Monday, May 18, 2009

Top Salespeople and Training

On another blog, someone posted a comment that 'Top Salespeople don't like to attend training.'

While I find it hard to believe that someone would write such a comment without supporting it with some study reference, I can image that it would come from someone in HR being asked to justify their internal sales training program.

"Top" people (not just salespeople) are always looking for an edge, and understanding, a tool, a perception that will assist them. The Top Salespeople I know are constantly investing in knowledge and are constantly observing how communication affects their results.

I think it would be safe to say that Top Salespeople will leave a training session they aren't getting something from. Here are three common examples of training they might leave:

1. Sales training done by someone with limited sales experience
2. Sales training done by someone with little understanding for the material they are training
3. Vague references with no 'how to': example, 'listen to your customers' without a list of what to listen for!

Why would they leave? Because Top Salespeople understand their most valuable asset is TIME!

P.S. Product training is not sales training, and sales training doesn't require product knowledge.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Difference between Prospecting and Lead Generation

What is the difference between prospecting and lead generation?

The answer is always: It depends on your perspective.

The traditional vision of marketing is lead generation. Marketing does their magic and comes up with a campaign to generate leads. Those leads are then turned over to the sales team which goes through the leads looking for prospects that will then be worked into sales.

There are three unfortunate realities. First, marketing and sales are not always on the same page. There might be lots of leads that could never become sales, and this is demotivating to sales and then to marketing. Second, too many salespeople lack the necessary skills to convert leads to sales. Third, this is a perspective issue because different departments are rewarded for different results.

If lead generation and prospecting were thought of as a singular activity, then sales might be improved. This can be one of the beauties of SN: It blurs the lines between functions and in doing so can drive the thought process to results as the clarifying purpose.

For example, is this blog lead generation? prospecting? or just too much coffee? or is it just Wednesday?

Hey, it's Wednesday and you know what that is 'It's Prince Spaghetti Day!' OK, so I've dated myself. You can check out the commercial on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tJUNlZF7Sw Is this prospecting or lead generation? It depends if you are a consumer or a grocery store, doesn't it? or does it?