Yesterday, I was returning from New Orleans on an airline I had previously decided never to use again.  When I arrived at the airport, the monitors showed that my flight, scheduled to depart at 5:18 PM, was delayed.  I entered a very short queue to speak with a gate agent to learn just how long the flight would be delayed.  There was one person ahead of me and one person at the counter.  There were two gate agents.  Twenty minutes later, the second gate agent finally looked up from her computer and asked the man in front of me if he had "some kind of question" he needed answered.  It turned out that he was also concerned about making a connecting flight and wanted to know how long the delay would be or whether the flight would end up being cancelled.

Based on how she responded, you would think he had insulted her entire family.  I clearly heard her snap that there was "a gate agent working on connections behind the scenes (a lie), a gate agent would be here an hour before the flight (a lie), and there were no seats available on any other flight leaving New Orleans because of the convention (truth).  Come back an hour before the flight."

He could not understand why she treated him so nastily so he repeated his fair and calm question and asked, "But do you know how long the flight may be delayed?"  She was even worse the second time, saying, "I already told you to come back an hour before the flight" and then repeated everything she previously said.  She had no interest in talking with him, helping or rescheduling him.

The information was available online.  United's website showed that the status of the flight was a 3-hour delay even though that information was not posted on the airport monitors.  When 5:18, the originally scheduled departure time, rolled around, not a single gate agent had ventured anywhere near the gate.  Everyone seated in the gate area was abuzz with the lack of communication, attention and ambivalence.

Today, as I begin writing this from Washington DC, I'm still not home yet, but I'm closer, having taken things into my own hands and thankfully, not leaving it up to United to get me home.  When I finally landed in DC 3 hours late, 50 people got in line to wait for a single United agent to reschedule them onto a future connecting flight.  Nice preparation, United!  But this isn't about me.  This is about United and what an excellent job they do at selling!  And I must say, they are very effective.

Yes, they sold me, for a second straight time, that flying United is not a good experience, their people don't care, putting their own needs first, ahead of their customers.  United is not the only company guilty of  deplorable customer service.  There are many others and you have likely experienced them too.

Customer service has a very important selling role.  Their job is to solve a customer's problem and do it in such a way that the customer forgets about the problem they had and remembers only how well and painlessly their problem was solved and how nicely they were treated in the process.  When companies screw this up, customer service has succeeded in UNSELLING a customer.  It isn't rocket science, but it does reflect poorly on recruiting, selection, management, onboarding and training.  Do you have similar experiences that you can share in the comments below?

United has been in the news for their horrible customer service before.

Want a good sales book to read?  Check out this list of the best sales books to read this summer.

Do you, your sales managers and/or sales leaders want to receive the most awesome sales leadership training around?  I'm hosting my annual Sales Leadership Intensive in September in the Boston area.  It's two days of training when my team devotes an entire day to mastering the art of coaching salespeople.  Watch this testimonial video and this one too.  If you're interested in attending, I'll make special arrangements for the first 10 who respond.  Just email me.

One of the many things that holds salespeople back, prevents them from reaching their potential, stops them from crashing through quotas, doesn't allow them to exceed expectations and never has them succeeding beyond everyone's wildest dreams is their fear of failing.

Fear of failing doesn't affect everyone that sells. The elite 6% are certainly immune to it, and most of the next 20% aren't affected too much by it either.  But the remaining 74% - the group that basically sucks - battles the fear of failing on a daily basis.

That fear - and most salespeople aren't even consciously aware of it - prevents them from:

• Making prospecting calls,
• Making enough prospecting calls,
• Getting through to decision makers,
• Pushing back on put-offs,
• Challenging a prospect's thinking, plan, or position,
• Asking tough questions,
• Having the difficult conversation,
• Talking about finances,
• Qualifying,
• Asking about competition,
• Getting past happy ears,
• Closing,
• Dealing with objections,
• And more...

Here are some symptoms that you might be able to recognize:

• When salespeople have good intentions, but lousy follow through,
• When salespeople have good plans, but poor time management,
• When salespeople have plenty of time, but a tendency to procrastinate,
• When salespeople are regularly unable to reach closure on their opportunities,
• When salespeople have a need to rationalize what they did and didn't do,

The ironic thing is that you simply can't fail. The only failures possible in selling are:

The folks over at Insight Squared recently posted this interview with me.  It touched on sales management, but there wasn't enough time to do it justice.  I have written about sales management a lot in my Blog over the past 7 years with at least 75% of the roughly 1,100 articles on the subject.  If you are a new reader, there is a lot of material to sift through.  Start with my article series by scrolling down the left-side navigation panel.

In the context of best practices, the sales management role is now 50% coaching.  The problem is that according to data from Objective Management Group, 82% of sales managers make very ineffective coaches.  Just yesterday alone we had conversations with sales managers who:

• Weren't able to recognize what their salespeople were doing wrong;
• Had the ability to listen in to sales calls, but weren't doing so;
• Heard how bad their salespeople sounded on the phone, but weren't able to correct them;
• Struggled to onboard new salespeople, but hadn't realized that lack of sales experience added at least a year to the ramp-up period;
• Couldn't identify who their most effective salespeople were;
• Were afraid to present critical feedback to their best salespeople;
• Couldn't terminate their worst salespeople;
• Couldn't differentiate between nice and friendly, versus nice and effective;
• Didn't have the time to spend with new salespeople.

My regular readers have seen this number before: 74% of all salespeople suck, so most salespeople need a lot of help, yet training and coaching are only two pieces of the puzzle.  These days, most training can be done more economically and effectively than ever before thanks to AdobeConnect and its powerful, interactive, engaging, live, online training platform.  Most of our sessions include a significant amount of spontaneous roleplaying that provide ample opportunities for us to coach the salespeople who are participating.

While most of these roleplays and coaching moments are memorable, impactful and terrific learning events for everyone on the sales force, some of these conversations tend to be more memorable than others.  More on that in a moment...

Recently, I spoke at the EcSell Institute Fall Sales Coaching Summit in Chicago.  I last mentioned EcSell in an extremely popular article, This is How Sales Managers Should Coach Their Salespeople.  The article outlined exactly how to coach salespeople to success and as its example, discussed a salesperson in a competitive situation.  Back to my story...

Today is your lucky day!  I have secured the webinar audio from which that coaching session took place.  The trimmed audio containing the moment in question runs about 5 minutes but it is so worth the listen.

Click here to listen.

If you would like to have a major impact on each of your salespeople with every coaching conversation, we will teach you how to do exactly that and more at our incredible Sales Leadership Intensive, November 14-15 in Boston.   

The conversation to which you just listened is easy to learn.  But we'll share examples that will blow your mind and show you how to develop the same level of effectiveness.

Last week I wrote this article and talked about how much selling has changed.  But in that article, I only mentioned the need to differentiate and sell consultatively.  The articles I wrote and mentioned here talk about it greater detail.  But to really understand how completely sales has shifted, you absolutely must read Frank Belzer's new book Sales Shift: How inbound marketing has turned sales upside down making it more difficult and more lucrative at the same time".

Frank has not only written the entire story, but goes really deep and wide on the impact of social selling and how you can and should leverage tools and resources like LinkedIn, inbound marketing, blogging and more.

I'm especially excited about Frank's book because he has worked alongside me at Kurlan & Associates since 2008 when these changes first began to take shape in a lasting way.  As you know, 2008 was also the year the economy collapsed and that says a lot about Frank.  Anyone who can survive a start in the sales development business during the worst economic climate in decades has to be strong.

If you want to know more about Frank's book, there is a great interview with Frank here.  If you would like to order Frank's book - and you should - you can get it here from Amazon.

Finally - if you would like to master the art and science of managing, coaching and developing salespeople in these changing times, this is the last call for our spring Sales Leadership Intensive in Boston May 14-15.  You can read about the event here and check out the testimonial videos here and here; but if you would like to attend, there isn't much time.  I recommend that you just drop me a line instead and we'll make the arrangements for you.  You'll get to work with Frank and me and 3 other great experts on my team.

I am asked quite often about the Challenger Sales model.  I've written about it twice, something that might lead you to believe I like it, but that's not entirely true.  Read this article and be sure to read the comments - a disagreement between me and the editor of the study.  Make sure you read this article too, written when the study appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

I am certainly not the only one scratching my head about why The Challenger Sale is getting so much attention.  There's nothing new here (for 24 years I have been writing about the blueprint to the sales DNA they just recently described, building into our assessments and delivering training on it) and while some of the Challenger approach is fundamentally correct, it can be very misleading too.

Sales has changed dramatically in the past 5 years and among the many things that are significantly different is this:  You must be able to differentiate yourself and your company and actually be the added value.  You can do that by asking the right questions, at the right time, for the right reason.  It's all about listening.  Consultative Selling, while being a question-centric approach, is driven by listening and nearly everyone who writes about it misses that point.  Another point that is often missed is that when Consultative Selling is properly executed, you can't help but develop a relationship.  Another point that is often missed is that if you are effective with Consultative Selling, you will, in essence, also be using Solution Selling.  Why am I bringing all of that up?  One of the premises of the Challenger Sale is that Relationship Selling and Solution Selling are dead.  As they say in Monty Python, it's Not Dead Yet.  

I don't promote an approach based on either Relationships or Solution Selling, but both must be incorporated into an appropriate 2013 sales approach.  Also worth noting, the approach or methodology is only one part of selling.  Without a sales process and a sales model, no methodology will work very well on its own.

Mike Schultz, a partner at The Rain Group, wrote this article highlighting their own study, What Sales Winners Do Differently, and the areas where their study reaches different conclusions from the Challenger Sale.

Finally, if you want to learn how to drive best practices in sales coaching, sales process, sales accountability and sales motivation through your sales team, sales force and sales organization, you'll want to be in attendance when we present our Spring 2013 Sales Leadership Intensive in Boston, May 14-15.  It's coming up quickly and seating is limited.  If you and/or your sales leadership team would like to attend, please send me an email and I will get back to you.  Event details are here.

I'll open with a baseball analogy:  A few weeks ago, the Boston Red Sox traded Kevin Youkilis - a disgruntled, underperforming, 3-time all-star - to the Chicago White Sox AND the Red Sox paid most of his remaining 2012 salary.  In return, they received a couple of unspectacular spare parts.  What has happened since?  Youkilis reverted to form and quickly became a fan favorite in Chicago.  The Red Sox continue to lose games and underperform.  So, the question is: Was it Youkilis or the team that caused him, and just about everyone not named David Ortiz, to underperform this year?

Now the sales connection:  Whether your salespeople are underperforming or doing well, are they responsible or is it your company, culture, advertising or offerings that's responsible?

Using data from the 600,000+ salespeople and sales managers whom OMG assessed, we know that salespeople, who work for industry leaders, do well because of their company's reputation, advertising and offerings.  We know that in underdog companies (pricier than competition, high-ticket, new company, new technology, story to tell, pioneer, etc.), when salespeople are underperforming, it is usually because of the salespeople, not the company.

Sales is not like other roles.  A salesperson's successful performance at one company does not necessarily translate to success in a different role or at another company, much like certain baseball players don't perform well in the Boston or New York markets, despite having the ability to perform at a high level for smaller market teams.

As selling continues to be more challenging, companies must make dramatic improvements at sales selection and development.  Specifically, sales leaders at all levels must follow best practices for the sales selection process, on-boarding and ongoing development.  OMG's data also shows that 86% of all sales managers don't perform any of those three roles very well. 

When sales managers are ineffective at selecting the right salespeople, they compound the problem by being equally ineffective at coaching - the foundation of ongoing development.

Training salespeople is nice, but a waste of time and money when the wrong salespeople are trained and sales managers aren't prepared to coach to and hold salespeople accountable to the training.

It's time to fix these problems, not turn a blind eye.  

When a room full of sales leaders arrive for two days of intensive training, there are many things that can and do happen.  Here are ten of them:

1. They can and do resist the training if they were sent there.  If they chose to come on their own, resistance never occurs!  Fortunately, the resistance fades away by the end of the first day.
2. They can and do see the magic of how proper sales coaching should be conducted.  
3. They can and do pick and choose what to embrace and bring back to their offices and teams.
4. They can get a much better grasp on what it takes to make their sales force change-ready, but some won't take the time to do so.
5. They can understand the subleties of how to shape their sales environment, but it's not as exciting as mastering sales coaching.  So, even though one can't coach effectively without shaping their environment, some will fail to execute that important step.
6. They can and do see the power, efficiency and magic of a well-thought-out, time-tested, proven, customized, optimized sales process.  But old habits are hard to break and some still want to demo and present too early in the new process!
7. They can and do get a much better understanding of how to effectively motivate their various salespeople, but some will forget most of it by the time they return to their office.
8. They can and do understand how to more effectively and consistently find, assess, interview, select, hire, on-board and retain better salespeople, but some would rather work harder and longer and do what they have always done instead of trusting that a time-tested, proven, customized, efficient sales recruiting process will make it as easy as advertised.
9. They can and do learn the power of the daily huddle as a great way to hold their salespeople accountable to the KPI's that will drive revenue.  However, some will ease into this by conducting a weekly huddle, mistaken in their belief that weekly will work as effectively as daily.
10. They can and do learn the power of a staged, criteria-based pipeline and what it takes to keep it filled.  Most will implement this upon their return.