If you’re a sales manager, or a VP Sales… and you’re frustrated by sales training, you need to take a hard look at how YOU are helping your sales team. Don’t shoot the trainer… shoot the goals you’ve set!
How can I be so bold you ask?
I was just sitting in Mike Kunkle’s presentation at ASTD on sales training effectiveness, and he pulled up a CRAZY statistic “50% of sales leaders feel that removing sales training budgets would NOT HAVE ANY NEGATIVE EFFECT on sales performance”. In essence, 50% of companies feel that sales training is garbage! As a sales training company, I heard this and felt two emotions:
Angry – how could there be so many crappy sales training companies?
Happy – wow, what a great opportunity to improve!
So as I digested Mike’s statistics from other great sources like @CEB and @Gartner – I thought really hard about that statistic. Here is my take on this:
Calling all VP Sales
The reason you’re angry about sales training, is you’re concentrating on training that DOES NOT solve YOUR core challenge! You’ve been spending your training time on helping your sales reps learn to describe your widget better than anyone else…
What is your core challenge?
Steve Richard did a sales kick-off study in 2012, and 71% of sales teams do “product based” training at the kick-off events. YET, Mike Kunkle’s research showed that 75% of sales managers agree that the one part of their business that needs the most attention is LEAD GENERATION?!?
Listen; there is empirical evidence everywhere on the changing lead generation market. Leads are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, because the buyer has changed. 60-70% of the buying process is completed without the sales rep (leaving them vulnerable to becoming irrelevant)??? You can imagine where I’m going with this point.
Your sales team is looking for lead generation help! So why aren’t you looking to help solve this challenge?
Biasedly, Social Selling “Lead Generation training focused on helping B2B sales reps drive business with LinkedIn, Twitter and other social tools”. The results have shown a 20% sales uplift in quota attainment.
Top sales practitioners that can help your team drive more sales opportunities
Steve Richard
Barbara Giamanco
Kurt Shaver
Anneke Seley
Matt Heinz
Jill Konrath
Miles Austin
Trish Bertuzzi
Lori Richardson
Craig Rosenberg
The Bottom Line
If you don’t want to be left behind the 8 ball – you need to start to take action. The following dozen blog posts on utilizing Social Selling strategies using LinkedIn can help you start. If you are really looking for some hidden gems on how you can attract a very specific prospect, I recommend you check out 42 LinkedIn Tips
Find the topic of Social Selling interesting?
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