Yesterday I changed my mind on a project where a consultant would do an analysis to tell us the best way to bring elearning content on line. Why? The consultant sent over a list of issues prior to our first meeting and it was obvious to me that the only issues he wanted to focus on were to build justification and ROI for the project. That's not what I was paying him for so I cancelled. If he had just showed up at 2PM like he was supposed to, he may have still asked the wrong questions, but I wouldn't have kicked him out. I would have set him straight. But when he advertised his intentions ahead of time, I provided myself with a couple of hours that I could redeploy.

It got me wondering how often prospects change their minds because of something the salespeople do. Are they too anxious? Do they become unprofessional? I saw an email from a salesperson to a client who had just agreed to do business. The first line of the salesperson's thank you letter was, 'I'm looking forward to getting to know you better.' That might have scared his female client. She cancelled the next day.

Lesson - Question everything your salespeople do and try to identify every possible way in which they can improve. Even if you don't know how to make them more effective, recognize that standing pat should not be an option.

First, the article asks, 'Which techniques are truly best practices and which are merely recommendations by a self-proclaimed expert?'

Well, I'm one of the experts although I haven't had to proclaim myself one for more than a decade. Then, Gielda exposes himself as a self-proclaimed expert by his choice of the top 5 sales management best practice. According to Gielda they are:

1. Understand and develop customer needs.

2. Develop trust in the client relationship

3. Know your customer

4. Full knowledge of capabilities and customer applications and the ability to bring to bear internal or external resources in service to the customer

5. Manage competitive threat over the course of an opportunity pursuit

So what are we to make of this list? The first thing you'll notice is that none of the five 'practices' are sales management practices. And while they're all sales and/or marketing practices, I wouldn't even place them in the top 5 sales best practices. As a matter of fact, if you want to see my list of sales best practices, you can find them at my Lens, The World of Sales and Selling. What are the real five sales management best practices?

1. Accountability

2. Coaching

3. Motivating

4. Recruiting

5. Growing the Sales Force

Personally, I found the Selling Power article to be akin to naming passing, receiving, blocking, tackling and kicking as the five baseball best practices.

I'm not a proponent of canned presentations - they're boring. I hate it when prospects ask salespeople to make a capabilities presentation. Your salespeople are expected to do this and as a result of agreeing to do this, they bore their prospects to death.

My research from evaluating 250,000 salespeople shows that close to 80% of them are making inappropriate presentations. If you think about the salespeople that have attempted to sell you something, you can certainly understand what I mean. Four out of five times, the first several minutes of the meetings tend to be lifeless, boring and irrelevent .

Get your salespeople to talk for only about 30 seconds, quickly highlighting the issues your company can address rather than the products and services you sell. Next have your salespeople ask their prospects what their biggest challenge is. If they can learn to do this they can reach out and get their prospect's attention in the first minute. They'll need to be able to ask great questions once they get there though. Which questions should they ask? Get a copy of Baseline Selling - How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. Read the whole book and then turn your attention to the chapter on getting to 2nd Base and developing your S.O.B. Quality. That will do the trick.

• When you say millions, is that a few millions or tens of millions? ($10 million)
• How long have you been losing millions? (6 months)
• Who sold you this widget? (XYZ)
• What happened when they came to replace it? (They wouldn't replace it)
• When do you absolutely, positively need it working properly? (yesterday)
• Who else have you spoken to? (MNO and PDQ)
• What did they say? (They weren't interested in helping)
• Who cares about this problem? (I do)
• Why do you care so much? (It's costing me $5,000 a week in personal bonuses)

So this has already cost you $120,000 - out of your own pocket - and you're saying that the company has lost $200 million dollars over this and nobody has offered to help. Why is that?

If you add up the additional pieces we have collected, you can see that the salesperson has much more effectively quantified the cost of this problem, collected competitive intelligence, found the most compelling reason to buy, and stayed with it long enough for the prospect, after answering all of these questions, to conclude that the salesperson just might be the one.

So if you want your salespeople to shorten the selling cycle, slow them down on the way to second base!

(c) Copyright 2006 Objective Management Group, Inc.

1. Intro and Today’s Theme
2. Success Stories – Limit to 5 stories, each under 2 minutes, about new account, new product, and HOW they accomplished it with a lesson learned.
3. Call for Help – Limit to 5 calls for help, state their challenge and ask if anyone can help them.
4. Unfinished business – info share: requests, changes, updates, new. No more than 15 minutes.
5. Training – 10 minutes on something specific.
6. Motivation – motivational message and weekly contest. Contest should be “new” focused as in most new products, accounts, appointments, line items, etc. Limit to 15 minutes.

(c) Copyright 2006 Objective Management Group, Inc.

One of the professionals I coach enjoys providing me with the details of accounts, calls, pipeline and schedule. He wants me to know how much he has going on. I call this activity 'off loading'. Some salespeople need to off load and want your input. But let's not fool each other. This is not coaching. It's more like horrible debriefing. It would be effective debriefing if you were asking the questions and your salesperson was answering them. But to spend time listening to the salesperson provide details that are important only to him is not effective coaching or debriefing.

So what should happen instead? While your salesperson needs to off load, it must be separate from the coaching that takes place. The coaching session qualifies as coaching only when you help the salesperson improve, grow, become stronger and more effective. It should culminate with a lesson learned, an epiphany, and some action to be taken by the salesperson.

Don't allow valuable coaching time to be monopolized by off loading. If you're going to coach someone, make sure that actual coaching takes place.

If you are the president of such a firm, your best best is to evaluate the professionals in the firm with the purpose of learning who would be suitable for doing some business development, as well as the type of help they'll need in order to be successful. Then, you can communicate your expectations only to those professionals who are well suited to performing this kind of work. OMG's Evaluation of a Professional Service Firm does just that and identifies any future rainmakers in the firm. In addition, the evaluation identifies those who, while not suitable for bringing in new business, could be utilized in some other area of business development.

1. Some people aren't trainable and won't show any improvement
2. Individual weaknesses that would prevent execution of learned skills were not identified in advance
3. Sales Management weaknesses were not identified in advance
4. Faulty Strategies and Processes were not flagged for modification or replacement
5. Right people are not in the right seats (Jim Collins - Good to Great)
6. Sales Training is a long-term process - some people will get better over time but it doesn't fix anything in the short term
7. If activity doesn't improve, salespeople won't have prospects on which to practice
8. If salespeople aren't being held accountable, changes will be slow to materialize
9. The trainer may not be effective at creating change
10. The system or process may not be consistent with your goals, culture, or business

Evaluate your sales force FIRST to determine exactly what needs to be fixed and keep in mind that sales training may be just one of several things that need to be addressed. You may be able to train while you are fixing the other problems or training may come after your infrastructure has been repaired.

(c) Copyright 2005 Objective Management Group, Inc.