressed with PeopleLinx. It makes the process so easy that I’m happily bestowing a Richy Award on it for Best Social Selling Tool. At Richardson, we test drive a lot of sales support and enablement tools; and, as a leader in sales training and performance improvement, we know a winner when we see one. We created the Richy Awards as a way to recognize cool, innovative, and standout products that make an impact on improving sales effectiveness and efficiency. That brings me back to PeopleLinx. Created by early LinkedIn employees in 2009, PeopleLinx makes social selling easy. And that’s important because, as studies show, buyers now complete 60 percent of their decision process before ever contacting a sales professional. Buyers are also five times more likely to trust online recommendations from people they know than from brands. And social leads generated by individuals are seven times more likely to close than those generated from corporate accounts. PeopleLinx takes advantage of cloud-based technology and integrates completely with CRM systems. It helps to drive new business using social networks by providing the tools required for social selling success. For example, sales professionals using PeopleLinx can easily achieve the following: Enhance their personal brands by optimizing their social profiles. Leverage networks to get warm introductions to sales targets. Share relevant and engaging content that attracts leads. Listen to social networks for business opportunities. The system includes automated alerts to sales professionals when there’s new content available for sharing. They can then post approved content to multiple social networks from their smartphone, tablet, or computer. Salesforce.com integration delivers seamless access in the context of daily workflow, and gamification creates a competitive dynamic that spurs adoption. The impact of social sharing can be measured through analytics that track tasks completed, content shared, and interactions generated with potential prospects. Whether you’re already immersed in content marketing using social media or unsure how to start, consider this final statistic: Research shows that sales teams hit their quotas 31 percent more frequently when they use LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks as part of their process. Now consider your approach, current or planned. Then do yourself a favor and check out PeopleLinx to, as its tagline says, "Empower your teams to drive awareness, leads, and deals through social networks." It really is Social Selling Made Easy!  If you would like to make a connection with PeopleLinx, please click here and we can make an introduction! The post Social Selling Made Easy appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Richardson and Training Industry, Inc. Release New Research, Best Practices in Design and Delivery of Sales Training Programs  Philadelphia, PA—January 16, 2015— Richardson, a leading global sales training and performance improvement company, and Training Industry, Inc. announced that it has launched a new research report, Best Practices in Design and Delivery of Sales Training Programs. The report researched the sales training programs and initiatives that organizations are using and any patterns in how these organizations leverage external providers to assist in achieving performance goals. The study, which included 223 companies, reveals several key findings, including: Only 22% of organizations’ sales training programs were rated "very" effective Instructor‐led classroom training, on‐the‐job training, and on‐the‐job coaching are currently used most frequently Instructor‐led online training, video‐based learning, mobile learning, and social learning are most frequently identified for planned use External providers were leveraged most often for training sales representatives and managers, defining sales process , and providing L&D data/tools (e.g., CRM) "This particular study provides a better understanding of how effective organizations deliver sales training, what they’re training, and when they’re leveraging third‐party providers," said Tom Whelan, Training Industry, Inc.’s Director of Corporate Research. "Organizations armed with this information can make more informed decisions about where to allocate sales training resources—including strategies and practices they may not otherwise have considered." "Training, developing, and building the skills of the sales team is a critical element to every organization," says Jim Brodo, SVP of Marketing for Richardson. "With the growth of digital technologies and changes in the selling market great training is critically important to every organization. This report offers valuable market information and best practice data, and will help to provide a direction where organizations can focus on to maximize their sales training investments."     To download this report, please click here. The post New Research, Best Practices in Design and Delivery of Sales Training Programs appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.