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™.

Adapted from interview with Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer for Richardson and Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer for Brandon Hall Group Part three of our series on applying key practices in learning and development to sales training. Just like people and snowflakes, no two companies are alike. And by extension, no sales organization is identical. And before you ask, there is no magic bullet formula to set your sales organization on the right path or cure all ills. There are too many variables, both internal and external, to be considered. So when asking the question, "What drives sales teams to perform?" you can certainly expect different answers, or at least differing priorities, among a range of responses. However, there are best practices and principles to guide you on your way towards improving your salesforce. Following is a list of our top 10 areas that contribute to driving - and if done poorly, draining - sales performance. What Drives Sales Teams to Perform - 10 Best Practices  1) The Right Strategy Know your company’s strategy as well as short- and long-term business objectives. What’s being sold to customers? What competitive advantage do you hold in the marketplace? (Be brutally honest when answering that - otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time.) Have your sales objectives changed? What do you need your salesforce to do differently (e.g., more of this, less of that) to support your company’s growth targets? Consider now, at this high level, what performance is necessary to achieve those goals. Then reverse-engineer that process to break down the elements that will either make that possible, or stand in your way. 2) The Right Processes and Tools In sales, time is money. Processes and tools helps to drive efficiency and productivity, ultimately helping to make sales more predictable and more replicable. Part of this will be driven by your corporate culture. Is yours nimble and results-driven, enabling sales to move fluidly towards a sale? Or is your culture very bureaucratic, slow to make decisions and cautious about going too fast? Focus on helping your sales teams to be most effective while still running an administratively smooth operation. 3) Skills and Behaviors Don’t think about your people. Imagine you’re starting a new business and were going to hire the ideal salesforce to sell your products and services. What skills would they have and behaviors would they exhibit when calling on prospects and serving customers? What core competencies will drive reps to peak performance? 4) The Right Talent Now think about your people. There is often ambiguity in sales roles, but you must be crystal clear about the expectations for sales roles and the nuances of each. The more you can drill down and define each role the better off you’ll be. What does it take to be successful in that role? For example, a "hunter" role is very different than that of a "farmer." The behavioral profile for each is very different, which requires you to assess your salesforce to determine who possesses the innate competencies to fit the roles. Who are your high performers? What makes them great and how can you get that performance from everyone else? Who doesn’t "get it" and will need extensive training or coaching, or to be sacrificed and replaced by someone with better potential? 5) Link Sales Training to Desired Performance Outcomes Don’t just offer training for the sake of training, and don’t just do things the way you’ve always done them. Partner with your learning and development leaders to craft training that is meaningful to your reps’ bottom-line performance. Ensure that the skills and behaviors being taught will directly contribute to how they’re expected to perform. Identify any critical gaps in skills and behaviors and figure out how to close them - fast. 6) Technology Enablement An earlier post in this series addressed the role of technology in sales training solutions. There are certainly benefits to leveraging technology throughout the sales process (including training and development opportunities). Technology can make your reps more efficient in researching prospects; help them connect with clients and prospects virtually before committing to costly and time-consuming travel; sift through mounds of data; and prepare cutting-edge presentations to "wow" potential buyers. However, for each benefit, there is a possible distraction if the whiz-bang effect is too over the top, or if the reps don’t know how to effectively incorporate the tech into their work and pitches. 7) Sales Management Sales managers play such a pivotal role in the performance of their salesforce. The goal is to have sales managers with both the skill and the will to reinforce and support any sort of change or developmental effort. There’s a direct correlation between leadership engagement and sales training initiatives and results. There has been plenty written over the years about how employees more often leave their company because of a bad boss or manager, not because of pay. Encourage your sales managers to be more than numbers crunchers and schedule minders. The best sales managers coach their reps towards the desired performance. 8) Sales Incentive Program As a direct follow up from the previous point, don’t assume that good managers mean you don’t need to pay well - money still talks. The critical concern is to make sure that you reward the desired behaviors and outcomes. A common disconnect occurs when you’ve changed your strategy and thus expectations for your sales reps, yet your incentive program goes untouched, thereby continuing to reward the old behaviors. What does great performance look like in your utopian world? Provide very specific outcomes and drive towards very specific goals. 9) Metrics and Measurement Identify metrics that allow you measure and move the herd in the middle of your salesforce. In sales teams, we too often focus on trying to make great sales people better and helping laggards to improve. Consider a performance bell curve of the bottom 20% (I don’t know if they are staying or not) and the top 20% (I really do not have to spend a lot of time with them - they are high performing). Focus on creating metrics for the middle 60%, which will allow for sustainable change within that "herd." These metrics don’t have to be big numbers. For example, out of 100 sales people, you have 20 you are not sure about, 20 you are absolutely sure about, and 60 in the middle that you would like to be more sure about. If you can get 5% to 15% changes with your return on your training within that group of 60, that is going to give you the most momentous change in revenue. Organizations need to think about metrics that are attainable and achievable by targeting the vast majority of them, the middle of that bell curve of sales reps, and look for incremental change with the larger group, which really gets to a bigger number in sales. 10) Communication and Feedback Astute observers have probably noted that products and promotion were excluded from this list. These certainly play a part in a salesforce’s success. But a salesperson’s biggest opportunity to influence these areas is in communication and feedback loops up the chain of command and with colleagues in product development and marketing. The better the relationships among these groups, the more synchronized their approach and receptivity to feedback (both good and bad), which can influence design modifications or emphasizing difference promotional aspects of the products or services. The sales person is usually in the best spot to collect input from customers (why they love it) and prospects (why they passed on your offering for a competitor’s). If the relationships are adversarial or nonexistent, then improvements will be slow coming, and sales performance will stall. What drives your sales teams to perform? Tell us in the comments section below. If you missed the first posts in this series, please click on a link below. What Is the Role of Technology in Effective Sales Training Essential Ingredients in Creating Effective Training for Sales Teams COMPLIMENTARY RESEARCH REPORT Download a copy of our newest research report, Content Marketing and Sales Effectiveness  The post What Drives Sales Teams to Perform? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Richardson Wins Two Stevie® Awards for Management & New Product Categories in the 2013 American Business Awards Richardson is very excited to announce that we were presented with two Stevie Awards at the Stevie Award ceremonies in San Francisco, on September 16th, 2013. Richardson’s President and CEO, David DiStefano, was awarded with a Gold Stevie Award for Upstart Company of the Year. Mr. DiStefano was recognized for his ground-breaking organizational achievements, helping lead Richardson to record growth in 2012. Among the many drivers for Richardson’s improved performance were new organizational roles,  a three-year internal culture initiative, expansion into new territories including China, and the additions of new sales training and enablement services Collaborative Account Development™, Selling with Insights™, Richardson Quick Check™,  and Change Leadership™ programs. Richardson also won a Silver Stevie Award for New Product or Service of the Year under the category of Corporate Learning/Workforce Development Solution for its mobile learning reinforcement tool, Richardson QuickCheck™. Richardson QuickCheck™ is an application designed for mobile phones and tablets that delivers daily, bite-sized knowledge and training to today’s on-the-go sales professional. It uses a proven approach to learning reinforcement to optimize the investment in training. "It is an absolute honor and privilege to be recognized for these two Stevie Awards," said David DiStefano.  "We will continue to innovate, lead and push the envelope to better understand today’s marketplace and provide our clients with solutions that truly affect the performance of their business.  I extend my sincere congratulations to the Richardson team and every one of our clients. Collectively they are the foundation of our business success." The Stevie Awards were created to honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and business people worldwide.  Beginning with The American Business Awards in 2002, The International Business Awards in 2003, The Stevie Awards for Women in Business in 2004, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service in 2006, their mission is to raise the profile of exemplary organizations and individuals among the press, the business community, and the general public.  In short order the Stevie has become one of the world’s most coveted awards. The American Business Awards are judged each year by more than 200 executives nationwide. To learn more about Richardson’s Awards and Honors, please contact Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com. The post Richardson Wins Two Stevie® Awards for Management & New Product Categories in the 2013 American Business Awards appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Would Your Sales Training Earn Your Customer’s Seal of Approval? The Customer is King This is still true, right?  The phrase seems less than politically correct these days (with "king" versus "queen" or "royalty"), but if you conduct an internet search for "the customer is king," you’ll find over 201 million returns in about 0.62 seconds.  It’s still a popular phrase. I don’t find myself quoting the Urban Dictionary much in my business life, but I have to admit, I peeked at their search return for the phrase and thought it was interesting.  In part: "A corporate cliché meaning that the direction of a business is ultimately determined by its customers. The business is compelled to sell products and services that customers want/need, at a price they are willing to pay, and provide an acceptable level of service, otherwise customers will look elsewhere and they [the business] will not make money." I also came across this SlideShare from Salesforce.com’s Desk and enjoyed their presentation, "50 Customer Service Quotes You NEED to Hang in Your Office."  Inspiring stuff. The Royal Family Gets a Lot of Attention We seem to spend a lot of energy around our customers and serving them well.  We have: Customer research Big data and customer analytics Customer insights Customer engagement management Customer relationship management Customer loyalty Customer valuation Lifetime value of a customer Customer value proposition (CVP) Voice of the customer Customer-centric approaches So with all of this attention devoted to the royal customer, one would think that our business lives revolve around them.  In some companies, I think this is true.  In others, there is more lip service than customer service.  I am not going to glorify or defile anyone in this post, though.  I want you to think about something else, specifically, about your sales training approach, at your company. How Do You Walk the Talk with Your Sales Training? I would like to tell you that I was always pure about following my own advice here, but I have developed an annoying habit of trying to be more transparent than average.  Twenty-five years ago, I used this script and plenty of others like it: "Mr. Prospect, let me ask you something. If you stepped out your front door and $300 was lying on your front porch, would you bend down and pick it up?  Me, too. That’s all I’m really trying to do here today… help you put $300 back in your pocket each month. Wouldn’t it make sense to take 15 minutes and see if we can do that?" I also spent a lot of time rehearsing product pitches, tie-downs, 101 ways to close the sale (the J. Douglas Edwards "door-knob close" and the Ben Franklin close were among them), and snappy phrases to overcome common objectives.  My heart was in the right place, because I really did believe I was helping my customers, but I was a certainly a product of the sales training of the time.  Eventually I came across Linda Richardson’s books, Mack Hanan’s work, and took a Dale Carnegie course, and got myself on a better track that felt right, too.  So I’m confident that in the past 18 years, people who have worked for me have seen me live by this principle: The litmus test of your customer focus in sales training is the inverse of the panic you would feel if your sales training materials ended up in the hands of your customers.   In other words: If your panic level would be very low, your customer focus is likely high If your panic or embarrassment would be off the charts, you might want to reconsider your approach. So, go ahead, ask yourself. The Customer Focus Reality Check How would YOU feel if your internal sales training materials were shipped to your customers for their review or feedback? Would you be proud, or concerned? Would your customers see an open, transparent, authentic attempt at uncovering issues, challenges, opportunities and needs that you could address to help them? Would they read about your attempts to foster a value-added dialogue that helps you earn real credibility and trust, and their business, of course, but through a focus on them, and solving their problems? Or, would your customer see a series of techniques, tricks, phrases, and methods devised primarily to manipulate them? Would the tone of the materials be "all about you?" - your company, products, and how to sell them? Or about your customers, their needs, and how to best meet or address them? Would customers see their perspectives and feedback represented, from your own research with them and win-loss analysis, highlighting what was truly important to them?  Or would they only see sales "war stories" and hear how top reps used a special technique to "triumph over the customer" to win the sale? Would the approach toward selling and negotiating be consultative, above-board and focused on creating win-win solutions, or be about winning at all costs? Would they read all sorts of military or sports phrases about winning the battle, "overcoming" their objections, and other adversarial mindsets? What would they think of your company after reading your sales training materials?  Would you earn their seal of approval? Now What? If you are pleased with your answers to the above questions, I tip my hat to you.  That doesn’t automatically mean your content is right or your materials will improve sales results, but it does mean you have the right focus.  You can always adjust the content to replicate what top-producers do, with the same focus. If you are not comfortable with the answers inside your head, it is time to have an authentic dialogue inside your company.  Your customers will thank you for it, even if they never actually see your materials or know what happened.  Eventually, they will  feel the difference and do more business with you and that is the REAL seal of approval. Related Reading: Customer Care Skills Win-loss Review Posts Losing A Mentor: A Fond Farewell to Mack Hanan Questions As Weapons! —————————————- To learn more about Richardson’s comprehensive sales training solutions, please visit us at http://www.richardson.com The post Would Your Sales Training Earn Your Customer’s Seal of Approval? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Why New Client Acquisition is a Lot like Flounder Fishing This past summer, I spent some time fishing for flounder. While I was moderately successful, I still had plenty of time to think about the similarities between flounder fishing and new client acquisition. Consider the ways in which both work. Step One, Market Identification - If you are going for flounder, you have to go where the flounder go. How do you identify these targets? 1)      Guess. Just throw your line in the water and hope for the best 2)      Follow other fisherman, see where they hang out, and fish near them 3)      Conduct research on the Web and social media sites to find where flounder have been hitting Similarly, when attempting to acquire new clients, you need to identify the market, then the territory, and finally the specific targets. Step Two, Create Awareness - Once you identify where you want to fish, you have to use the right bait to attract flounder. Simply put, you set your boat in a certain area and let the tide move you and the fishing line, in a tactic called drifting. You throw out your line, which has bait and a weight, and you hope to capture the flounder’s attention while the weight drifts on the bottom of the ocean. In today’s business environment, we essentially follow a similar process. We begin the new client acquisition process with a message - our bait - to attract the interest of the buyer. We then use a variety of tactics, like Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, content marketing, public relations, and advertising to get our message out into the marketplace. Then we wait, hoping to be in the right place at the right time to get a nibble from the buyer. Step Three, Catching the Big One - If we have selected the right fishing area and used the right bait, then it should be only a matter of time before the fish bite. Even then, our work is not done.  We have to reel them in carefully, or they can get away. We don’t know whatis on the end of the line until we land it in the boat. It could be a huge flounder or a little shark stealing the bait. In New Jersey, to keep a flounder, the fish has to be over 18 inches. Now think about new client acquisition. After we have developed a targeted message and sent out the communication, we sit and wait until we get a response, or a bite. Once we do, our work still is not over. We have to set nurturing activities in motion to reel them in. At first, we don’t know what the opportunity is. Is the lead a keeper or a time-stealer? We must further qualify it using our criteria before it can officially be labeled a Sales Qualified Lead, or "keeper." So I am a Fisherman! The similarities between fishing and new client acquisition are interesting to think about. In fact, these basic processes can be used for many areas of business and everyday life. The best part of this aha! moment for me was that, for many years, I had trouble explaining to my young kids exactly what I did for a living. Then I thought about the similarities to fishing. I walked them through the fishing analogy, and they finally got it.  My ten year old said, "Now I understand, you fish for businesses; you are a business fisherman." I can’t wait to explain this one at the next Parents Day at school. ———————————— 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 Why New Client Acquisition is a Lot like Flounder Fishing appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Sales Training Programs: Mission Impossible or Mission Accomplished? Let’s face it.  For learning and development leaders without a sales background, being assigned to develop sales training programs can feel like the kiss of death.  Even for seasoned sales training leaders, it isn’t a walk in the park. When you consider that… ES Research Group, Inc. estimates that 80 to 85 percent of sales training programs produce no long-term impact (after 90 days) and 20 to 33 percent of sales people do not have the capabilities to do their job Sixty-five percent of top sales leaders surveyed by CSO Insights said their top objective for the year was capturing new accounts, yet 67 percent of those same leaders felt that their sales team "needs improvement" in generating leads ASTD’s recent State of Sales Training research reported that half of the respondents felt that 50 percent or less of the sales training programs they received was relevant to their job Sales leaders don’t count "butts in seats" or care much about level 1 "smile sheet" ratings… they want sales to actually increase after training… …it can seem like Mission Impossible. Layer the difficulty of diagnosing performance levers and driving change in a complex organization, or the overwhelming nature of all the moving parts in the Sales Performance Ecosystem, and it can become even more daunting. Effective Learning Systems There is a way to tame the beast. You can follow a system and produce great results for your internal sales clients and your company.  In the process, you can establish yourself as an organizational leader who deserves the coveted "seat at the table." How? There are multiple ways, but my favorite recipe is to create what I call an "effective learning system."  I spoke about this at the ASTD 2013 International Conference and Exhibition and at a local Dallas ASTD Lunch and Learn recently, and the concepts resonate with learning leaders and sales performance pros at all levels.  It also works. The concept, simply, is this: Create the right Content Use sound instructional Design principles Engage sales Managers in multiple ways Plan purposefully to orchestrate training Transfer Foster sales Coaching excellence Get the right metrics and Measures in place Plug into the organization’s larger Performance Management system Integrate and Align with other business leaders to develop and execute a Change plan Create the Right Content The best instructional design, the best learning system, the best plans for transfer… none of it makes any difference if the content, when used, won’t get results.  If you want to improve performance through sales training programs, you need to start with the right knowledge and skills, and the accurate judgment about when to use them.  If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you know I’m a big fan of top-producer practices and comparative analysis. Analyze your sales force Document the validated patterns of behaviors in your top-producers (exemplary performers) Compare their behaviors to the other performers Create Continue | Start | Stop lists and use the top-producer practices to fuel your content for training courses Use sales managers as a content source, too… we’ll touch on that in a moment Use Sound Instructional Design Principles This topic alone is deserving of a series of posts, if not a book.  See this Instructional Design Primer for more detail, but… Focus on outcomes and use the top-producer inspired content Teach the prerequisite knowledge first and use elearning or virtual ILT to prepare participants for any ILT skill practice Chunk, sequence and layer content with reinforcement and assessments built-in to increase retention Reserve the time spent in ILT for complex topics and skills/behaviors with intense skill practice, exercises, activities, and role plays with feedback loops Design for instructors to coach, shape and redirect learner behavior as much as possible in the time they spend with your participants Engage Sales Managers in Multiple Ways Frontline sales managers are the strongest performance lever you have for improving sales performance. Involve vetted managers, who were usually top sales producers before promotion, in your data set of top-producers, as appropriate Gain sales manager buy-in to your rep content upfront, because you need them to reinforce it later Assess top-producing sales managers and also build sales manager training Develop very-specific programs to help managers coach and support the rep training programs Teach managers how to train, coach, and develop reps - if possible, certify the managers on the rep course content and coaching - you need them talking the talk, and walking the walk Purposefully Plan Training Transfer Training transfer, or the widespread use of what is taught in class once back on-the-job, doesn’t happen by accident (except with a small percent of highly-dedicated, learning-oriented and ambitious sales reps).  You need to orchestrate it. Build training transfer plans into your learning process Use managers to reinforce training (throughout the curriculum, whenever possible) and encourage the use of performance-support tools Build those performance-support tools into other systems and use post-learning reinforcement and assessments to increase retention after class (mobile reinforcement is the latest rage and more importantly, can work very well) Use social/community tools and consider gamification principles to improve retention and reinforcement Connect reps and managers before, during and after training, with expectations for each, at every stage Foster Sales Coaching Excellence This is part of engaging your managers and fostering transfer, but important enough to call out separately. Research has proven two things about coaching … it makes a tremendous difference in performance, and yet it’s still not done frequently enough or well enough. Train your managers first on the rep programs, and then train the managers how to coach Have managers track rep performance throughout any prerequisite courses Have managers attend training with their reps, as a coach, when possible (yes, I’m aware of the adult learning theory arguments against this, as well as the "managers can’t afford the time away" smokescreen, and will debate both vigorously with anyone) Develop manager toolkits or "meetings-in-a-box" to help managers use tailored, post-program sales coaching Develop ongoing support for coaching and sales manager development - coach the coaches and develop a coaching culture Get the Right Metrics and Measures in Place You can use measurement for both your learning efforts and to track, report, predict and influence results. Agree on leading and lagging indicators for learning progress and post-class performance progress and define verifiable outcomes for both Report on progress throughout training and develop reporting that compares learner performance pre- and post-class. (Consider gamification and leader boards for an improvement race.) Identify leading indicators for performance and track and report them to better predict performance levels, and reinforce or coach as needed to ensure improvement Report progress and challenges regularly and transparently to business leaders and stakeholders - foster a shared responsibility for results between all stakeholders: trainees, their managers, trainers, training leadership, sales leadership, and senior leaders (each own various pieces of "sales performance improvement") Plug into the Performance Management System This is a separate and special call-out from the below integration efforts.   In organizations, new ways of working (replacing the status quo) rarely become "how we do things around here" on their own.  Work your way into the fabric of the business. Establish a cadence of check ins, review of reports, activity, results, and methods - based on a mix of reporting, dialogue and observation - make it a habit and expectation Managers coach and counsel rep performance as needed, holding reps accountable Senior managers hold sales managers accountable Establish goals, MBOs, or performance metrics that are woven into regular performance reviews Integrate and Align with a Change Plan Change rarely happens by luck.  The larger and more critical the change, the more likely that achieving it will require change planning, change management, and change leadership. Link training to business strategy and involve stakeholders Ask for top-down support and proactively suggest ways to help Work with stakeholders to create a change leadership and change management plans Communicate plans, rationales, goals, risks, measurements, and impacts through regular and open communication Share success stories and find and address issues quickly Mission Accomplished! It is possible.  It’s not always easy, but if anyone could do it, we’d all be earning a lot less.  One challenge, I know, is to garner the attention and focus required to create and sustain an effective learning system.  It’s far different than just creating and launching a course or curriculum. Often, people nod their heads at the principles but shy away from the actual work involved, or the commitments it requires (this especially applies, oddly, to the top-producer analysis and investing equally in sales management - the two very things that yield the best results). People’s intentions are usually great, but the crazy-busy world we work in, often finds us focusing on the urgent, to the detriment of the important.  I’ve found it helps to remind leaders of shared goals, risks of not doing it, how the investment could be maximized instead, and the power of aligned action in getting phenomenal results (which everyone - or at least most successful people - want to be a part of). I wish you the best of success as you work to create effective learning systems at your company and would enjoy hearing about your successes or troubleshooting your challenges. As always, I’ll leave you with some additional related reading. Related Reading Transform Sales Results with Effective Learning Systems Sales Performance Management Accountable Sales Enablement 7 Ways to Kill Sales Training (Note:  6 out of 7’s not bad, as they say - see the comments) Are You Looking at Sales Training Strategically? ————————————————————————————— Click the following to learn more about Richardson’ award winning customized sales training programs. The post Sales Training Programs: Mission Impossible or Mission Accomplished? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Video Blog - Custom Sales Training: Why is it Important? Changing behavior within an organization is a continuous learning process that requires alignment and support for the sales reps. In order to sustain the change, sales leaders must build a bridge for reps to learn the new skills and behaviors. In this video, Andrea Grodnitzky, Senior Vice President, of Richardson’s Global Performance Solutions, offers advice about the importance of developing custom sales training and how to leverage it to help  sales reps learn, practice, and apply changing behaviors within an organization. Custom Sales Training Every company has a unique finger print and At Richardson, we believe that custom sales training solutions drive behavioral change. Through customization we are able to capture and share your knowledge and best practices across your sales team and reinforce your strategy.  We leverage our proprietary customization process to ensure our solutions support your objectives and have maximum impact on improving performance.  Our customizing process minimizes the time needed from your professionals and allows for a consistent methodology to be deployed across audiences while the application is completely relevant to their specific situations and challenging to the learner. To learn more about Richardson’s custom sales training solutions, please click here     The post Video Blog: Custom Sales Training: Why is it Important? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

How do you support the transition of a high performing sales rep to a sales manager? In this video blog, Richardson’s Andrea Grodnitzky, Senior Vice President, Global Performance Solutions, explains the first steps to transitioning from sales rep to sales manager: letting go. Andrea also discusses the responsibilities that new sales managers must create time for, including reporting, coaching, and planning. Learn more about Richardson’s Sales Coaching Training Solutions Richardson’s Developmental Sales Coaching programs quickly deliver the processes and skills sales managers need to coach their salespeople to a higher level of sales excellence. To learn more, click here.  The post How Do You Support the Transition of a High Performing Sales Rep to a Sales Manager? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: Make Messaging More Personal? Behind the scenes, marketing is tracking campaigns and sending leads to sales reps, but sales could lose good opportunities if they don’t make a personal connection. In this video, Jim Brodo, Senior Vice President, Marketing, builds on his earlier blog post, Some Do’s and Don’ts for Better Lead Nurturing and Follow Up, to  further discuss the impact of marketing automation on the ability of reps to effectively nurture leads with a more personalized message. Please join him for this short video blog post. If you are having trouble viewing this video blog, please click the following - Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: Make Messaging More Personal ———————————- Jump Start your Next Sales Meeting with Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ Workshop Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ Workshop is a three-hour interactive workshop that will enable your sellers to bring insights to customers to change the conversation! The Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ Workshop is designed for groups of 40-50 participants making it a great fit for your next sales meetings. Contact us today to request more information at jim.brodo@richardson.com   The post Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation: Make Messaging More Personal appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Does it make sense for HR or Learning and Development to own Sales Training?  Professionals in Human Resources (HR) and Learning and Development have tremendous expertise and can be extremely valuable to organizations. However, we believe that neither HR nor Learning and Development should own sales training. That may have made sense in the past, but it no longer fits today’s business environment. Rather, these functions should be positioned as a trusted business partner to either the line or the sales organization. One reason for the change from owner to partner is that the world of sales and marketing is changing at breakneck pace, which is being driven by advancements in technology and evolving customer-buying behavior. Think of the way you buy products and services as a consumer as compared to 10 or 15 years ago. The "consumerization" that has plagued bricks-and-mortar stores has leaked into the business-to-business world. Can HR or Learning and Development keep up with this level and degree of change occurring in sales and marketing in addition to keeping up with all of the change that is happening in their own world? It’s a lot to ask. Their role would be better served as a trusted partner to the business to ensure that good learning principles and practices get applied to helping the sales force develop the skills necessary to operate in this new environment that we are being pushed into - but not necessarily as the owner. Don’t take away the efficiencies gained through a central Learning and Development group. There has to be scalability between the overall Learning and Development initiatives, modalities, and approaches that are used within an organization. Every learner within the organization can and should benefit from those practices. It comes down to forging a collaborative partnership between HR and the business units, but allowing the subject-matter experts to drive the training. HR and Learning and Development reps are not subject-matter experts in sales, although they are not subject-matter experts in accounting either. But it is a real wake up call for many HR professionals to say, "You are going to have to become a bit of an expert and live in the world of your learning audience in order to really be collaborative." The takeaway is that HR should no longer own the process. However, HR should take ownership of working with the VP of Sales and with all of the sales management. Travel to the field, get to learn what sales trainers are putting out there, and then start to think about what things you can help them with, how you can collaborate on new and different ways of practical, relevant training approaches. As learners, sales teams need to know that there are new learning models and approaches, in which HR should be an expert. Do you agree that HR should no longer "own" sales training? Let us know in the comments below? Selling with Insights Learn more about how Richardson’s Selling with Insights™ can help teach your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, create needs and shape the customer’s thinking to add more value and differentiate your solution. Learn more The post Does it make sense for HR or Learning and Development to own Sales Training? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Objection Resolution Model: Why is it Important? For many salespeople, objections are the toughest obstacle they face in making a sale. Today, it is crucial for sales reps to be able to handle and recover from objections because they are unavoidable. Join us for this video blog post as Andrea Grodnitzky, Senior Vice President, Global Performance Solutions, discusses the purpose of Richardson’s Objection Resolution Model and its ability to establish credibility for a sales rep who can consultatively deal with resistance from a prospect or client. {If you are having any troubles viewing this video blog, please click here} Want some further tips on the Objection Resolution model? Watch our video, Sales Training: Resolving Sales Objections.  This interactive video, walks you through our four step Objection Resolution Model of acknowledgement, question, position, and check. At Richardson, we help your salespeople overcome objections. We provide interactive sales training - in the class and on the Web - that provides the process and skills to help your sales team to confidently and effectively respond to client’s objections and win more business. To learn more about Richardson’s Consultative Selling Skills Programs please click here. The post Objection Resolution Model: Why is it Important? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Tell your ValueStory! The fall seems to be flying by and it is already time to announce the October Richy. This month’s Richy goes to Alinean’s ValueStory™. ValueStory™ is an interactive selling platform that communicates and quantifies the value of your solutions to buyers. The program includes sales methodology and value message consulting services, tool customization, SaaS licensing, and skills training. We liked the product so much, Richardson recently partnered with Alinean to improve sales force effectiveness, providing sales teams with the right content, capability, and credibility to deliver personalized value messaging and the right financial justification to each decision stakeholder. Click above to view ValueStory Demo ValueStory™ is designed to get purchase decisions moving faster from "Do Nothing" to "Yes," with less discounting and with higher win rates. Beyond that, here’s why our team thinks ValueStory™ deserves a Richy: Personalized Buyer Interactions — Recommends the right value messages based on client information and profile, roles, and challenges. Divvies up the right parts of your story to deliver the right amount of value, increasing your sales effectiveness. Easy to Use and Create — Allows the team to quickly create value-selling and marketing tools from the bottom up with pre-made templates and default metrics. You also have the ability to freely roam between chapters of your value story, making it easy to jump to what interests your client or prospect. Prioritizes Your Proposal — Quantifies the benefits of your solution against the "Cost of Doing Nothing," allowing your prospect to easily see the true value in your solution. Have it Your Way — Being that this is your story, you have a variety of options to personalize it and communicate your value proposition the way you want to, with drawings, graphics, animations, and more. Mobile Convenience — Tablet fever is in full effect, with 59% of sales organizations currently implementing a company-sponsored initiative to assess and deploy tablets for their sales force. Your team can access ValueStory™ at any time on a desktop or a tablet — whichever is most convenient for you. Provocative Engagement — with personalized detail, compelling and credible analysis, and an interactive framework, ValueStory™ supports a provocative engagement style between you and your client or prospect. Congratulations to Alinean’s ValueStory™ on being awarded this month’s Richy. To view a demo of ValueStory tool, click here. Do you have a great product that will improve sales effectiveness and want to be considered for a Richy? Just e-mail us at jim.brodo@richardson.com and tell us your story. ————————————————————————— Want to jump start your next sales meeting? Help your team bring insights to customers that change the conversation with Richardson’s Selling with Insights® Workshop. It’s the perfect fit for your next sales meeting. Learn more!   The post Tell your ValueStory! appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Social Selling: A Few LinkedIn Best Practices Over the last few years, LinkedIn has rapidly evolved beyond a professional social networking site. Today, the LinkedIn network is becoming the hub of social selling. It allows members to leverage relationships with clients, participate in customized groups, and collaborate with your marketing team. Join us as Jim Brodo, Senior Vice President, Marketing, offers his executive tips for getting the most out of your LinkedIn membership and how to your social selling efforts. Download our Complimentary Social Selling Report To learn more about Richardson’s 2013 Social Media in Sales Survey, please click here to download the report.   The post Social Selling: A Few LinkedIn Best Practices appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Dialogue: The Oldest New Killer Sales Skill   The World of Buying and Selling Has Changed Few people disagree that professional selling has changed. The internet has disrupted standard selling approaches because it has changed buying behavior. Request for Proposals (RFPs) are more frequent, as buyers do their own research and engage suppliers much later in the buying process. Buyers attempt to drive us toward commoditization while sellers strive to differentiate. With closer budget scrutiny, senior executives and procurement professionals are more involved and the number of decision makers has increased. "Selling has changed because buying has fundamentally changed." Brian Fetherstonhaugh - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, OgilvyOne Worldwide Everyone is talking about content marketing, and some, content selling. Social selling is all the rage. Selling with insights is a hot topic, and Richardson’s Selling with Insights® program is one of our most popular new courses in our recent history. Cold calling is dead, or it’s not, depending on who you listen to. Inside Sales is growing and predicted to overshadow field sales. Decision makers are buried in email and voicemails often are not returned. Smartphones might as well be surgically attached to us and there is no downtime. Sound familiar? Are you dizzy yet? But Some Things Remain the Same As much as the landscape has changed, and forced new behaviors for sales professionals who want to remain relevant, there are some key things that have not changed, or changed very little. People still buy based on some combination of emotion, logic, and credibility (or if you’re a fan of Aristotle: ethos, logos, and pathos). They make decisions based on a combination of business and personal needs and wants. Organizational politics, positioning, and posturing still linger. While the Millennials and the digital natives of Generation Z may have different values and approaches toward working, social interaction, and digital connectedness, they remain human beings with all of our best traits and worst foibles. Emotions, kindness, decency, altruism, helpfulness, and trust still matter a great deal. Researcher and author Dan Pink posits that purpose, autonomy, and mastery remain our intrinsic motivators. We evolve and are influenced by our environment, but our hardwiring makes change slow. People are still… well, people. Dialogue and discourse remain foundations of effective human communication, whether in marriage, friendship, learning, or business. The open, respectful exchange of ideas around a shared interest or a common purpose, and the willingness to listen, learn, and share with others is powerful glue for relationships of all kinds and can generate the impetus for the positive changes we all seek. Dialogue: The Oldest New Killer Sales Skill It is for these reasons that we, at Richardson, believe that dialogue is the oldest, new killer sales skill. Whether you are opening a sales meeting, leading a needs discussion, exploring solutions, or establishing next steps,  it’s all about (or should be all about) engaging your client in an effective dialogue. Are you ready for this? (Perhaps you should sit.) It is also a critical skill when selling with insights. If you have been thinking that selling with insights is simply a way to use data, information, or expertise to shock and awe your prospects or clients with your brilliance or show them the error of their ways, you might want to rethink that. We have found this to be one of the many possible traps that sales reps unwittingly get snared in, that completely undermines their effort and objectives.. The Sales Conversation Pendulum Instead, we think of the sales conversation as a pendulum that swings back and forth from question-led dialogue to insight-led dialogue, based on the context of the conversation and desired outcomes. In our Selling with Insight® program, we teach that listening, observation, and judgment are necessary to help reps recognize the cues and clues that indicate which approach will produce the best results. Hmm.  Insightful Dialogue. What a Concept! In fact, the pendulum swings even within our model for delivering a personalized insight message. We teach sales reps to use the same Checking skills and The Six Critical Skills (communication skills) that have been a core part of our Consultative Selling Skills  course for years.  And when reps use an insight and have the desired effect with it (perhaps trigger a new idea, pique interest, or create urgency), this is just the beginning of a longer sales conversation where the rep and client explore possibilities together. This requires… [dramatic pause for emphasis]… dialogue, the new, yet oldest killer sales skill of all. Want to Have a Conversation about Dialogue with Insights? We speak with clients weekly who are struggling to scale an insight methodology across their sales organization. Often, they are falling into common traps and want to start to use insights in an effective manner. In other cases, they are having some success but want to improve the effectiveness of their efforts. If you would like to explore any of these things, or just have a dialogue and swing on the Sales Conversation Pendulum with us, reach out and let us know or comment below… we’d enjoy hearing your thoughts. Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insight Solutions  If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more. The post Dialogue: The Oldest New Killer Sales Skill appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Selling With Insights: When is the Best Time to Provide insight? Insights can be provided through any phase of the sales process. Today, selling with insights is about the value you are able to bring to your client or customer through the solutions you offer. Your sales team members need to become a source of ideas and insights for their customers to add value while building credibility and awareness of how they can help. In this video blog, Richardson’s Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer, talks about some of the  best times to provide insight and how to do so when that moment presents itself. {Please click the following link if you are having trouble viewing the video blog: Selling With Insights: When is the Best Time to Provide Insight?}   Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insight Solutions  Richardson’s Selling with Insights® sales training program teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, challenge the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more. The post Selling With Insights: When is the Best Time to Provide Insight? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

5 Strategic Applications of Richardson’s Selling with Insights ® Since launching Richardson’s Selling with Insights® program just over a year ago, we’ve seen incredible excitement and uptake from our clients, and we’ve learned a few things along the way. Selling in this era of an ultra-prepared buyer requires a seller to be even more skillful and prepared than ever. While interpersonal, communication, and consultative selling skills are still relevant and important, sellers need new skills to share value-creating ideas that shape and create opportunities with buyers. Sellers also need insightful content to share, which requires even greater alignment between the sales organization and other functions that may be the keepers of subject matter expertise, such as R&D, Product Management, and Marketing. Another unexpected outcome has been that many of our clients are using the program to rally the entire organization behind an important strategic initiative. They recognize that their new initiatives will require different customer interactions and conversations, and Richardson’s Selling with Insights® ensures that everyone knows what to say, how to say it, and why. Here are just a few examples of how our clients are applying Richardson’s Selling with Insights® in some very powerful and innovative ways. 1. Bringing new ideas or innovation to market Our client invested heavily in R&D, but their sales team often sold on price. Richardson’s Selling with Insights® program got their subject matter experts aligned with the sales team, giving them an Insight Blueprint™ to capture and communicate innovative ideas for the sales team at the right level of detail. The sales team then learned how to take the blueprint, research customers, develop customized Insight Messages™, and share the insight at the right time during a customer conversation. 2. Launching a new product, service, or solution Our client is a relatively new but fast-growing company in the telecommunications industry. They have been developing disruptive solutions to enable mobile operators to keep pace with growing demand for bandwidth and increasingly demanding costumers who expect fast, flawless connectivity at any time. Their sales force is very technical. Richardson’s Selling with Insights® gave them a standard template to position the benefits of their new solution from their buyer’s perspective and the skills to leverage insights with discovery and need dialogue. The content and the skills kept their sellers aligned with their customers and minimized tendencies to dive deeply into technical details too soon in the sales conversation.  3. Breathing life into underperforming products, services, or solutions Our client is well known as a global manufacturer of personal computers and has also built a strong service organization. They recognized significant growth and profit potential in services and sought to get their sales teams focused on realizing this potential. At a national sales meeting, they used Richardson’s Selling with Insights® to clarify their unique differentiators and value proposition and train their sales teams to position this value in conversations with customers. Sales leadership is confident that driving focus, content, and skills across their sales force will make a huge impact. 4. Making "Big Data" more meaningful to customers Lately, we have been doing a lot amount of work with media and advertising companies. Innovation is rampant, competition is fierce, and buyers expect measurable impact or they will try something else. Our client had reams of granular data to make a compelling business case to a customer, but customers didn’t have the appetite or the patience to sit through a 50-page PowerPoint deck filled with charts and graphs. Additionally, our client saw a need to up-skill their sales force to be more competitive in a rapidly changing market. Through Richardson’s Selling with Insights®, we gave their market research team a simple but effective format to keep their sales team informed of the latest market trends. Sellers learned to customize this information for client and prospects and deliver insight in a much more natural and conversational manner. 5. Delivering a compelling "Total Cost of Ownership" business case Our client is another global technology manufacturer. The product managers of one of their hardware divisions built a powerful "Total Cost of Ownership" model that proved beyond a certain time period it was far more cost effective to replace aging equipment than to continue to try to maintain it. They trained the sales team on the TCO, but they were never really sure if the training "stuck." Additionally, the training focused on the TCO model itself rather than the skills needed by the sales team to position and communicate the model with customers. Richardson’s Selling with Insights® helped to unite product management and sales, reinforcing both the content and the skills. The big takeaway is this: Richardson’s Selling with Insights® is a very powerful program that can help an organization get marketing and product groups aligned with sales, provide a standard approach and language to connect a customer’s challenges with your unique capabilities to help them, motivate your sellers to be more assertive and proactive with buyers, and round out the skills necessary to succeed in the age of the informed buyer. Complimentary Webinar To learn more about the applications of Richardson’s Selling with Insights ®, we encourage you to contact us or register for an upcoming webinar. Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insight Solutions  Richardson’s Selling with Insights® sales training program teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, challenge the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more. The post 5 Strategic Applications of Richardson’s Selling with Insights ® appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? Using social media in the sales process to drive leads, build relationships, and accelerate revenue is a hot topic, but it requires an expert balance of art and science. Deciding which social selling  tools you use will depend on what stage in the sales process you are in, what tools you have available, and of course which tools you are most comfortable with. In the realm of social selling, Twitter is changing the game. It is now an avenue for sales people to build a personal brand in the social field and the sales field. Please join Jim Brodo, SVP Marketing of Richardson for today’s video blog, Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? Jim will review the use of Twitter as a very valuable social selling tool on three fronts: Providing insights Listening to what is being said about your company, industry, prospects, clients, or products Interacting with your selling ecosystem Please click the following if you are having difficulties viewing our video, Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com. The post Social Selling: How is Twitter Effecting the Selling Process? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Customized Sales Training:  Why It’s Important and How We Do It About a year ago, we published the results of a survey that found that customization increases the odds of a sales training initiative being effective.  This reconfirmed what we’ve believed for years and how we work with clients.  But, some buyers push back on customization, hoping to take a cheaper and easier path to success.  With this in mind, here’s a primer on why customized sales training is so important and how we do it. Why does customization make for a better sales training program? Clients often come to us with a particular business objective that they want to achieve, such as accelerating organic growth or growing market share.  Changing behavior is one of the paths to achieving that business objective.  To change behavior requires people to break old habits and learn the behavior. We find that in order to really learn new behaviors and change old behaviors, you have to practice.  It is best to practice in as real-world a situation as possible so that sales reps see clearly how the training is directly applicable to them.  The training must be relevant and challenging, and this is why customization is so important. Think about learning a new skill.  It is a leap to learn a new skill and apply it back to the real world.  You have to build that bridge for your sales reps by customizing your training and helping them to learn that new skill in an environment that is like the real world.  They do not have to make the leap on their own back in the real world. How we customize sales training for clients One of the best ways to customize sales training is to talk to the people who do the job day in and day out.  We like to really work with top performers in particular.  Certainly, we want to talk to sales leaders and learning leaders to get the overarching objectives of what they are really trying to achieve, but when it comes down to actually customizing training content, you really want to work with the people who are doing it in the field and doing it well. You want to gather from them real stories that you can use to teach concepts to other participants.  You don’t want the outliers.  You want real stories that are challenging to participants but are also going to be something that they see in their everyday world.  It is not an outlier that they would say, "This does not feel real to me." Finesse is required in working with top sales reps to really find that right balance of a challenging scenario that you can apply and that is also something that they would see in the course of doing their business every day. Developing customized sales training is hard work that requires instructional designers with some serious expertise.  Our instructional designers will typically interview clients to first learn all their overarching objectives.  What is it that they are trying to achieve?  What are the business outcomes?  What current behaviors and skills do they want their people to capitalize on?  What new behaviors and skills do they want them to acquire?  Then, our designers will craft and design a program. It could be a classroom training program.  It could be a full solution starting from before the classroom, to classroom training, and then to some sustainment pieces, all linked to those business objectives that client is trying to achieve.  Then, once the designers start to lay out what the design is going to be for each component, they will start building them.  That is when they are work with top-performing line leaders and sales reps to gather real stories. The designers start to build in custom activities, such as role plays, case studies, group discussions, and learning activities, that help sales reps to gain those new skills.  Through observations, interviewing, and sometimes ride-alongs,, we learn from our clients what it is they are doing well.  The designers will incorporate the best practices from the client organization that they want replicated across their sales force, along with best practices and models that we continually research and refine across our client base. Finally, the program is reviewed by the client to ensure that it meets their requirements and expectations.  The entire process takes six to eight weeks.  Although we do most of the heavy lifting, we need our clients to help us line up interviews with the right stakeholders so that we can incorporate their perspective into the solution.  It is also important to have commitment from the executive team and sales management to sustain the impact of the training and drive true behavior change.  It is a bit more work and commitment upfront, but it really makes a difference in the success of the initiative. If you are planning a sales training initiative, we encourage you to contact us to learn how we can create a customized solution that will help you achieve your objectives. New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com   The post Customized Sales Training: Why It’s Important and How We Do It appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Creating the Skill and the Will to Unlock Sales Manager Coaching Power Sales managers are the force multipliers of productivity and key players for supporting change in your frontline sales force. Research from the Corporate Executive Board indicates that when training is complemented by in-field coaching and reinforcement, productivity is quadrupled from 22% to 88%. However, many sales managers are promoted based on their ability to sell, and the characteristics that contribute to a sales manager’s success as an individual contributor run counter to their role as a developer of others. Some sales managers lack coaching know-how and skill, while others don’t make time to coach. So, how do you create both the skill and the will to unlock the power of coaching in your organization? From our perspective, it comes down to three factors: Following a common sales management process Developing strong sales coaching skills Holding managers accountable for coaching Following Common Sales Management Process Many companies do not have a clue of how sales managers use their time and what they really need to do. Sales managers get very frustrated when everyone is throwing coaching training at them as a "magic bullet," but they don’t coach because they can never find the time. A sales management process is a summary of the activities you need your sales managers to do, along with timing, frequency, and expected outcomes that you can verify. It helps break this "chicken and egg" cycle of not coaching and having poor time management. But, a sales management process is more than setting aside time for coaching — it gives your sales manager guidance for what they should be doing each day, week, month, quarter, and year. A sales management process should also clearly identify performance measures, best practices, quality criteria, and verifiable outcomes. The process should not be overly rigid and should give you sales managers the latitude to use judgment and have flexibility with the sales reps and situations they face. We also find that some sales managers simply don’t know what questions to ask their sales reps beyond "how are you doing?" We help our clients create high-impact questions for key activities in their sales management process to get more and better information from their sales reps and inspect more consistently across their teams. This helps sales managers more precisely pinpoint where their sales reps need help, which ultimately saves time and improves coaching performance. Developing Strong Sales Coaching Skills Many organizations train their sales managers in coaching skills, but too often, we see this more as a training event rather than a commitment to a continuous improvement process. So, it is essential to have the right level of commitment and mindset before you even get started. Any learning will be accelerated by a great learning experience, mastering knowledge, and accountability. Organizational support is essential to kicking off a great learning experience, and the experience is bolstered by a well-designed program delivered by exceptional facilitators. To really understand how you want your sales reps to sell, your sales managers should go through the same training as your sales reps. Then, sales managers should go through a sales coaching program that is tailored to your sales management process and customized to reinforce the way you want your people to sell. Learning to coach to a process is much easier and real than learning a skill and not knowing when and how to use it. Time in the classroom is an opportunity for your sales managers to practice new skills in an engaging and supportive environment. Emphasize real-life scenarios and applications with lots of activity. Insist on a facilitator who has real-life experience managing sales teams — scars and all — and can relate to the challenges your people face each and every day. The classroom is really the starting point of coaching skill development. The renowned psychologist Ebbinghaus estimated that 87% of learning is forgotten within 30 days. You need to address this reality head on and start the reinforcement process immediately to push your managers to master the knowledge they just gained. Managers need to know your sales management process, your coaching framework, and your high-impact questions. This can be supported by job aids, but you want sales coaching to become second nature. The time to drive knowledge mastery is immediately after your sales managers go through coaching skills and sales management process training. Without mastery, sales managers will not benefit from the opportunities to coach in the moment when inspecting. Without high-impact questions, sales managers won’t have consistent coaching criteria that is aligned to your sales process. Even with great coaching skill, they may end up missing an important aspect of the sales process to inspect and support. We help our clients drive knowledge mastery through a process of spaced repetition, testing, and gamification powered by our QuickCheck™ application. QuickCheck™ utilizes a learning algorithm developed and used at Harvard Medical School to help ER nurses and residents recall and apply best practices under high-stress situations. QuickCheck™ has proven to be a very popular and useful tool to remember what was learned in class. The process takes less than five minutes twice a week for about eight weeks. Your sales managers will receive an e-mail with a scenario on their mobile device or laptop, and they select the best response. It harnesses your sales managers’ competitive drive by using a "game" approach, with real-time tracking of results on leaderboards. Holding Sales Managers Accountable for Coaching Well Holding sales managers accountable for coaching well implies that you are holding them accountable for coaching in the first place and that you are motivating them to continuously improve their coaching skills. As with developing strong coaching skills, holding sales managers accountable for coaching is much easier if you follow a sales management process. If you set clear expectations and inspect, then there is a much better chance of sales managers following through on their coaching commitments. One way to verify if they are coaching is to survey your sales reps. Ask your sales reps how much coaching they’ve received over a set period of time, the nature of the coaching interaction, and the effectiveness of the sales manager. Then, ask your sales manager the same questions. If there’s overwhelming evidence that coaching isn’t happening, isn’t effective, or there’s a major difference in perception between the sales rep and the manager, this is a red flag to examine further. It is also very helpful for your sales managers to meet on a periodic basis to share success stories, challenges, and solutions. These are very busy people, but an hour a month can go a long way to building a coaching culture. The bottom line is that your sales managers can play a pivotal role in your sales effectiveness initiatives. Consider your sales managers’ ability to reinforce the changes you expect in sales reps, and give them a path to succeed. New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com The post Creating the Skill and the Will to Unlock Sales Manager Coaching Power appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Sales Training: The Importance of a Great Classroom Experience In sales training, the classroom experience is a big differentiator. It’s simple, adults learn best by doing. If you are pulling sales people out of the field it is critical to make sure the classroom experience is customized and interactive through activities such as role playing for practice. Please join Richardson’s Andrea Grodnitzky, SVP Global Performance Solutions, for this video blog where she discusses the importance of the classroom experience in training the sales team. If you are having trouble viewing this video, please click the following - Sales Training, the classroom experience is a big differentiator.  New From Richardson - Social Selling Training Webinars Richardson has developed a series of webinars to help your team fully utilize social selling tools…whether they are prospecting for new business or further developing current clients.  Our webinars will introduce your sales team to both basic and advanced techniques of social media selling to provide practical knowledge and skills that improves research, drives lead generation, creates more referrals, and develops integrated connection strategies. To learn more about our in-company Social Selling Webinars, please email us directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com The post Sales Training: The Importance of a Great Classroom Experience appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

What Makes a Good Sales Training Reinforcement Strategy? A good sales training reinforcement strategy requires early planning. One of the biggest mistakes I see our clients sometimes make is waiting until after the training is over to think about the actual reinforcement plan. You need to be thinking about your plan well in advance. And ideally, you should split it up into three phases. What do you want to do for short-term reinforcement?  What do you want to do in the medium-term?  What do you want to do in the long-term?  Each of those three sales training reinforcement buckets should be a little bit different. In the short-term, for example, you may want to focus on knowledge mastery by drilling participants in the concepts they learned in the main classroom training. We do this through our QuickCheck process that involves spaced repetition, testing, and competition for about eight weeks following the initial training delivery. Participants are e-mailed two questions per week. They answer the questions, and even if they get the question wrong, they will see the correct answer and try to answer the question right the next time. Results are captured in a database and reported back to sales managers for additional coaching. Many clients also elect to post results of the top ten performers on a leaderboard to fuel competition and accountability. All of this activity sends a message that the skills learned in the classroom are not going away. In the medium-term, you might start doing assessments to see how salespeople are doing and gauge and flex what it is you are reinforcing. Assessments could take place as a result of sales managers inspecting a sales rep’s call plan or observing the rep in action. This activity identifies strengths and gaps and enables rich developmental sales coaching discussions to create additional awareness of gaps and suggestions to close gaps. You might be giving more on-the-job training to really make sure that the new behaviors are embedded into their daily work stream. Then, in the long-term, you want to see the needle for a rep’s key performance indicators start to move in the right direction. If they know what they need to do, and if through inspection you see that they are doing it, then you would expect positive results to follow. If KPI’s aren’t moving in the right direction, then that’s a red flag requiring a closer look. You need to ask yourself if this is a trend you are seeing across the sales force; in isolated pockets, such as a territory or vertical; or something very unique to the rep in question. If you have issues in pockets or territories, it could be an indication that sales management is lagging in their role to reinforce the training. Leadership must hold management accountable, just as management must hold the rep accountable. A big part of any sales training reinforcement program is coaching, and I think organizations have gotten the memo: coaching is important. They have seen that it has business impact. For years, those of us in the sales training space have been trying to get people to understand how important coaching is. Organizations get it. I think managers get it. But that doesn’t make it any easier for managers to actually do it. They have a lot of things on their plate. If their organizations are not teaching them how to do it or pushing them to do it, it may fall down on the list. What we are trying to now have discussions with our clients about is that coaching is a learned skill. It requires just as much, if not more, attention in terms of a training plan as sales skills. It is sometimes harder for sales managers to learn how to coach and to acquire coaching behaviors — true developmental coaching behaviors — than it is for a salesperson to pick up new sales skills. The best, or one of the best, ROIs on your training investments is to not only expect your managers to coach, but to teach them how to do it. Help them build the skills to have true developmental coaching discussions.     The post What Makes a Good Sales Training Reinforcement Strategy? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Lead Nurturing and Prospecting emails that Make Me Scratch My Head and Go Hmmm…. It seems I hit a nerve with my blog post Is Email on Life Support as a Sales Effectiveness Tool. It has become one of our most popular, and it continues to generate conversation and discussion on social media. As sales and marketing professionals, we have seen the declining effectiveness of email for prospecting, lead generation, and lead nurturing. Yet, it remains a necessary tool in our arsenal. As SVP of marketing at Richardson, I get my fair share of sales calls, and I receive quite a number of lead nurturing and  follow-up emails after I download a white paper or article. I don’t always open the emails, or spend much time with them if I do click to open, because I usually only want the download. But if something interesting catches my eye, I read on. The lesson here for marketers is the need to target and engage prospects from the get-go, starting with the email "Subject" line, then quickly leading into the right message and value statement. Here are a few real-life examples of lead nurturing and prospecting emails I received that didn’t deserve to be opened, but once read, just had me scratching my head and saying "Hmmmm…. " "I found you through Google search engine. Did you see my last email? I am writing you today to remind you about our SEO capabilities." Really? You found us through a search engine and you want to sell me on your search engine capabilities?  Hmmmm…. "I’m hoping to talk with you about doing some telemarketing for Richardson Group.  I know your business is complex, but we can actually do it better than you and at a much lower cost than your internal team can." So let me get this straight. Your team of untrained professionals is going to be able to sell Richardson’s complex services over the phone better than our own team? Hmmmm…. "I have sent you a couple of emails but have not heard back from you. I wanted to call you to follow up but you seem to be on the "Do Not Call" list. Would it be OK to call you? No, it’s not OK, that’s why I’m on the list. Now what do you say? Hmmmm…. "Hi James, is there 10 minutes we could have a call in the coming weeks?" I know we are all trying to cut the amount of text down, but this was the entire email. I have no idea who he was or what he wanted. Hmmmm….. "Hi {first name}, I sent you an email but I did not receive a response from you. I’m curious if you have read my previous email and want to take this initiative further. Dear Salesperson First Name - I have no real idea who your company is or what they provide. How well did you really prepare for this prospecting email? Hmmmm…. "Hi, Follow up on my last email, just wanted check with you if you got a chance to review my lasts email. Huh… I have to respond to this person? Please make sure you proofread your emails. Hmmmm…. "I am sorry to bother you, but would you mind referring me to the person in charge of your sales training? We are a leading sales training company and would like to train your team. Thanks for the help and have a great day! I am sorry, but do you know Richardson? Did you research us at all? Look us up on LinkedIn? Anything? I actually received a call from this person as well. He was very surprised when I told him what Richardson does. Hmmmm…. I have been in this industry a long time. Because of this, I tend to hold sales professionals to a higher standard than most when it comes to communicating, prospecting, and lead nurturing. I may be a harsh judge, but I rank 70%-80% of the emails I receive as below average in sales effectiveness. While marketing automation products provide the tools for mass communication, they’re not smart enough to make sure those communications are effective or even well written. It’s up to you to target the appropriate prospect, develop a message that delivers value and insight, write an email that engages the reader, proofread that email for any mistakes, and test the technology to make sure it works as intended. Don’t treat prospecting and lead nurturing as just a box to check in your strategic marketing plan. You need a well thought-out process if you have any hopes of making a good impression on the prospect and driving action. You may not receive a response the first few times, but if you’ve done your homework and have the right combination of target/message/value/timing, you just might begin to see your own email inbox fill with responses. Need to Jump Start Your Next Sales Meeting? Add a Richardson Selling with Insights® Workshop. Click here to find out how! The post Lead Nurturing and Prospecting emails that Make Me Scratch My Head and Go Hmmm…. appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Connecting Dots in the Sales Performance Ecosystem We’ve written a few times about the Sales Performance Ecosystem.  It can be a daunting concept.  While many people can relate to what’s included, either the sections or individual elements, how to actually intertwine and align the elements (or "connect the dots") is often less clear. Today, we’d like to share how to connect a few of the dots that will help you align your sales methodology to your buyers, for better sales results. The Beginning of Wisdom is the Definition of Terms Let’s start by briefly defining some elements: Win/Loss Analysis:  According to MarketingProfs, win/loss analysis is a process for differentiating why one sales effort wins and others fall short of the mark, and the intent of the analysis is to adjust go-to-market strategies and tactics. We’ve written about it multiple times: http://blogs.richardson.com/tag/win-loss-review-process/ Customer Experience Management: Gartner sums it up pretty well in their definition: "the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy." Buyer Personas: According to Tony Zambito, Buyer personas are "research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions."  (He’s since added the criteria of where they buy as well as when they decide to buy.) Sales Messaging: Michael Cannon of the Silver Bullet Group has written that sales messaging is "the stated reasons you give prospects to buy and to buy from your firm." I’ve also described it as saying the right thing to the right prospect in the right way at the right time. Social Selling: I’m not a big fan of this term (it’s a misnomer, to me), but everybody’s using it. I like Jim Brodo’s recent definition… "Using social media in the sales process to drive leads, build relationships, and accelerate revenue." Selling with Insights: Richardson’s Selling with Insights® is a customized sales training program that teaches the advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills needed to effectively present insights to generate interest, create and shape opportunities, influence thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. Connecting the Dots Now, let’s look at how these elements can weave together to create a tight, aligned connection between your buyers and how you sell to them (aka, resolve their issues). Win/Loss Analysis helps you understand why buyers chose you, or didn’t.  In addition to giving you great data to understand buyer needs, buying process, decision criteria, how you can better interact with them, and more, it also provides insight into the Customer Experience - or at least their experience during the buying process and perhaps - depending on when you interview them - during the implementation of your solution.  This isn’t the entire experience, but it’s important to understand. You can use what you learn to feed and fortify your Buyer Personas. It can help you document roles and archetypes, and more importantly, the challenges they face, impacts of those challenges, and the resulting needs. As with Win/Loss Analysis, this is only a slice of building personas, but critical for this focus. Knowing what challenges your various buyers face (issues, impacts and needs) and all the things listed above in the definition of Buyer Persona, including the "customer experience" they want to have, can help you build appropriate sales messaging for each persona, each set of challenges, and the capabilities that address them. If your Win/Loss Analysis interviews are structured to gather feedback from various stages of the buying process, you may be able to develop messaging for various stages. If you have R&D, research, special expertise or experience, or case studies, you can develop insights to support and strengthen your messaging. The information available through social media sites and the internet allows you to find your clients, Buyer Personas, and others like your current ideal clients. You can set up alerts for trigger events, watch interactions for challenges you can resolve, and research specific prospects or clients through various means. Social channels like LinkedIn (don’t forget Groups), Twitter, Google+ (don’t forget Communities) Facebook, SlideShare, YouTube and blogs (yours, theirs, and blogs your target buyers follow) allow you to create awareness and credibility (content marketing), share information, connect, and forge relationships, leading to offline connections and real dialogue.  Social dashboards and especially integration with your CRM can make this all more convenient than ever before. Last and possibly most powerful in this series of connected dots, selling with insights can empower you to sew a lot of this together.  Our Insight Blueprint links your buyer’s Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts and Needs (COIN) to your Capabilities that resolve them - connected by insightful data or information. Our Insight Message model and accompanying worksheet, allows you to take these inputs and personalize them for a specific buyer’s situation. If you target this messaging to specific personas, and organize it by the stages of the buying/selling process, you can create a library of sample messaging that can be personalized for increased impact and used whenever appropriate. Connecting Enough Dots = Sales Transformation This is just one of many examples of how elements of the Sales Performance Ecosystem fit together.  It takes planning, prioritization, and time, but piece by piece, you can align all the elements of the ecosystem to support your clients, their needs and buying process, and your sales force that serves them. But be careful… if you do that, you just might transform your sales force (and your business), in the process! ———————————————————————————————————————- Richardson’s Selling with Insights - Learn More! Buyer behavior has changed, selling behavior hasn’t. Provide your sales team advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to add more value, build credibility, and differentiate your solution! Click here to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights® training solutions. The post Connecting Dots in the Sales Performance Ecosystem appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.