These information-packed, sales training articles combine Action Selling ® principles with the 5 Critical Selling Skills and adult learning methods & techniques. Each article featured below is straight talk on what you need to do when it comes to training your sales force.
What Differentiates You?
How to be different, even when you’re not.
It is more difficult for your company to maintain any degree of uniqueness. Your competitors seem to be cloning your products and services. Even your sales force refers to your solutions as commodities. Margins are shrinking as customers challenge you to meet or beat the lowest price for the goods and services you sell. You want more market share, but winning competitive deals is harder than ever.
What Differentiates You?
Want a Better Sales Culture?
Great advice from YOUR SALES CULTURE EXPERTS
In a nutshell, “culture” refers to the way that a group of people customarily think, talk, and behave. When it comes to sales, your culture is the sum total of the way your people think about the sales process, how they communicate about the sales process, and the actions they take during the execution of the sales process.
Outside the Action Selling ® world, everyone means something different by the term “sales process.” This lack of clarity about the sales process is clearly part of the reason why so many companies have lousy sales cultures.
Want a Better Sales Culture?
Great advice from YOUR SALES CULTURE EXPERTS
In a nutshell, “culture” refers to the way that a group of people customarily think, talk, and behave. When it comes to sales, your culture is the sum total of the way your people think about the sales process, how they communicate about the sales process, and the actions they take during the execution of the sales process.
Outside the Action Selling ® world, everyone means something different by the term “sales process.” This lack of clarity about the sales process is clearly part of the reason why so many companies have lousy sales cultures.
How to Break out of a Sales Slump and Get Back on top
Which boat are YOU in?
You’d think in today’s economy it would be smooth sailing for every company out there. But, that isn’t exactly the case, is it?
I began my research for this paper by looking at the percentage of salespeople and companies who aren’t hitting their sales goals. A lot of data exists about reps performing below quota. Estimates of salespeople failing to hit their goals cluster in a range from 45% to 52%.
When it comes to companies (as opposed to individual reps) that are not on target to hit their sales-revenue goals, the figures become much sketchier. From what I see, it appears that about 30% of companies admit they are behind. We can safely assume that’s a low-end estimate because, after all, who wants to advertise their own failures?
Is This the Salesperson’s Weakest Skill?
Sales Training Fails to Teach the Vital Skill of Handling Objections
If you visualize the overall skill set of salespeople as a chain that connects sellers to buyers, one of the weakest links in that chain is the ability to handle objections.
Our data shows that more than 90% of salespeople are ineffective at uncovering and then resolving objections. This is a BIG problem! Since objections are present in most selling situations, it’s no wonder so many salespeople aren’t hitting quota.
Is Your Sales Force Obsolete?
Your Company seems to have all the right stuff. So, why aren’t you crushing your sales goals?
This white paper is going to explain some things about the nature of learning and behavior, and why those things matter desperately to salespeople and the companies that employ them. To put the discussion in context, let’s start with a true story.
Call it X Corp. You would recognize its real name. It is a highly respected, multi-billion-dollar company with more than 1,400 business-to-business salespeople worldwide…
Want A Great Sales Culture? Fill The Gap.
Here’s what the best-run companies are doing.
Every business leader wants a productive, efficient, and effective sales organization—one that consistently hits quota.
But, what we want and what we are actually getting are two very different things. While companies are chasing more aggressive goals and applying more pressure to hit them, several recent studies suggest that their efforts are falling short. Research by the Aberdeen Group finds that two-thirds of sales reps fail to hit quota and that 65% of B2B companies say their #1 challenge is sales productivity.
Customer Service Training's Dirty Little Secret...It Doesn't work.
Why customer service training fails
Is your company investing in training for your customer service teams? I’m talking about training intended to sharpen the skills of employees who interact with your customers but are not part of your formal sales force. They work in functions with names such as customer service, customer support, technical support, marketing, account management, client services, help desk, inside sales, and others.
In most companies, these employees have more customer contact than your traditional sales force. They provide information, solve problems, make referrals, and handle sales opportunities like up-sell and cross-sell.
The umbrella term I use to describe these employees is Customer Relationship Professionals (CRPs). I say “professionals” not because most of them actually deserve that title on the basis of their skills, but simply because building customer relationships is what they do for a living–supposedly, at least.
5 Great Ideas to Survive Your First 18 Months
(and the) 10 Most Dangerous Pitfalls to Avoid
New research shows that as a New Sales Leader you’ve just got 18 Months to figure it out. Learn what YOU need to do before the honeymoon is over.
New White Paper by Duane Sparks, author of Best Selling Book, Action Selling ® outlines the 5 most important things to do and explains the 10 pitfalls to avoid.
Based on solid research, you’ll learn the most important things you must do right away to avoid the 18-month revolving door! Register for your FREE copy.
When The Selling World Isn't Flat
Can Complex Selling Be Made Simple?
85% of selling situations are “complex.” That is, there are multiple buyer types to deal with and a selling process that involves several steps or milestones. Salespeople will be more effective if they learn how to uncover the decisive factors that are unique to each buyer. Download this sales article to learn more about multiple buyer types and how their different criteria, motivation, and needs affect how you should approach the sale.
Five Basic Skills
Selling can be taught. Sales performance can improve dramatically. But only if we treat selling as a skill—not a personality type, not a work style, not a gift.
It's Time to Redefine Selling
A lot of people in the sales-training industry will tell you that the internet has revolutionized the salesperson’s role in ways that require you to do all sorts of outlandish things. so, what needs to change today about the way your company trains its sales teams?
Here Comes the Bandwagon
Lately a lot of people in the sales-training industry have been making some pretty remarkable claims. As a jumping-off point, they usually start with this premise: Because customers now have so much access to information on the internet, the role of the salesperson has changed.
Hard to argue with that one, isn’t it? Things quickly get bizarre, however, because after pointing out so helpfully that the internet exists, these deep thinkers proceed to use the fact of the net’s existence to justify practically any claim that suits their purposes.
The New Role that Drives Sales Leader Value
Sales leadership might be the toughest job in any company. Like any executives, we have more work to do than time to do it. But, in sales, the stakes are incredibly high. Just like people need oxygen to survive, companies need top-line revenue; without the top line, there can’t be a bottom line. What’s more, in sales there is nowhere to hide: What’s more visible than a leader who isn’t hitting sales numbers?
90% of All Sales Training Fails
The Problem & The Solution
Investing in sales training for your sales force seems like a perfectly sensible business practice. It must be a smart thing to do; after all, sales training is estimated to be a billion-dollar industry. But this billion-dollar industry has a failure rate approaching 90%. So why would any company want to waste training dollars and everyone’s time doing something that has a one-in-ten chance of producing a significant payback? Download this article to read about what you can do to get your business in the top 10% that have significant long-terms gains from effective sales training. Topics discussed: Why Train Your Sales Force? Problem A: Wrong Content Problem B: Rejected By Salesperson Problem C: Ineffective Transfer The Solution
Can You Triple Your Sales Growth In This Economy?
How to Supercharge Your Sales
Supply Chain Services Inc. (SCS) of Stillwater, Minnesota is a small private company with about 25 employees. It is 11 years old. It does business-to-business sales. It faces many of the same challenges that your company probably does. Yet it has grown dramatically despite the rotten economy since the crash of 2008.
The full article details exactly how SCS got an enormous lift from sales training. How they changed Company Culture and positioned for even greater sales growth. Learn more about the success of SCS.
5 Secrets To Record Breaking Sales
What Top Performers Do That Others Don’t
Research shows that salespeople will never reach their full potential without using the right skills within a well-defined sales process. Unfortunately for many salespeople, knowing what selling skills to use and how/when to use them are like elusive secrets that are never exposed … Until Now! This white paper reveals the most common mistakes salespeople commit and how to get your sales force on the road to producing record-breaking sales.
Is Your Sales Training Worth The Money?
If You Can’t Measure It, Don’t Do It
Sales Training Gives Company an ROI of 14:1 Most companies have no idea what their sales training is worth. If You Can’t Measure It, Don’t Do It! Locked inside every company is an asset that represents its greatest investment opportunity and its best chance to achieve dramatic revenue gains. A dollar invested in this asset can return more than $3 in 90 days and almost $14 in a single year. Find out how one company grew profits by $2.4 million in 90 days.
A Loyalty Force
How to Transform a Sales Force into a Loyalty Force – Article Featured in Future Pharmaceuticals vol. 3, 2009
Mike Capaldi, Associate Vice President for Sales Training and Leadership Development at sanofi-aventis, interviews Duane Sparks, Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board and creator and author of Action Selling ®, about the trends related to sales in the pharmaceutical field and how to transform a sales force into a loyalty force. This article is also available to listen to from our Sales Training Podcasts page.
The Hunter/Farmer Paradigm Is Dead
How a New Breed of Sales Pros Can Change the Game
So-called experts claim that there are two types of business developers: Farmers and Hunters. You’re either one or the other. Consequently, you fit one type of sales position or the other: new account rep or current account rep. If you see anyone heading in the same direction on a topic like this, they are usually all wrong. This article explains the confusion on the hunter/farmer sales model and what you need to do to make the leap from Hunters and Farmers to 2.0 Sales Pros? Learn How To: Elevate your team’s performance Create a well-documented, effective sales process Train on the sales skills that have the most impact Transfer skills into consistent field success
Top Training Method to Achieve Record Breaking Sales
25 Critical Elements to Effective Learning
If sales management and trainers are to cultivate maximum revenue and profit growth, a healthy adult learning environment must exist whereby salespeople are motivated to learn … This white paper describes the requirements for an effective adult learning environment and answers the question: “What is the most effective/efficient methodology for training a sales organization?”
Price Competition Study
Escaping the Price Trap!
In today’s global economy, salespeople are under pressure like never before to match or beat lower prices from competitors, domestic and foreign. When they do, their sales margins shrink, resulting in lower profits for their companies and lower commission-based earnings for themselves. This white paper is about effective strategies salespeople can adopt to protect their profits and company margins when faced with the issue of reducing their price to win the sale.
Free Coaching
Register for GREAT IDEAS directly from our Training Consultants.
What Differentiates You?
How to be different, even when you’re not.
Want A Better Sales Culture?
Great advice from your sales culture experts.
How To Break Out Of A Sales Slump And Get Back On Top
Which boat are YOU in?
Is This The Salesperson's Weakest Skill?
Sales fraining fails to teach the vital skill of handling objections
Is Your Sales Force Obsolete?
Your company seems to have all the right stuff. So, why aren’t you crushing your sales goals?
Want A Great Sales Culture? Fill The Gap.
Here’s what the best-run companies are doing and how you can hit goals.
Customer Service Training's Dirty Little Secret...It Doesn't Work.
Why customer service training fails
5 Great Ideas To Survive Your First 18 Months
(and the) 10 most dangerous pitfalls to avoid at all costs
Sales training deployed as a solution fails to deliver results 90% of the time
When Selling The World Isn't Flat
Can Complex Selling Be Made Simple?
Five Basic Skills
Selling can be taught. Sales performance can improve dramatically.
It's Time To Redefine Selling
What needs to change today about the way your company trains its sales teams?
Here Comes The Bandwagon
Deep thinkers proceed to use the fact of the net’s existence to justify practically any claim that suits their purposes.
The New Role That Drives Sales Leader Value
Just like people need oxygen to survive, companies need top-line revenue; without the top line, there can’t be a bottom line.
90% Of All Sales Training Fails
Learn what you can do to get your business in the top 10% that have significant long-terms gains from effective sales training.
Can You Triple Your Sales Growth In This Economy?
How to supercharge your sales
5 Secrets To Record Breaking Sales
What top performers do that others don't
Is Your Sales Training Worth The Money
If you can’t measure it, don’t do it
A Loyalty Force
How to transform a sales force into a loyalty force - article featured in Pharmaceuticals vol. 3, 2009
The Hunter/Farmer Paradigm Is Dead
How a new breed of sales pros can change the game
Top Training Method To Achieve Record Breaking Sales
25 critical elements to effective learning
Price Competition Study
Escaping the price trap!
What Differentiates You?
How to be different, even when you’re not.It is more difficult for your company to maintain any degree of uniqueness. Your competitors seem to be cloning your products and services. Even your sales force refers to your solutions as commodities. Margins are shrinking as customers challenge you to meet or beat the lowest price for the goods and services you sell. You want more market share, but winning competitive deals is harder than ever.
Want a Better Sales Culture?
Great advice from YOUR SALES CULTURE EXPERTS
In a nutshell, “culture” refers to the way that a group of people customarily think, talk, and behave. When it comes to sales, your culture is the sum total of the way your people think about the sales process, how they communicate about the sales process, and the actions they take during the execution of the sales process.
Outside the Action Selling ® world, everyone means something different by the term “sales process.” This lack of clarity about the sales process is clearly part of the reason why so many companies have lousy sales cultures.
How To break out of a sales slump and get back on top
Which boat are YOU in?
You’d think in today’s economy it would be smooth sailing for every company out there. But, that isn’t exactly the case, is it?
I began my research for this paper by looking at the percentage of salespeople and companies who aren’t hitting their sales goals. A lot of data exists about reps performing below quota. Estimates of salespeople failing to hit their goals cluster in a range from 45% to 52%.
When it comes to companies (as opposed to individual reps) that are not on target to hit their sales-revenue goals, the figures become much sketchier. From what I see, it appears that about 30% of companies admit they are behind. We can safely assume that’s a low-end estimate because, after all, who wants to advertise their own failures?
Sales Training Fails to Teach the Vital Skill of Handling Objections
If you visualize the overall skill set of salespeople as a chain that connects sellers to buyers, one of the weakest links in that chain is the ability to handle objections.
Our data shows that more than 90% of salespeople are ineffective at uncovering and then resolving objections. This is a BIG problem! Since objections are present in most selling situations, it’s no wonder so many salespeople aren’t hitting quota.
Is Your Sales Force Obsolete?
Your Company seems to have all the right stuff. So, why aren’t you crushing your sales goals?
This white paper is going to explain some things about the nature of learning and behavior, and why those things matter desperately to salespeople and the companies that employ them. To put the discussion in context, let’s start with a true story.
Call it X Corp. You would recognize its real name. It is a highly respected, multi-billion-dollar company with more than 1,400 business-to-business salespeople worldwide…
Want A Great Sales Culture? Fill The Gap.
Here’s what the best-run companies are doing.
Every business leader wants a productive, efficient, and effective sales organization—one that consistently hits quota.
But, what we want and what we are actually getting are two very different things. While companies are chasing more aggressive goals and applying more pressure to hit them, several recent studies suggest that their efforts are falling short. Research by the Aberdeen Group finds that two-thirds of sales reps fail to hit quota and that 65% of B2B companies say their #1 challenge is sales productivity.
Customer Service Training's Dirty Little Secret...It Doesn't Work.
Why customer service training failsIs your company investing in training for your customer service teams? I’m talking about training intended to sharpen the skills of employees who interact with your customers but are not part of your formal sales force. They work in functions with names such as customer service, customer support, technical support, marketing, account management, client services, help desk, inside sales, and others.
In most companies, these employees have more customer contact than your traditional sales force. They provide information, solve problems, make referrals, and handle sales opportunities like up-sell and cross-sell. The umbrella term I use to describe these employees is Customer Relationship Professionals (CRPs). I say “professionals” not because most of them actually deserve that title on the basis of their skills, but simply because building customer relationships is what they do for a living–supposedly, at least.
5 Great Ideas To Survive Your First 18 Months
(and the) 10 Most Dangerous Pitfalls to Avoid
New research shows that as a New Sales Leader you’ve just got 18 Months to figure it out. Learn what YOU need to do before the honeymoon is over.
New White Paper by Duane Sparks, author of Best Selling Book, Action Selling ® outlines the 5 most important things to do and explains the 10 pitfalls to avoid.
Based on solid research, you’ll learn the most important things you must do right away to avoid the 18-month revolving door! Register for your FREE copy.
When The Selling World Isn't Flat
Can Complex Selling Be Made Simple?85% of selling situations are “complex.” That is, there are multiple buyer types to deal with and a selling process that involves several steps or milestones. Salespeople will be more effective if they learn how to uncover the decisive factors that are unique to each buyer. Download this sales article to learn more about multiple buyer types and how their different criteria, motivation, and needs affect how you should approach the sale.
Five Basic Skills
Selling can be taught. Sales performance can improve dramatically. But only if we treat selling as a skill—not a personality type, not a work style, not a gift.
It's Time To Redefine Selling
A lot of people in the sales-training industry will tell you that the internet has revolutionized the salesperson’s role in ways that require you to do all sorts of outlandish things. so, what needs to change today about the way your company trains its sales teams?
Here Comes The Bandwagon
Lately a lot of people in the sales-training industry have been making some pretty remarkable claims. As a jumping-off point, they usually start with this premise: Because customers now have so much access to information on the internet, the role of the salesperson has changed.
Hard to argue with that one, isn’t it? Things quickly get bizarre, however, because after pointing out so helpfully that the internet exists, these deep thinkers proceed to use the fact of the net’s existence to justify practically any claim that suits their purposes.
90% of All Sales Training Fails
The Problem & The Solution
Investing in sales training for your sales force seems like a perfectly sensible business practice. It must be a smart thing to do; after all, sales training is estimated to be a billion-dollar industry. But this billion-dollar industry has a failure rate approaching 90%. So why would any company want to waste training dollars and everyone’s time doing something that has a one-in-ten chance of producing a significant payback? Download this article to read about what you can do to get your business in the top 10% that have significant long-terms gains from effective sales training. Topics discussed: Why Train Your Sales Force? Problem A: Wrong Content Problem B: Rejected By Salesperson Problem C: Ineffective Transfer The Solution.
Can You Triple Your Sales Growth In This Economy?
How to Supercharge Your Sales
Supply Chain Services Inc. (SCS) of Stillwater, Minnesota is a small private company with about 25 employees. It is 11 years old. It does business-to-business sales. It faces many of the same challenges that your company probably does. Yet it has grown dramatically despite the rotten economy since the crash of 2008. The full article details exactly how SCS got an enormous lift from sales training. How they changed Company Culture and positioned for even greater sales growth. Learn more about the success of SCS.
5 Secrets To Record Breaking Sales
What Top Performers Do That Others Don’t
Research shows that salespeople will never reach their full potential without using the right skills within a well-defined sales process. Unfortunately for many salespeople, knowing what selling skills to use and how/when to use them are like elusive secrets that are never exposed … Until Now! This white paper reveals the most common mistakes salespeople commit and how to get your sales force on the road to producing record-breaking sales.
Is Your Sales Training Worth The Money
If You Can’t Measure It, Don’t Do It
Sales Training Gives Company an ROI of 14:1 Most companies have no idea what their sales training is worth. If You Can’t Measure It, Don’t Do It! Locked inside every company is an asset that represents its greatest investment opportunity and its best chance to achieve dramatic revenue gains. A dollar invested in this asset can return more than $3 in 90 days and almost $14 in a single year. Find out how one company grew profits by $2.4 million in 90 days.
A Loyalty Force
How to Transform a Sales Force into a Loyalty Force – Article Featured in Future Pharmaceuticals vol. 3, 2009
Mike Capaldi, Associate Vice President for Sales Training and Leadership Development at sanofi-aventis, interviews Duane Sparks, Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board and creator and author of Action Selling ®, about the trends related to sales in the pharmaceutical field and how to transform a sales force into a loyalty force. This article is also available to listen to from our Sales Training Podcasts page.
The Hunter/Farmer Paradigm Is Dead
How a New Breed of Sales Pros Can Change the Game
So-called experts claim that there are two types of business developers: Farmers and Hunters. You’re either one or the other. Consequently, you fit one type of sales position or the other: new account rep or current account rep. If you see anyone heading in the same direction on a topic like this, they are usually all wrong. This article explains the confusion on the hunter/farmer sales model and what you need to do to make the leap from Hunters and Farmers to 2.0 Sales Pros? Learn How To: Elevate your team’s performance Create a well-documented, effective sales process Train on the sales skills that have the most impact Transfer skills into consistent field success.
Top Training Method to Achieve Record Breaking Sales
25 Critical Elements to Effective Learning
If sales management and trainers are to cultivate maximum revenue and profit growth, a healthy adult learning environment must exist whereby salespeople are motivated to learn … This white paper describes the requirements for an effective adult learning environment and answers the question: “What is the most effective/efficient methodology for training a sales organization?”
Price Competition Study
Escaping the Price Trap!
In today’s global economy, salespeople are under pressure like never before to match or beat lower prices from competitors, domestic and foreign. When they do, their sales margins shrink, resulting in lower profits for their companies and lower commission-based earnings for themselves. This white paper is about effective strategies salespeople can adopt to protect their profits and company margins when faced with the issue of reducing their price to win the sale.