Reach your full potential and become the next star performer with The Sales Skills Accelerator Programme. This 2-day course is designed to develop and strengthen core selling skills and self-management aspects critical for delivering consistently steady sales results.

Enrich your leadership skills to boost sales staff productivity and performance with The Sales Manager Pro Programme. This course is designed to expand a sales managers strengths in the three critical areas of personal efficiency and effectiveness, sales team management and building a competitive sales organisation.

The impact that frontline and second-tier sales managers have on the performance of their sales teams cannot be over-emphasised. This 2-day masterclass has been designed to equip delegates with the knowledge, strategies and actionable methodologies to cut through the chaos and radically improve the results of their teams by focusing on two core pillars within sales strategy and sales management: Metrics and Coaching.

Proactive, formalised, structured coaching interventions have been found to increase the win-rate of forecast deals.This one-day Coaching Pro for Sales Managers course has been excerpted from the two-day Metrics & Coaching For Results Programme and is designed to equip sales leaders with the skill-set required for effective coaching.

Experiencing a reduction of profit margins? Battling to differentiate your offering? Struggling to win new business? Level 4 Value Creation is the first of its kind on the market. It elevates sales to greater levels of value, creating strategic, differentiated, compelling and replicable standards of service and delivery. The programme provides sales people and sales organisations with a plan of action that they can immediately implement in their business to increase revenue.

Are you facing deals that end in a no decision? Are deals stalling on account of stakeholder groups resisting change? Building Consensus is the framework for creating value propositions for winning more and larger deals. Arm your sales force with techniques to understand the clients structure and develop a plan to work within that structure. Create new opportunities or move existing ones successfully through the pipeline.

Is your current sales process not getting the results it once was? Are you battling to bring in new business? The Sales Engagement Process programme is designed for an executive team and a select group of star sales representatives, whose success depends on advanced selling methods that target todays complex customer problems.

ThinkSales presents a number of its sales training programmes in a public forum. These sales training programmes are offered at venues in Johannesburg. Check our annual calendar or subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates for upcoming sales training programmes.

Our sales training programmes are available in South Africa. All of our psychometric assessments are online and we offer in-house sales training programmes to all major city centres including sales training in Johannesburg and Pretoria, sales training in Cape Town and sales training in Durban.

ThinkSales offers Implementation and Refresher Coaching Sessions as an optional companion service to selected ThinkSales training programmes. These sessions are focused on improving implementation of sales process and/or sales methodology learning within live sales opportunities. Besides feedback and coaching of the individual, outcomes and action points are reported back to sales management for further internal coaching.

In addition to our Refresher Coaching Sessions we offer Implementation Evaluations as an optional companion service to selected ThinkSales sales training programmes. This service addresses a number of key business challenges and ensures implementation of a sales engagement process and sales methodology learning with live sales opportunities, conducted in a formal review.

Continued here:
Sales Training Courses in South Africa for Sales Executives ...

Selling Power is pleased to announce the 2016 listing of the Top 20 Sales Training Companies. This year's application pool was one of the most competitive so far. Each company on the list submitted a comprehensive application and had at least four clients submit a brief survey on their experience working with the training provider and the results provided.

The four main criteria used when comparing applicants and selecting the companies to include on this year's list were:

Note: This list is organized in alphabetical order and no priority or ranking is implied.

The singular focus of The Sales Board (Action Selling) is improving the salesperson's ability to sell and the manager's ability to coach. While many industries are neck deep in big data, the sales training industry has not been until now. Since 1990, we have trained, tracked, and certified more than 400,000 salespeople from 3,500 companies using the Action Selling LearningLink system. With more than 78 million data points, The Sales Board has tangible proof of how Action Selling is the world's most effective sales training methodology.

Then you need AXIOM. We have completely redesigned how to improve the effectiveness of sales teams. We provide you with an integrated solution, including a proven behavior model, sales enablement technology, inline learning assets, and a dedicated sales success team. All are designed to work seamlessly together inside Salesforce.com. With Axiom, learning is continuous and so is improvement. Enlightened learning and inspired selling, that's AXIOM.

The Brooks Group's coaching methodology ties together live coaching by an SME, peer accountability, gamification, management participation, and on-the-job application of concepts to guarantee learners have the tools needed to apply concepts quickly and permanently to get stakeholders the results they're seeking.

Carew takes a holistic approach to sales and business development honing the skills, methods, processes, and attitudes needed to drive lasting sales performance improvement. Our hallmark is developing sales professionals who are able to cultivate productive, long-term customer relationships and elevate themselves to a business advisor role inside their customer organizations while creating value for their customers.

Our client list includes industry leaders such as American Airlines Cargo, American Express, BlackRock, BMO, Chobani, Direct Energy, EMC, General Electric, HSBC, Molson Coors, Nucor, Pfizer, PwC, SAS, Scotiabank, Telus, and many others.

Headquartered in the UK and with offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific Imparta delivers national and multinational programs with local knowledge and experience. Delivery to a global audience has positioned Imparta as a leading blended learning provider of sales and service training as well as a pioneer in the field of business simulations.

Integrity Solutions increases leadership's ability to align and engage their teams with a specific focus on their attitudes, values, motivations, and beliefs. We go beyond skills and process to boost self-belief and release achievement drive often-overlooked performance accelerators. Our core solutions are grounded in values and ethics and tie well to the importance of integrity and values in the corporate world. Integrity Solutions has more than 45 years of experience delivering innovative and sustained learning on a global scale across the business spectrum.

Janek's research-based sales training programs and skill sustainment solutions have allowed clients to consistently deliver this and more. There is a reason we refer to ourselves as a sales performance company. "Performance" is part of our identity and our entire team of experienced consultants, instructional designers, and facilitators is laser-focused on providing comprehensive solutions that produce long-lasting, positive results for our clients.

Mercuri International provides open courses in a number of countries, but the majority of the business is built on customized in-company sales development projects. Based on the global footprint, number of consultants, size of client base, and the results achieved by clients, Mercuri International is one of the global market leaders in sales development.

Miller Heiman Group, a TwentyEighty company, is one of the largest dedicated performance improvement companies in the world, bringing game-changing insight to sales performance, customer experience, and leadership and management. Backed by its Be Ready set of solutions, Miller Heiman Group helps companies build and sustain successful, customer-focused organizations that drive profitable revenue and predictable top-line growth on a global scale.

Richardson is a global sales training and performance improvement company. We collaborate with sales organizations to achieve greater levels of success by changing the behaviors of their salespeople and sales managers. Our approach is highly collaborative, with a focus on enabling the right sales activity and effective customer dialogues. To help you achieve your goals, we partner with you to develop customized training programs and a culture of continuous learning to help drive improved organization performance.

By partnering with us, some of our clients have been able to eliminate the classroom altogether. Our footprint spans six continents with support for over a dozen languages. Most of all, we never deliver a program off the shelf every project is a partnership defined by our client's unique business challenges and aimed at achieving their specific sales goals and objectives. Contact us and you'll feel the difference immediately!

A key enabler for our clients' success is our SPI-1 sales performance improvement platform. SPI-1 empowers sales leaders to drive continuous, data-driven sales improvement and offer sales managers greater insight and control over performance. Our extensive sales performance expertise, deep industry knowledge, global resources, and technology innovation uniquely position SPI as the go-to partner for organizations that need to rapidly transform sales in a disruptive and increasingly competitive world. SPI is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, with offices in Brussels, London, and Shanghai.

Leveraging our extensive curriculum library, our programs are custom tailored to each client's unique development needs and promote skills adoption and retention through a highly engaging, interactive program methodology and blended training delivery methods.

Sandler Training is a global training organization with more than three decades of experience and proven results. Sandler provides sales and management training and consulting services for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as corporate training for Fortune 1000 companies. Our proven methodologies and specialized tools develop top-performing sales, management, and executive teams that excel in a fluid, fast-paced, global business environment.

ValueSelling Associates guides sales managers and their teams in using the ValueSelling Framework, a proven formula for accelerating sales results. The ValueSelling Framework is the first and only methodology with a toolset integrated throughout the entire sales lifecycle. Since 1991, thousands of inside, outside, direct, and channel sales professionals have adopted the ValueSelling methodology to better qualify prospects, advance bigger contracts, and close deals faster. To drive overall adoption, ValueSelling Associates proven sales professionals and leaders themselves tailor the simple and practical ValueSelling Framework to be relevant to your business, engaging for your teams, and localized to your region. Our highly customized sales training, tools, and consulting services provide a proven formula for accelerating your sales results.

Vantage Point Performance is the sales management training partner of choice for leading companies such as 3M, FedEx, GE, HP, Roche, and Samsung. Based on the groundbreaking research in the best-selling book, Cracking the Sales Management Code, Vantage Point is redefining sales management by deploying simple but powerful frameworks that finally put sales managers in control of sales force performance. The company partners with global corporations to replace stale coaching models with a powerful sales management methodology. Vantage Point simplifies sales managers' lives and empowers them to lead by providing intuitive, straightforward insight into the levers that drive sales performance.

Our holistic approach combines proven sales development content, consulting expertise, and coaching with an array of learning services and an award-winning reinforcement and sustainment system. Our sales solutions align with clients' sales and business priorities to improve the impact of their sales teams and business performance. For example, our work with a sales team at a global chemical company increased revenue by 12.8 million and grew market share from 7 percent to 10 percent in one year.

Selling Energy is revolutionizing the sales training industry. Mark Jewell, our lead instructor, conducts live workshops throughout North America as well as online/on-demand courses that focus on reframing and expressing proposed solutions so they capture decision makers' attention and motivate action. Selling Energy's training artfully combines professional selling and sales management, advanced approaches to cost/benefit analysis, and segment-specific business acumen.

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Selling Power | Top 20 Sales Training Companies in 2016

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Freight broker training school, online career classes, courses

This article was originally published on the Knowlarity blog.

Its tempting isnt it? The thought of closing a deal with an enterprise customer?

You earn substantial revenues, which might run into millions of dollars. You also add a well-known company to your customer list and this reputation makes it easier for you to close other deals.

However, selling to enterprises is extremely complex and far more difficult than winning deals with mid-sized companies or startups.

What Makes Enterprise Sales Tougher?

Here are just a few challenges of enterprise sales:

You dont just sell to one or two people. An enterprise deal will have several decision makers. Additionally there will be several people who you might never meet, but who will have considerable influence over the decision.

You will have to speak to a dozen or more people from different departments, attend several meetings and deliver multiple presentations.

And all this will take time. It usually takes at least 3 months to close an enterprise deal and might even take a year sometimes longer!

How can you successfully navigate all these complexities of the enterprise sale, and win the business?

Asking the Worlds Leading Authorities on Sales

To find out, we asked 47 of the worlds best known sales experts about their advice on how to win at enterprise selling.

Who are these experts?

Most of them are consultants, trainers and coaches who Fortune 500 companies go to, when they want to learn about sales.

Many of these experts have been recognized by Forbes, TopSalesWorld and Salesforce as the worlds leading authorities in sales.

Many are bestselling authors in the field of sales

Some of them are in executive roles in Training Industrys Top Sales Training Companies of 2017.

Others are CEOs and senior leaders of companies who have had years and even decades of experience in selling to enterprises.

What these Experts told Us

Our experts gave us several tips of the multiple aspects of enterprise sales

1. How to accurately identify the prospect companys needs, even if they dont explicitly tell you.

2. How to identify companies that would be most likely to buy

3. How to identify the right decision makers within a company to approach

4. How to build relationships with the decision makers

5. How to position your offering for maximum impact

6. How to know who you are competing with for the deal

7. How to do better than your competitors

8. How to objectively assess if the deal is going in your favor or not

9. How to manage a sales team focused on enterprise prospects

Here are our featured experts (in alphabetical order of last names)

Enterprise Sales Tips from 47 Top Sales Experts

Steve Andersen

Performance Methods business is primarily focused on helping our clients become more strategic to their most important customers, and so our work brings us into contact with many organizations that are trying to advance and close difficult sales with large, complex and demanding customers. When we take score and separate the winners from the losers, several factors repeatedly stand tall again and again. The most successful salespeople and account managers that we work with always seem to:

o Develop sponsors and supporters up and down the customers organization before the sale (these sponsors and supporters understand the sellers unique value and are willing to talk about it).

o Align their objectives with the objectives of the customer during the sale (which requires doing your homework, exploring possibilities and visioning success with the customer).

o Stick around after the sale to ensure that value is realized by the customer and that their relationship is expanding (activities that frequently point them in the direction of their next sale).

I recommend that contemporary salespeople consider taking this longer-term view when engaging and selling to large, complex organizations. Sure, it requires an investment of time, but the ROI will be a much higher win rate, and more repeat business within these accounts.

Bob Apollo

Selling to large enterprises is inherently more complex than selling to start-ups, scale-ups or the mid-market. There are more stakeholders involved (some of them may be invisible to you), and their procurement and approval processes often derail otherwise promising opportunities. In many cases, your most significant competition is not other vendors, but the convoluted and often opaque decision making process itself. This can be particularly challenging when you have limited sales resources.

Before investing large amounts of time and effort on such projects, you need to carefully assess not just whether you have a good solution fit, but also company fit whether the organisation has a track record of buying from vendors with similar profiles to your own. Its too easy to be seduced by the allure of winning a big brand without taking into account your realistic chances of actually doing business with them.

Naomi Assaraf

CMO and Co-Founder, CloudHQ

For larger enterprise deals, my advice would be 3 tips, in order:

1. Make sure theres a need and a budget.

2. Understand the process and track your time goals.

3. Dont waste time building relationships with anyone whos not the decision maker.

Irene Becker

Chief Success Officer, JustCoachIt

The most important tip I can offer is understanding the arena in which you will be playing and the players involved.

Enterprise buyers tend to be more risk adverse and will be looking for what is tried and true, for results that have been achieved with other enterprise clients. The average decision maker in enterprise-level organizations would want to minimize failure. Therefore, if you do not have a list of other enterprise customers, you would encounter difficulty in convincing them that you are the right fit for them.

While you might not be able to compete with other vendors in terms of an enterprise customer list, there are other things that you could do, to make a more convincing case:

o Stress how working with a smaller company like your yours can have benefits that a larger company cannot offer such as better service levels, faster deployment, access to your top management, etc.

o Rather than send a younger person to a sales meeting, send your senior leadership. That will make the decision makers feel important. Your senior leaders will also be able to have far more convincing sales conversations.

o Try to build rapport with the decision makers at a personal level. Relationships and credibility go hand in hand.

Butch Bellah

National Sales Manager, Bulls Eye Brands Inc.

"When selling to larger organizations there are a few things to remember in your sales process. For example, the wheels may turn a bit slower than in a smaller company and it may take a bit more time for each step of your sales process the prospect controls. For example, if you are waiting for the prospect to respond with data or information, it tends to take them longer to gather it and clear it for release. Understand it just takes a little more time and red tape to clear on your way to the sale. However, one thing Ive found is while you may think every one of your competitors is calling on the Big Fish or the major players in your category thats not always the case. Ive seen many times where competitors either were intimidated, didnt want to go through the extra work a large account required or simply thought there was no way they could earn the business. Its like the old story about the prettiest girl in school. Every guy thinks she has a date Friday nightand she sits home alone because no one called."

Steve Benson

Founder and CEO, Badger Maps

"Selling to enterprises involves sales cycles which are far longer than selling to small or mid-sized organizations. Deals usually take a minimum of three months to close and might take up to a year or more, depending on the nature of the industry and your product. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges of enterprise selling is to assess the performance of your sales activities. A far longer sales cycle makes it necessary for you to apply completely different benchmarks to determine how well you are doing.

These revised benchmarks are important for both the sales manager as well as the sales reps.

Sales reps would want to determine how well things are going. They would accordingly modify their approach, do more research to understand the company better, connect with other decision makers within the organization or adapt the offering to suit the organizations needs better.

Similarly, the sales manager would want to keep track of the status every single of of his/her opportunities. How is a particular opportunity progressing compared to other opportunities in the pipeline? If its not going so well, how can things be improved?

How are the sales reps performing? Do they need any coaching on how to address a specific situation? Do they need any help from other departments like the product team to understand how to position the offering?

Is a particular opportunity worth pursuing, or would it be a better idea to invest time and resources on others that look more promising. Having the right metrics and benchmarks in place make it far easier for you to answer these questions.

You companys sales leaders should determine what the ideal metrics and benchmarks should be, based on past experience, industry standards and inputs from the sales reps. You should also define the different stages of the sales cycle and make them easy to identify. These stages should ideally be reflected in your CRM and should not necessarily be the stages that you have defined for opportunities with smaller organizations.

You should also clearly define the indicators of progress from one stage to another. You can define an advancement in terms of events such as a meeting with a key decision maker, a demo, an integration test with their engineering team, etc.

Make sure that these definitions are adhered to when you determine your progress. Its extremely important to be honest with yourself about how the deal is progressing and not be overly optimistic because of a gut feeling. The more accurate your assessment is about the opportunity, the more easily you will be able to take a decision to invest more or less resources behind it, and therefore increase your overall conversion rates."

Kirsten Boileau

Head of Regional Engagement and Social Selling, SAP

"At SAP, we have discovered that social selling can play a vital role in winning enterprise accounts. Social selling has several aspects to it. Lets talk about how one of these aspects, social listening, can be used to get enterprise deals.

Successful salespeople know the importance of listening very carefully to what their buyers say. Social listening is the contemporary version of paying attention to your buyers so that you can understand them better. It can be used to gather invaluable insights about the current issues a particular company is facing and what sort of solutions they are looking for. Going through social media accounts of the key decision makers of a company will help you understand what matters to them professionally and personally. You can use this information to frame your pitches in the context of issues that are topmost on their mind and in sync with their beliefs and expectations.

Here are a couple of examples in which social listening can be used to gather valuable information, position your offering and build key relationships.

In one instance, our salespeople used social media to identify the decision makers in a target account. They found out that one of the key decision makers was unfavorably disposed towards SAP. However, they also discovered that this person was a huge sports fan. They knew that they would need to win him over to get the deal. They decided to include a lot of sports analogies in their sales presentations in order to build rapport and help him relate better with the offering. That certainly had the intended impact and they were able to win the account.

In another instance, Freddie Borsellino, one of our Success Factors account executives, used social selling to win a significantly large deal. He used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build a relationship with the HR managers at a certain company. Through social listening, he was able to learn that they were looking for another solution in addition to what SAP was pitching to them, and that they were already evaluating vendors for that solution. That solution also happened to be something that SAP offers. Freddie took the opportunity and approached them with a proposition to evaluate the SAP solution as well. He was able to close the deal and increase the value of the combined deal size by 50%. Without social listening, he would not even have been aware that they were looking for a solution.

Social selling has played a key role in our enterprise selling at SAP. We have trained more than 7,500 sales and marketing professionals in social selling techniques across the company. We have developed a training program internally and have more than 200 trainers who are certified in the SAP approach to social sales. It works, and therefore, we continue to invest in it!"

Jeb Brooks

President & CEO, The Brooks Group

"To win in todays complex sales environment, your salespeople must shift their mindset and approach from tactical to strategic. Real success goes beyond making a one-time sale, to developing a long-term partnership and business strategy with your clients and prospects. Its about selling far beyond the initial order.

To become a strategic resource capable of driving change, salespeople need the skills to position themselves as experts. They need the in-depth knowledge of your customers organizations, buying process, industry, and the concerns of individual stakeholders within the organization.

Sure, buying committees are larger than ever before. Procurement is playing a more strategic role. And, because buyers can easily get the information they think they need on their own, its harder for salespeople to share relevant information with prospective customers.

Therefore, in order to drive change inside of your customers business, your salespeople must position themselves as expert consultants. Its about going beyond product knowledge to convincing prospects with industry news, research, and subject matter expertise. Its about demonstrating business acumen so clients trust the solutions they recommend. Its about providing thought leadership that stimulates conversation and improves credibility. Its about presenting value to effectively differentiate your solution from the competition.

Oh! And thats only the beginning!"

Bill Carmody

"Over the past two decades, the major shift in selling to large enterprise companies is the migration from 1 or 2 decision makers to as many as 8. On average, 5.4 people are involved in todays B2B purchase decisions according to CEB. The biggest mistake most sales people make is targeting only one of those decision makers. Today, you need to be at least moderately versed at social selling in order to identify all the key decision makers. LinkedIn is the obvious choice for the US market, and so I interviewed Mike Derezin, VP of LinkedIn Sales Solutions to see what tips he had to give. (Hey, why not go to the source, right?)

You can read the output of my interviews in the following two Inc articles on the subject: LinkedIn on the 3 Best Ways to Attract Your Ideal Customer and 4 Ways to Boost Your Social Selling Profile (Courtesy of LinkedIn). While there are several free ways to to leverage LinkedIn, the pros eventually break down and purchase a monthly subscription to Sales Navigator. Thats because LinkedIn does all the sleuthing for you. You put in the name of a company and title youre after and it will build you a list of the 5 to 8 likely decision makers you need to connect with.

Rather than sending a bulk generic invitation to all of them, you need to spend time on their profiles. Everything you need to know about how to sell to them is right there for the taking if you just take the time to do a little homework. Most people will not only share their career path, but also keen interests. As a bonus, head on over the Facebook and do some Google searches to see what else you can find out about each of your prospects. Youre looking for a common connection that will help you build an authentic connection. You dont start with the hard sale that turns everyone off. Instead, look for common ground such as youre both into coaching a particular sport or are part of the same group on LinkedIn. From there, look for ways to add value first. GIVE before you ever ask for something. I know you feel the sales pressure, but that smell of desperation will repel the very people youre trying to attract. Instead, look for authentic ways you can be helpful and just do it. Thats the best way to connect and being a real relationship. Large Enterprise sales take time. If you think youre going to close in 30 days, think again. The average sales cycle is between 3 to 6 months. This sales process is a marathon, not a sprint, so be prepared to invest heavily to land the business. If youre not prepared to do that, stick to smaller companies until you have enough income to support an investment in a larger enterprise."

Jim Cathcart

Remember there is no such thing as selling to an organization. ALL sales are to individuals within the enterprise. They must see you as a more appealing solution source than others. A big part of this will be in showing how much you understand them and what matters to them. Know their systems too, discover how they make decisions like this. Be easy to say Yes to.

The person who drives the decision to buy from you is your champion within the enterprise. Care for that person well, and keep in mind that career paths change and so does corporate leadership. If you are seen as only that persons solution source then you may lose the account if the decision leader changes. Connect well with as many people as you can, not just one clique or team.

Kevin F. Davis

"When responding to a lead of some kind, you dont know what step of the buying process your prospect is in. So an important question to ask is, What steps have you taken thus far in regards to making this decision? Are you the first supplier this prospect is talking to, or the third? It makes a huge difference.

If youre the first, you have a chance to influence the buying criteria in your favor. If youre the third, you know they are in the comparison stage. Acknowledge that, and ask about the earlier stages of their buying process. What problems do you have that you are trying to solve? And then, Other customer have also told us about an additional issue such as this. Your goal here is to identify at least one additional customer need that they dont currently recognize they have. Thats the best way to go from worst position to first position, late in the buying cycle."

Craig Elias

"I have three tips for selling into large enterprises:

1. Start locally by developing a relationship with the nearest regional or district manager and reduce the risk they take on buying something from you by selling something them small that compliments what they have instead of trying to replace something they already use.

2. Make sure that sale delivers real results and then upsell that person while you cross sell to other locations of the same division. Once you have multiple locations as customers work your way to a national contact for a national contract. Only then can you take your track record to sell to other divisions or other countries.

3. All of what I just said goes out the window if there is a change in the national decision maker. Now go straight to them AND do it as soon after they get the job as possible. Heres why:

According to a DiscoverOrg report, 80% of decision makers who are new in their job make decisions about the big changes/purchases they are going to make within their first 90 days. The same report also says that they spend $1 million+ on to new initiatives within this period.

Essentially, people who are newly appointed to a role and are dissatisfied with the status quo have the highest likelihood of making a purchase. Conversely, the data also shows that if you try to approach a decision maker beyond this window, your likelihood of closing the deal falls dramatically. Therefore, look for trigger events like new appointments and approach them as soon as possible."

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47 Top Sales Experts Share their Best Enterprise Selling Tips - HuffPost

FLORENCE -- Some University of North Alabama students in the College of Business' professional sales program are getting a firsthand look at what a sales job is like.

Students in the advanced sales class and others involved in marketing student organizations are selling spots on a discount card geared toward UNA students and employees.

The card -- called Mane Benefit -- is like a store discount card, but instead of giving discounts at one store, it opens up savings to multiple businesses.

The card is a key tag card and will be available to all UNA students and employees.

It is going to be the job of UNA sales students to find businesses and sell them on being part of the program. It is experiential learning that will give students the experience necessary to be a success when they enter the sales workforce, said Tim Butler, a UNA marketing professor and director of the Steele Center for Professional Selling.

"There are very few sales programs that offer the students real sales experience," Butler said. "This is that experience. It is a very different task than us generating a scenario in the sales lab."

The discount program is patterned after a program at Stetson University.

Students are being trained on the product now and have generated a list of businesses that are popular in the university community. Three packages will be offered to businesses to participate. Businesses that buy-in can pick the discount offered.

The lowest level -- $149 one time payment -- puts the business on the Mane Benefit website and provides signage that shows the business is part of the program. Higher levels include those same benefits, and social media and on-campus promotion of the business.

That revenue offsets the start-up costs for the program. Any profits will be used to promote student success through scholarships and professional conferences.

Butler said the nominal costs to businesses will be made up by increased revenue as students and UNA employees are motivated to patronize a business that is offering a discount. A local restaurant and hair salon have already signed on.

A database of 300 students has been created after just one event on campus. Students solicited contact information for those students so they will be the first to know when the Mane Benefit discount card is available.

Taylor Parker, a new sales major at UNA, said getting students to buy-in was simple for two reasons -- the discount card is free, and most students are eager for a price cut.

"Being a student myself, I don't have a lot of money," Parker said. "Students like discounts. When I went up to students, the first question they would ask is 'How much is it?' When I said it was free, they were like 'Sign me up.' Students are super eager about it."

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Sales class getting real-life training - Times Daily

When having a conversation about sales problems, I might remind you about the folly of only taking cash (depending on the type of business). I might also remind you to eliminate the tedious & annoying out of your buying process. There are cases where thats useful, but mostly it isnt. But not today. Today, Id like to remind you of the value of training your sales team.

Heard of Quora.com? Quora is a website where you can ask questions. Many times, youd never have access to those who answer: world-class subject matter experts. If you asked an airplane question, you might hear from an engineer who helped design it & three commercial pilots who fly it.

Why Quora? Because I found a Quora question pertinent to this discussion: What can businesses learn from the military? It reminds me of the not well informed Why dont non-profits run like a business? question, but this is a much better question.

A Marine named Jon Davis who deployed to Iraq & Afghanistan answered: Training. His answer breaks down like this: 1) A detailed process to track progress. 2) Regular job specific training. 3) An annual schedule to ensure standards are met. 4) Find & reward teachers. 5) Ignore the training them to leave myth. 6) Discipline.

If those six items are checkboxes can you check any of them?

Ive recently met several folks who work in the car business. The one I wrote about last week is the only one Ive encountered recently who knew the product well. I dont mean he could wake him in the middle of the night & tell me (blindfolded) how to change a timing belt. I mean he didnt have to run to the showroom to find out the horsepower for a vehicle whose manufacturer makes cars with only two engine choices across the entire product line.Yes, it happened.

This isnt a sales team failure. Its a management failure.Are you preparing your salespeople to succeed? Product knowledge isnt what sells cars. Rapport is. Guiding me to a special value (car thats been on the lot too long) because it pays more than a mini (minimum commission) doesnt build rapport.

A question about the value of rapport: Whats worth more to you, getting that special value off the lot, or creating a relationship that provokes me to return every x years to buy only from you for the rest of my vehicle buying days, while also encouraging my friends to do so? You decide.

Sometimes product knowledge is critical: Can you help me find a good red wine? The salesperson who knows less about your product than most prospects will struggle & reflect poorly on your business. You need someone who understands the problems your prospects want to solve & how your solutions address them.

One of the best parts of the answer Jon gives relates to on-boarding. He describes how the military trains recruits and leads them. He then compares that to the training that most businesses provide: haphazardly, if at all, and with little ongoing mentoring which unfortunately matches my observations over time.

You probably hire experienced people so theyll step in & become effective quickly. Do they do it the way you want it done? Did they learn a completely different way of doing what you do? What if you dont want them to do it that way? How will they learn your proprietary way of doing things?

Dont assume an experienced new hire has mastered the systems, machinery, methods, and processes your business uses to succeed. Learn from their experience, but train / mentor them.

No matter what, the last thing you ought to be doing is turning them loose on your customers, prospects, products, and services and simply assuming that everythings going to work out. Maybe it will. They might survive, or get by, or be good enough. Did you exert all that effort to find just the right person only to toss them to the lions with the expectation that theyd get by?

How much does it cost each time you have to replace a poorly trained salesperson who failed? How much does it cost to keep someone not as effective as they could be because they had to learn your ways by the seat of their pants?

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? SeeMarks site,contact him on LinkedInorTwitter, or email him atmriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.

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Training: Improves Sales, Improves Ops - Flathead Beacon

Hes the master of negotiation who believes firms can learn from Brexit talks. Lizzie Murphy met Tony Hughes, CEO of Huthwaite International

Weve been chatting for almost an hour when Tony Hughes casually mentions that hes a former trampolining champion.

I was British Colleges and Universities Champion, I think. Its a long time ago now, he says dismissively.

It was his love of sports that initially led the chief executive of global sales training company Huthwaite International to start his career as a teacher and then ski coach.

He trained at Wentworth Woodhouse, a teacher training college near Rotherham, close to what is now Huthwaites headquarters at Hoober House.

This house was a hall of residence, he says, gesturing around the meeting room we are sitting in. I met my first wife at college and she lived here. In fact, her bedroom was my first office when I started working at Huthwaite.

It was whilst teaching a Huthwaite director to ski, that his eyes were opened to the possibility of a potential new career as a sales and negotiating expert.

I didnt know what he did but he turned up to coaching in a big car and he seemed to have a lot of money so I thought it might be a good idea, Hughes laughs.

He was initially turned down for a job at the company but two years later he joined as a trainer and later led a management buyout of the company.

People often say, how did you get from teaching to this? In sports coaching you have a best practice model and the idea is how do you get people to do that model? Thats exactly what we do (at Huthwaite). Coming into it wasnt difficult, he says.

Huthwaite International trains companies around the world to sell and negotiate to the highest level.

Its clients include IBM, HP, Siemens, Fujitsu, UPS, Ericson, BT, EY, Royal Mint. It trains 30 of the top 100 companies in the world as well as charities and SMEs.

What makes it different to other firms is that it uses verbal behaviour analysis to develop methodologies which it uses in its training programmes to teach the skills for successful sales or negotiations.

Hughes says: Really, the training comes last of all. We would never start with a training product and then do some research to back it up. Thats very back to front for us. Were not commercial opportunists.

The companys founder undertook the biggest global study into effective negotiation and created the SPIN Selling model in 1988, which changed what people thought about selling and how they approached it.

By analysing 35,000 sales calls, researchers found that by developing the right questioning skills, salespeople could increase their sales by 20 per cent.

Now Huthwaite, which has a 7.3m turnover and 521,000 pre-tax profit, is exploring what artificial intelligence (AI) can do.

The size of the SPIN study, access to observe and cost have meant it could never be repeated in the same form so Huthwaite is working with a US company and using theirAI technology and conversation intelligence platform to do in hours what it took 10 years to achieve. Its giving us the first opportunity in over 30 years to not only revisit the research but on an unprecedented scale, says Hughes.

According to Hughes, Brexit is an important platform for companies to learn about their own negotiation capabilities, particularly when it comes the messages sent by each party.

The Brexit talks so far show that negotiating skills are no easy task when concerning a high-risk deal, he says.

Someone made a mistake in saying to our negotiators and Prime Minister very early on that no deal is better than a bad deal, says Hughes. If youre working in a business, thats probably true because you can go somewhere else.

Britain doesnt have an alternative so how can we walk away from it?

He adds: Negotiating in public is impossible. To go to the whole world and say this is what were going to have as our target in a negotiation is always just going to be a soundbite. You can only recover from it in a negotiation behind the scenes.

Im not sure they will be getting feedback about how they negotiate. They will get lots of feedback about what the numbers are and whether they are right or wrong but not about how they use and manage them.

Asked whether he would describe himself as a good seller and negotiator, he pauses. I think Im quite good at it but you can believe your own publicity too much in my job because people trust you.

I always did quite well before I was a CEO and thats how I managed to do the MBO but you dont want to promise more than you can deliver.

They say good sales people make terrible buyers because they are far too lenient when they buy something. Does this apply to Hughes?

Probably, yes. Im always told I should negotiate harder, he admits.

The one thing that annoys me is when you go to countries where its expected that you should barter in a bazaar because a) I dont like horse trading anyway and b) Its taken you half an hour to save 25p when you could have been better spending the 25p and using the half an hour to do something different.

Hughes, who has a grown-up daughter, owns a livery yard at his home in Upper Denby, West Yorkshire, overseen by his partner, Sam. They have 17 horses, five of which are theirs.

The 58-year-old describes himself as adventurous. He enjoys motorcycling and other outdoor pursuits. This week he is going on a skippers course for motor boats.

It all comes back to the PE stuff. I enjoy getting out and about, he says.

Read this article:
Profile: Tony Hughes - Yorkshire Post

Details

An exciting opportunity for an experienced, proactive, results-orientated sales manager to join an established, global B2B online publisher.

CW Research (CWR) provides the global business community with the facts and perspectives it needs to achieve safer chemicals in products. We provide a 360 degree view of this agenda, impartially reporting on the actions and opinions of all stakeholders in our community. Our company has a strong shared sense of purpose, fuelled by motivated staff who want to make a difference with their work.

Were looking for experienced individuals with drive, enthusiasm and passion. In return, youll find CWR a stimulating place to work and progress your career.

The role:

Joining our commercial team at an exciting time - the company now celebrating its tenth anniversary year and continuing to enjoy strong year-on-year growth - youll be at the heart of our B2B sales operation, driving sales growth across our premium subscription information services, conferences, training and advertising products, globally.

Our sales growth in each of the last two years has averaged 30%, and we are projecting a similar rate in the current financial year. Our subscription products enjoy annual renewal rates in excess of ninety percent.

Reporting to the Sales & Marketing Director, the role will suit a mature individual with a solid background in sales management who is capable of working effectively with product, management and sales teams to develop our sales operation and ensure we take full advantage of the commercial opportunities ahead.

Responsibilities:

Managing a team of 7 Account Managers, you will be responsible for:

Requirements:

Applicants should have a minimum of 3 years B2B (consultative) sales experience and must have successfully managed a sales team focused on telesales and/or account management activities. Any experience in B2B publishing and/or high value information products/services would be welcomed.

To be considered for this role you will also need to demonstrate the following skills and attributes:

Applications:

Please send your CV by email to richard.butterworth@chemicalwatch.com, along with a covering letter.

Continued here:
Sales Manager - Chemical Watch (subscription)

Sales performance

Constant change has always characterized the business world. Looking in the rear view mirror has never been a recommended strategy for determining future direction. However, from time to time the nature of the change takes on a different look. The scale and speed of the changes during these periods can truly be labeled disruptive. In the early 19th century the Industrial Revolution changed everything.

Lets fast forward to the present and ask the question are we now in such a period? If you are a VP of Sales, a sales manager or a salesperson, where you come down on this question will dramatically impact what you do as the future unfolds.

The folks at McKinsey answer the question in the affirmative in their recent book No Ordinary Disruption. The authors summarize their answer as follows: Today our world is undergoing a dramatic transition due to the confluence of four fundamental disruptive forces (urbanization, technology, aging population, and global connectivity) any of which would rank among the greatest changes the global economy has ever seen. Compared with the Industrial Revolution, we estimate that this transition is happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale, and roughly 3,000 times the impact. Although we all know these disruptions are happening, most of us fail to comprehend their full magnitude and the second-order effects that will result.

In Sales, these forces will alter in a fundamental waywhat customers buy, how they buy, and what they are willing to pay for it. If you are on the sales side of the table, the resulting changes will produce a new set of winners and losers. To be on the right side of that binary choice, sales leaders must up the bar as to the acceptable standard for sales performance.

There are a number of looking glasses through which this reexamination can be viewed. Here, lets explore the notion that average is over from the perspective of the individual salesperson. What can they do given that superior performance is the new black?

The good news is there are more ways and means to accomplish this feat than ever before. Some suggestions: blogs (list of top rated sales blogs) work better than books and self-directed online training (Udacity, Udemy, edX, Coursea) can augment formal company-based training.

To support this idea sales leaders need to emphasize self-motivation both in terms of the selection and ongoing management of salespeople.

Here again there is good news. Today, there are more innovative sales training companies and the training is more customized and creative than ever before today sales training is being redefined and the new ideas are exciting and they actually work.

Sales leaders need to divorce from old notions like: the only time we can do sales training is at our national meeting or we trained all our people two years ago so were okay.

The good news exciting mobile-based coaching software is coming online to support coaching efforts so that coaching can be better, faster and cheaper than in times of yesteryear.

To support this idea sales leaders should put in place a rigorous talent management effort for their front-line sales managers. The development of a superior sales team will always be a bridge too far if the selection, training and retention of front-line sales managers is not a top priority.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to theSales Training Connection.

2017 Sales Momentum LLC

Technorati Tags: biotech sales training, sales coaching, sales performance

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Sales Training Connection | Innovative Training Ideas Blog

Strategy

Learning organizations are under constant pressure to prove their value to the enterprise. And learning leaders must design budgets that deliver performance gains while being defensible and justifiable from a business standpoint.

This requires careful planning, a considered approach and a transparent process that illustrates exactly where and how they intend to spend company funds.

Before learning leaders can secure the funding needed to deliver on business objectives, they first need to make budget requests that are justifiable and defensible. The learning function must deliver performance gains and measurable ROI both of which require careful planning and a transparent process illustrating exactly where and how funds will be spent.

Dont just cross your fingers and hope the dollars come through take a more strategic approach to budgeting.

First and foremost, understand who ultimately controls the purse strings, what kinds of information they need and want to know and the optimal timeline for submitting budget requests. If the request involves an outside vendor firm, get ahead of the master services agreements approval process to avoid getting tripped up by red tape.

Additionally, lay a little political groundwork. Identify and court supportive business stakeholders who can champion your efforts. Where possible, tie your pitch to their own pet interests and priorities. Youre much likelier to get a sales training initiative funded if the vice president of sales is an active proponent of the project, for instance.

When discussing project proposals with business unit stakeholders, share cost information with them. Karen Freedman, vice president and manager of enterprise learning for FM Global, a large commercial and industrial property insurance company, recalled the time a stakeholder discussed a learning budget request with another business leader.

Freedman had previously made the case for training including insight into the cost so, lo and behold, the business leader defended the budget request and it eventually went through.

Its all about communication and relationships and making sure they understand what we do, she said. Dont wait until budget season to do that.

Do Your Research

Its tough to ask for money if you cant clearly articulate how it fits into the overarching learning strategy. Before building your budget, account for the various projects, deliverables and initiatives that are in progress and on the horizon along with their anticipated ROI.

Know whats happening elsewhere in the industry by reading research reports, benchmarking surveys and trade publications. This valuable intelligence can be used to provide context and support to frame your own budget requests.

Determine how much comparable organizations are spending on similar projects, what your project headcounts should be and what technological advancements are needed to remain competitive. Likewise, use industry data to compare your learning organization to high-achieving counterparts that you aspire to match and to determine alignment to accepted best practices and standards. If you do your research right, even assumptions and forward-looking guesswork will be rooted in reality.

Of course, it doesnt matter how well the budget is supported by evidence if stakeholders dont understand how the learning initiatives will deliver on the business case. Make sure that executive management sees the connection between L&D operations and corporate aims.

Learning organizations that have well-defined and carefully considered learning strategies aligned to enterprise goals and objectives are far likelier to achieve budget fulfillment.

The reason is obvious: Business leaders have a clear understanding of exactly what the funds will be used for and why it matters in the bigger picture.

Be able to explain in some detail the thinking and analysis behind each budget request. To this point, its critically important to have the right metrics and measurements in place ahead of time in order to clarify how the budget will ultimately add value back to the business.

Gregg Spratto, vice president of operations for the global customer service organization of California-based software company Autodesk, said when learning budgets are rejected, its often because the request was either too ambitious or the organizational payoff was unclear.

Pretty frequently, people go after too much budget right away, he said. Go after the low-hanging fruit first. Solve that show that ROI and say, If we can apply that technique across everything, here is the ROI we could get.

Illustrate the Alternatives

Theres the cost of training but theres also the cost of not training.

If your budget requests are indeed defensible and justified, then there will be a tangible negative impact if funding fails to come through. Lay out the implications of a funding shortfall, making informed projections where necessary. Aim to explain in measurable terms the ill effects of subpar training. That could mean estimating a dollar figure for a given customer service mishap or calculating the lost productivity of workers taking outdated and inefficient training.

Dont assume that business stakeholders fully understand these implications make them understand. Its up to you as a learning leader to make sure theyre working with a complete view of the situation.

In some cases such as compliance and regulatory matters, the cost of training may be dwarfed by potential penalties that could arise from poorly trained workers. For such mission-critical endeavors, it may be worthwhile to take a more heavy-handed approach.

Draft a risk assessment statement that details the knowledge and skills gaps that will persist if the training doesnt take place and the ensuing liabilities and business challenges that will result from inaction. Then insist key decision-makers sign it. Beyond documenting your efforts to get needed training funded, this bold tactic effectively forces stakeholders to personally accept the risks associated with not moving forward with training, which they may be reluctant to do.

Or they may stand by their decision. Executives making budget decisions likely have a more complete view of the organization, including goals, outlook and finances. Freedman advises learning leaders not to give up when a budget request is refused.

When a budget gets cut, it may not mean, No, we wont do that, Freedman said. It could just mean, Not now.

Tell a Story

When framing a budget request, craft a through-line: Start with the business problem, explain the identified solution, illustrate how the L&D initiative will achieve that solution and paint a picture of the desired end state. In other words, tell a story.

Every budget needs a story, Freedman said. Otherwise its just numbers on a page and people just want to cut the numbers.

There are two basic methods of building a budget. The first is top down, in which total categorical expenditures are given spending limits with costs divvied among line items. The second is bottom up, where departmental subunits and managers make allocation requests which are then totaled.

Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks, which is why its best to use one method to cross-check the other. If you choose to start from a top-down approach, apply real world hypotheticals to the numbers to make sure they are workable and plausible. If starting from the bottom up, compare the categorical totals to past years actual data, trimming the fat where possible and taking budget requests down from a dream scenario to a more realistic level.

Prove Your Successes with Metrics

An L&D organization that lacks an effective metrics and measurement program is going to have a difficult time proving its business value and that in turn means budget requests may not be taken seriously. Comprehensive learning metrics help L&D gain respect and trust from business leaders and it goes a long way toward getting talent development initiatives funded both now and in the future.

When establishing a metrics and measurement program, its critical to measure training ROI but also important to measure things like a learners intent to apply the training, transfer of knowledge and whether desired performance change is taking place.

Take a strategic approach to budgeting and make this the year your learning organization achieves its true business potential.

Gary Schafer is president of Caveo Learning, a consulting firm that delivers ROI-focused strategic learning and performance solutions. He can be reached ateditor@CLOmedia.com.

Tags: budget, budget planning, learning and development, learning budget

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Designing a Learning Budget You Can Defend - Chief Learning Officer