Sales Enablement Blog

Sales Onboarding Deep Thoughts

As a training professional, I’ve seen situations where sales organizations want to onboard their reps as effectively and as soon as possible. What I’ve noticed is that no matter the sales organization’s size, industry, or situation, they have similar issues in terms of how to create an effective program, including resources, dependencies, and considerations. That said, here are my ”deep thoughts”—the key things you should keep in mind when creating or revising your sales onboarding program. You may consider them no-brainers, but I believe they are worth repeating.

Sales Enablement Excellence in Practice Awards

The Excellence in Practice category recognizes organizations for results achieved through learning and performance solutions. Awards are presented for proven practices that have delivered measurable results, and Citations are presented for practices from which much can be learned. Here are this year's citations in the area of sales enablement.

Equating Real World Performance with Mobile Learning

Evaluating training effectiveness is a long-running challenge for our industry. How do we know what we are doing is having a real and lasting effect on our audience’s behavior and, in turn, improving our company’s performance?

Appealing to Your Sales Team’s Competitive Nature

Most of us would agree that salespeople are competitive by nature. This is obvious and necessary. After all, these are the people we put on the front lines to win the day and bring back revenue-producing opportunities for the company. They are assessed on their sales performance via metrics and measurements, and they’re incentivized with compensation and perks. Many organizations even have annual sales drives or competitions to quantify the level of performance and measure who is the best.

Meet Your New Sales Enablement Community Manager

My name is Roxy Torres, and I am proud to introduce myself as the new manager of your Sales Enablement Community. Prior to joining ASTD, I spent three years at CEB (Corporate Executive Board) in a variety of revenue roles, ranging from inside sales to commercial operations and data analytics.

Assessing Low-Hanging Fruit in Your Mobile Strategy

How do you bring just-in-time delivery of sales job aids, performance support and, other sorts of tools to mobile learning? Start small and build from there to ensure success

Bringing Mobile Learning to Your Sales Team

The effects of mobile learning are real and measurable.

Even as far back as 2011, i4CP had drawn a strong linkage between mobile learning rollouts and the Market Performance Index. Recent studies have found even more linkages between the two.

Mobile learning may be the most measurable form of learning delivery ever created, due to the many lenses you can use – Web usage, event completion, time on task, location, and more.

Transitions

I am a huge fan of ASTD and have decided to begin writing the next chapter in my career

Companies Need to Get Serious About Sales Training Reinforcement

Effective training reinforcement must include coaching and institutional support. These are two very different—but equally important—types of reinforcement follow-up. Let’s take a brief look at each.

Is Sales Coaching Really Necessary?

Sales leadership talks about it all the time. Sales consultants advocate it. Sales managers say they would like to do more of it—if they had the time. The “it” of course is sales coaching.

Social Selling

A friend of mine who owns an ice-cream shop told me a story the other day about a conversation she had in line at the grocery store. She was commiserating with a college student about how coffee shops are lousy for studying because of the noise. So, she asked if the student knew about a corner of one of the campus greens that still picked up Wifi and was right next to a parking lot.

Formalize Your Commitment - "Join Me and We can Rule the Universe!"

Formalizing Commitment WHAT does "formalizing commitment" (or any other sales competency) mean to an executive, corporate behavioral psychologist, or sales trainer? These Leaders want to build a BEST Sales Company. They are concerned about building a sales culture that focuses on business sales education, human performance and ROI mea...

TrainingIndustry.com Announces 2013 Top Sales Training Companies

TrainingIndustry.com’s Top 20 list recognizes the top sales training companies in our industry. Leading companies all provide outstanding service, and a proven track record for delivering superior sales training and improving the impact of the sales organization.

10 Questions to Ask When Selecting a Sales Training Platform

Choosing the right training platform for your sales team seems like a straight-forward process. The solution with the largest catalog of training programs will be the most effective, right? Not necessarily. To help with your decision, here are the Top 10 Questions you should ask before selecting a sales training platform.

How to Hold a Kick-Butt Sales Training Meeting

Often, the mere mention of sales training elicits groans from even the most enthusiastic of salespeople. Instead of telling them what they’re selling and how to sell it, use the session to practice and perfect the whiteboard approach to selling.

Back to Basics: Considerations for Creating Sales Training

Most sales training managers are well into planning for the year ahead. Priorities have been set and budgets finalized, so it’s a good time to not only think about what sales training needs to accomplish, but also to review some of planning fundamentals.

Survey Says: Only 13 Percent of Sales Conversations Use Whiteboards

Findings from a recent Corporate Visions survey reveal a lack of visual storytelling techniques among marketing and sales teams—specifically, that only 13 percent of salespeople use an interactive writing surface such as a whiteboard to support their customer conversations.

The Secret is out. Powerful CEO's hang at ASTD events!

You want a well-kept sales secret? Top Decision Makers of major corporations attend the ASTD International Convention Expo every year. Why is this important to you? MONEY, LEVERAGE, and very POWERFUL CAREER NETWORKING. You want to get next to CEO's, Presidents, and Senior Leaders of companies? Presidents, CEO's and Senior leader...

Sales Training RFPs: What You Need to Know

Here's a closer look at sales training RFP—from both the buy-side and the supply-side perspectives.

Time to Replace Your Sales Methodology? Probably Not.

Let’s pretend that your sales force has a specific sales methodology that it deployed three years ago. And during those three years, sales results have not improved the way you had expected. You decide to conduct ‘refresher’ training for the sales reps to ensure they know how to use the methodology. Now it’s one year later. Still no results. What do you do now to improve your sales performance? Refresh them again?

STATE OF SALES TRAINING 2012

The purpose of ASTD’s The State of Sales Training, 2012 is to provide insight into sales training efforts within various organizations so that members of the sales training community can tailor their programs to help each sales team member reach his or her full potential. The Study’s findings are divided into four key topics:

sales training personnel
sales training and performance
sales training efforts
expenditures

Selling Has Gone Mobile – Shouldn’t Your Sales Training Follow?

Here are a few more reasons why m-learning is especially useful for today’s modern sales teams.

Do you really KNOW your Sales Team?

ACCELERATED LEARNING - Multiple Intelligence and YOU. "It's not how smart you are but how you are smart," states Harvard College of Education Professor, Howard Gardner, who developed the "Theory of Multiple Intelligences". Why is it that people with IQs of (160) end up working for people with IQs of (100)? When you understand h...

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO DEPLOY A POINT OF VIEW SELLING APPROACH? – Part 3 of 3

In our second post, we discussed the five ways to tell if your sales organization is ready to elevate sales and deploy a higher-level selling approach, called Point of View Selling. Forum’s research shows that in today’s market, this approach makes a big difference – and your organization doesn’t need to have the resources of a Fortune 500 company to implement it. Let’s look at an example of one salesperson at a mid-sized company and how he changed his selling landscape with a point-of-view approach.

Sales Moves by Jeffrey Gitomer 1-16

When Jim Rohn said, “All the information you need to succeed already exists, the problem is you haven’t exposed yourself to it,” it was one of the most challenging and eye-opening statements I had ever heard. I immediately made a lifelong goal to read a thousand books.

Moving Sales Training Beyond Sales 101

Dave Stein’s December post, “Higher Education,” on the Sales & Marketing Management website reminds sales trainers that for competitive sales campaigns to succeed, they will likely need to provide learning opportunities that move beyond the basics.

Brandon Hall Group Announces Winners of 2012 Excellence in Sales Technology Awards

Brandon Hall Group, a research and analyst organization, recently announce the winners of the 2012 Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Technology Awards. Now in its 19th year, the program honors winners with more than 70 Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals in 30 categories, including best sales training and sales and marketing technology.

Recent Richardson Blog Offers Trends to Watch in 2013

What trends do you think will shape your sales enablement efforts in 2013? In the first of two blog posts, Dario Priolo, Chief Strategy Officer for Richardson, notes four of nine trends—mobile, social, cloud/integration, and big data/metrics—that sales organizations should get on board with in 2013.

New SRG Article Details Factors That Create Sustainable Sales Training

In the blog post, “5 Factors that Affect ROI on Sales Training” Norman Behar, managing partner for the Sales Readiness Group, addresses the question, “What can a sales organization do to maximize its ROI from a sales training initiative?”

What Does It Take to Deploy a Point of View Selling Approach? – Part 2 of 3

Point of View Selling is more demanding to employ than traditional strategies and requires sales organizations to address five critical categories before implementation.

Sales Moves by Jeffrey Gitomer 12-10

Decisions – either by you, your coworker, your boss, your family members, or your customer – drive your success, your lifestyle, and your attitude.

As you’re contemplating what to do, or how to decide, there are stream-of-conscious thoughts that affect the final choice and the resulting outcome. Whether you’re buying something, working on a project, parenting, or making a sale, there are decisions you have to make that will determine theoutcome. Your job is to make the best one, the right one.

Sales Moves by Jeffrey Gitomer 11-30

The most misused word in sales may surprise you. It’s “value.”

Value is a misguided, misused, maligned word, whose meaning has gone fallow. It is often used without understanding of its true meaning or implications. It’s bantered about in a way that customers (including yours) are becoming numb to anything related to the word.

On the Job Coaching

Sales coaching is a hot topic. Every webcast and paper my firm delivers on the subject yields a massive response. Consequently, we spend a lot of time thinking about the various issues with current sales coaching models and why they fail to make a real difference in sales performance.

Sales Evaluation

I’m often on the phone with sales enablement professionals discussing options and solutions to their organizations sales woes. Typically the conversation goes something like this:

Call Recording Can Be Sales Training's Best Friend

McKay Allen’s November 15 post, “Sales Training Without Accountability Is Pointless,” on Sales & Marketing Management contends that monitoring and measuring are the only way to improve training ROI. Enter call recording and scoring.

Sales Moves with Jeffrey Gitomer 11-26

What’s the difference between you and all of your competition?

Are you different from your competition, or do you just THINK you are? Are you different from your competition, or do you just tell customers and prospects you are?

Or are you different from your competition, and others CLEARLY perceive you as both different and better?

I Bet Your Sales Coaching Program Misses Many of These Best Practices

First, from one of our T+D articles, a manager must understand the value of coaching, possess the skills, and make the time. So organizations must apply the following 5 practices:

Take Your Sales Training to the Next Level with ASTD Education Programs

ASTD has two programs which will enhance your sales training skills and help you develop high performing teams. Click on a link to learn more, and register today! Developing High Performing Sales Teams Certificate Program This two-day workshop provides particip...

Sales Coaching Lessons from the US Open

Andy Murray winning this year’s US Open Tennis Tournament was not just one of the great sporting events in the world. Looking deeper, you can see how it’s a great metaphor for not only individual performance, but also the role that a good coach plays in achieving success. Let’s take a closer look at some lessons and applications Murray’s win offers you and your sales coaching.

What to Expect from a Sales Coaching Program

A successful sales coaching program will instruct your sales team to use the following approaches. How does your coaching program relate (if you have one)? Your sales coaching program should help you and your team: Hire the right type of person by interviewing them with stringent criteria that will meet your organizations goals...

What Sales Coaching Is and Isn't

Since our webinar about sales coaching is coming up, we've started thinking about what coaching actually means. When most people think about coaching, they immediately think about sports. They think of a coach barking orders as they run their teams through drills to get them ready for the game. Or if you haven't had the...

Sales Coaching Programs

Why doesn't sales training work? Top performing salespeople are often in many different companies in any given day during any given week. Each person they interact with expects a certain level of integrity and also a high level of performance. Sometimes this is hard to juggle. While the salespeople are meeting the high expectation...

Sales Moves with Jeffrey Gitomer 11-19

We went to visit the Eiffel tower again. Our fourth visit in five years.

What do you know about the Eiffel Tower?

When it was built it was, to say the least, the most controversial structure of all time. Hundreds protested it, criticized it, campaigned against it, said it was a disgrace to architecture, and predicted it would be the ruination of Paris.

Premeditated-Selling-Blog-6-of-6

Bob Ross is famous for being a painter, art instructor, and television host. People of a certain age, including these authors, remember him for his Joy of Painting broadcast, which ran for 12 years on PBS. Ross joyfully painted scenic landscapes, usually filled with “happy little trees.” Apart from his charm, what made the show interesting television was the way he created the painting.

Sales Moves by Jeffrey Gitomer 11-13

A guy walks into a hardware store and says to the clerk, “I need a drill.”

Clerk says, “Well, not really. You want to make a hole.”

If you’re in retail and your customer comes in and says, “I need a drill,” or “I want a drill,” or “Where are the drills?” you, the salesperson, begin some response dialog.

Sales Moves by Jeffrey Gitomer 11-6

I get a ton of emails from people seeking insight or asking me to solve sales dilemmas. Here are a few that may relate to your job, your life and, most important, your sales thought process right no

Jeffrey, I am a marketing and sales rep for a company that sells emergency cleanup services. I visit prospective customers almost daily, mostly insurance agents and property managers, and provide value. Given the nature of what we do, my biggest challenge is coming up with objectives for each visit. Do you have any advice for me? Roxanne

Survey Finds 1 in 3 Salespeople and Marketing Do Not Collaborate to Develop Messages

Corporate Visions, Inc.,recently announced the results of its third quarter survey on marketing and sales alignment. The findings highlight the lack of collaboration between the sales and marketing teams of industry-leading companies as they work to differentiate their solutions in today’s marketplace. In fact, a staggering one in three respondents reported that their message creation process is non-collaborative, politically charged, or nonexistent.

Premeditated Selling Blog 5 of 6

Books on strategy extol the virtues of knowing your competition or your enemy. From The Art of War to the Book of Five Rings to more contemporary volumes, the advice has now become commonplace. Know your competition. Do not underestimate them. Learn their strengths and their weaknesses. Minimize their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. It’s become fairly vanilla. And while we have nothing against Sun Tzu or Clausewitz or even the Harvard Business Review, we tend to extract lessons on strategizing from popular culture.

Sales Moves by Jeffrey Gitomer 10-29

Dear Jeffrey, I am a huge fan. I recently had a WOW experience that completely coincides with your philosophy on customer loyalty versus satisfaction. Today, I received the following email from Amazon:

Hello, We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental on Amazon Video On Demand: The Hunger Games. We're sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for the following amount: $3.99. While Amazon Video On Demand transactions are typically not refundable, we are happy to make an exception in this case. This refund should be processed within the next 2 to 3 business days and will appear on your next billing statement for the same credit card used to purchase this item.

World Series Decision Making

Now is a great time to look at how your slice of the organization’s business is progressing. Are you and your team on track to achieve your business goals? If you’re on schedule (or ahead of it), you’re likely to stick with the plan and keep doing what you’ve been doing.