The Sales Café

People buy from people. Trite but true, whether it's B-to-B, B-to-C, complex or simple business relationships. Successful salespeople never lose sight of that little fact. Talk to one and ask them. Look in the mirror and ask yourself!

What complicates things is how many options there are for meeting people, from Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to plain old networking meetings held by local organizations, and everything in-between. Perhaps no matter how much your company spends on marketing, sooner or later, the buyer is going to check YOU out, on their own, without your knowledge. They want to see if you're the kind of person they want to do business with.

Knowing that, how will you position yourself? Do you want to portray a conservative persona on LinkedIn and a cool one on Facebook? Would you rant on Twitter or "keep your powder dry" knowing that your potential customer might be shopping you instead of your company? One thing is for sure, when everybody shops the Web, your presence is required and your privacy is not the buyer's concern. 

Companies spend an enormous amount of energy and money trying to control the buyer-seller conversation on their websites. However the trip shoppers take, of their own choosing, on their way to a buying decision tells us an interesting story. When we analyze the traffic on our own site, we see people moving from the home page to the blog, to the team page and then out of the site, moving on definitely to LinkedIn and probably to Facebook or Twitter. I think this is common.

So, the moral is YOU, whether you are the owner, CEO, VP Sales, or an account executive, may have more to do with how enticing your product or service looks to the buyer than any feature, benefit or research paper that the marketing department can come up with.    

There’s nothing like $4.50 gas, $600 plane tickets, $300 hotel rooms, and $14 hamburgers to make you think twice about bringing your salespeople together for a training session. Although high costs are nothing new, travel has inflated much more quickly in the last few years. The business “about face” that General Motors and Ford announced this past month regarding the shuttering of truck plants and ramping up of small car production should be a clue to all of us. There is no reason to believe the inflation will abate.

Yet your market remains complex, your offering keeps evolving, and you must continually find ways to hone the skills and capabilities of your salesforce.

Sales VPs across the US have clung tenaciously to the old methods of salesforce development: bring people together for a weeklong workshop for skills and product training; do a little motivation; and send them on their way. The venues are invariably processed-air, windowless or view-challenged hotel conference rooms that induce stupors in your overwhelmed, jet-lagged, and (sometimes) hungover salespeople. Amidst this uninspiring backdrop, billions are spent every year on change initiatives, new product and service rollouts, and behavior training - and that’s before you’ve paid for the facilitator and training company!

The good news is VPs of Sales can realize big benefits from distance learning methods and technologies that have proven themselves over the past decade to be quite effective for training and communicating with far-flung populations of salespeople.

ELA and our partners have kept involved in the development of digital platforms and new methods of education over the past six years and have used them to effectively train salespeople and sales management.

Here are some things to consider:

Use the Internet. Most corporate sales training is designed to help salespeople build some type of interpersonal skill - sales flow, relationship building, needs identification, strategy execution, negotiation, etc. It is widely assumed that the only way to make these things happen is in a live event. After all, anything interpersonal requires you to learn it in-person, right? Wrong. With today’s electronic learning platforms - from highly interactive computer and internet-based programs to dynamic web-casting - salespeople can learn just about anything online.

Be creative. Today’s electronic learning platforms need not be static, dull, PowerPoint lectures that predominated on-line learning in the first half of this decade. Leading universities and corporations have continued to push the development of distance learning technologies. Today it is possible, for a reasonable cost - especially when compared to the cost of live training - to deliver knowledge and skills through interactive formats that include lecture, discussion, breakout practices, and individual learning experiences. Training is delivered by teleconference, Skype, webcasting, e-learning programs, and even sites such as Second Life. Chat rooms function as breakouts for group practice. Office hours are held by the facilitator for further discussion and coaching. Nobody flies anywhere.

Measure effectiveness. It’s still important to track and measure your training success using these technologies. In fact, it’s easier. We measure effectiveness by sales increases.

Training can still happen, be highly effective and help improves sales efforts. We just need to take advantage of the technologies available—right in our own offices.

Additional links:

As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual, New York Times, July 22, 2008