Richard Ruff

The vast majority of sales training programs have solid content and excellent instructional design.  Any company looking to purchase sales training programs has a wide variety of viable options. Yet, too often  great sales training programs don’t produce great results. Although the reasons may vary as to why many sales training efforts don’t work, the main culprit is the lack of buy-in from the sales force.

For sales people to change what they do and how they do it, they must first decide there is a need to change.  Simply telling the sales team they need to attend a great program at a really nice conference center is not going to create the need. And, the sales training program, per se, cannot be expected to both persuade the attendees that a behavior change is needed and help them to learn the new behaviors.  Sales training programs do the latter – not the...

Way back in 1955 when the average cost of a new car was $1,900 and a gallon of gas was 23 cents, Louis Mobley was given a blank check by Tom Watson, IBM’s CEO,  to create a school for training IBM executives.

The first step he took was to locate a group of the very best executives he could find.  Then he developed a battery of test to find the skill sets they had in common.  The logic being find out the skills the very best possess and then develop a comprehensive training program to help others learn those skills.

So on which skills do you think the very best executives consistently scored high?  Interestingly, the answer was – there weren’t any.  Regardless of the skill tested the proven top executives were all over the normal distribution – on any given skill some were at the top, some in the middle and some at the bottom.  Maybe the tests were flawed – possible but unlikely since Mobley had contracted with the Educational Testing Service to help in the testing....

Recently we published a blog framed around the idea that if you wanted to get coaching right, three fundamental questions need to be answered – what to coach, how to coach, and who to coach. In that blog we focused on the “who to coach” question.  This time around we thought spending a little time on the “what to coach” part of the equation might be useful.

Heretofore, when we designed sales coaching programs for our clients, we have customized the “what to coach” portion of the program around the core selling skills and best practices relevant for that individual client.

Destructive behavior study. The other day we reviewed an article in the McKinsey Quarterly...

If you look back over the last decade, a number of industries have gone through dramatic change.  As a result, the organizations in those industries have substantially changed how they do business with those companies that sell to them.  They have changed what they buy, how they buy, and what they are willing to pay for it.

If your customers are making changes of that magnitude, then the case is made that it is no longer business-as-usual for your sales team.  If you are to be responsive, it becomes a matter of doing something different rather than simply doing a better job doing what you are doing. The required shift in the sales process isn’t incremental; it’s transformational.

So, what does it take for a company to plan and implement a sales transformation?  First, let’s explore that question from a sales leadership perspective, then...