It's that time of year again when all of the "Best of 2011" blog posts, newsletters, and magazine articles are coming out - from the best new business books to the best restaurants in every city. This year we are thrilled that RAIN Group and our online publication RainToday.com have been nominated for an unprecedented total of 7 Top Sales and Marketing Awards. But the voting ends tomorrow! With stiff competition in each category, we need all the voting help we can get. If you find that we're deserving and you would be willing to vote for us, we're up for:      

The votes have been counted and the results of the 2011 Top Sales Awards are in. We are thrilled that RAIN Group brought home 6 awards in total including the gold in 4 categories: Top Thought Leader: Mike Schultz and John Doerr Top Sales Book: Rainmaking Conversations Top Sales Resource Site: RainToday.com (taking home the gold for a second year in a row)      

What does sales training failure look like? Hear any of the following comments after asking, "How was the sales training?" and you're closing in on it. Failure is popular these days. Seriously. I’ve been reading (and recommend) The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. In The Lean Startup, Ries covers a number of concepts to help entrepreneurs and their new ventures to succeed. One such concept is ‘Validated Learning’. Essentially, Validated Learning is a process by which you try a lot of things that you think make sense, measure the results, find that you made a lot of mistakes and hit on some successes, and keep on keeping on by avoiding the mistakes and testing new things.   I like it. For a business.  For sales training, not so much. I’m a fan of failure when...      

According to ES Research between 85% and 90% of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days. At the same time, companies are spending billions of dollars on sales training each year. That’s billions of dollars being wasted on limited sales performance impact and only short-term boosts in sales at best. Training can be a disappointment right away when it just doesn’t go well, or it can be a disappointment months later when results don’t materialize. Regardless, sales training strikes out a lot. When it does, it’s usually because of common and predictable reasons. But if you can avoid these mistakes, you can set yourself up for a successful training initiative that leads to increased sales performance and long-term revenue growth. Here are 7 reasons why your sales training might be failing...      

There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. A hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.  - Harry Belafonte Here at RAIN Group, our advice to organizations looking to create a culture of sustained, serious selling: Make sure the bucket doesn't have any holes or it won't hold water. Time and again we see organizations doing a certain percent of what they need to do to help their teams achieve more sales success and increase sales performance (our favorite, "Can you come in and give a 90-minute speech that will charge up the team for the next 12 months?"), but rarely do they put forth 100% effort. If you're only doing 70% of what you need to do to increase sales performance, you don't get 70% results; you get much less. Like patching a leak in the bottom of a boat, if you don't patch it 100%, it still takes on water. So if your charge is to create a team of rainmakers, those people responsible for selling who are bringing in three, five, or seven times more revenue than everyone else, make sure you...      

In our last post about building a rainmaking sales culture, we discussed the three areas of organizationally-controlled influences you need to address in order to create the best sales environment in which your sales team can thrive and succeed: Organizational Influences:    1. Expectations and Feedback    2. Tools and Resources    3. Consequences and Incentives In this post we will discuss how to make certain you have the best rainmakers and potential rainmakers working in that culture. We’ll look at the three factors that are a part of who is on your team, who can sell, and, just as importantly, who will sell. These 3 factors are...      

If your firm is like most, you’ve been using CRM software for years now. Name after name, title after title, data point upon data point, you’ve likely stockpiled a huge amount of prospecting information through various lead generation activities. You’ve created countless records and guided each one through your sales pipeline. What do you do with those records once you can no longer push them forward? Again, if your firm is like most, you probably leave them languishing in your database, perhaps with a sad "lost - chose competitor" or "dead - no budget" tag attached. But these are more than just dead data...      

Is your account team playing all the right roles? Ask leaders at companies how much more they believe they could be selling to their strategic accounts and you don’t hear 5%, 10%, or 20%. It’s usually more like, "We should be selling 2 times…3 times…even more." Ask what’s in their way, you’ll often get this answer, "Our strategic account managers just aren’t doing what they need to do to penetrate the account, cross-sell, and keep the competition out so we can truly grow our accounts to their potential." The reasons vary why this is the case. But when it comes to the strategic account management team, eight of the reasons are predictable. There are eight distinct roles that must be played for strategic account management initiatives to deliver at peak potential. Few companies define the roles and play all eight well. The first step to changing this is to know what these roles are. So here you go.      

Rule #1: Play to Win-Win. (This post is the first in a series of blog posts on the new rules of selling.) Win-win is a common negotiating philosophy. The idea is to find solutions that satisfy the interests of both parties, and maximize value on both sides. Since repeat business and referrals are so important in complex sales, employing win-win as part of your selling technique and philosophy should be a foregone conclusion. However, in the name of "win-win" many salespeople get so tied up in the name of "providing value" during the sales process that they:      

Ask the question, "What needs to happen at your company to maximize your success with your strategic accounts?" and you’re likely to get answers like this: The leaders at the account need to know about the value we can bring them besides what we’re doing for them right now. We need to penetrate different divisions of the accounts. Our relationships need to be deeper if we want to keep competitors out. We need to work directly with decision makers at the enterprise level. Nice list, but not unique to strategic account management. Indeed, the answers tend to be the same as those to the question, "What would you like your salespeople to do more of?" Company leaders often ask the question, look at this list, and decide, "Okay - looks like we need sales training. Let’s put something on the agenda." This is a mistake. While on their face, many of the outcomes of strategic account management and sales are the same (e.g. higher revenue, higher margins, longer contracts, deeper penetration, more mindshare, stronger relationships) and some of the concepts are the same, the paths to get there can be quite different. Here are 5 areas where these differences stand out...