Making it Stick

Wander the halls of nearly any corporate headquarters or field office and you’ll find bookshelves bulging with the pristine pages of untouched sales training materials. The title pages beam with worthy but mostly unfulfilled promises. Find the people who will help you win! Better selling through better stories! Value propositions that sell! Close like you're double-parked outside! And on it goes.

The tragedy is that many of these approaches really do work-- if only people would use them. So why don't they?

We believe obstacles take root when organizations fail to approach sales effectiveness challenges from a practical systems thinking point of view. Here are the four principles we use to create “stickiness” with new selling processes and behaviors.

Simplicity is the antidote for complexity. We work very hard to streamline sales processes and methods, so they don’t add excessive overhead to the work sellers do.
Focus first on first-line sales managers. Effective coaching at this level is the most reliable way to ensure behavior change by individual sellers who spend most of their time with customers.
Design with implementation in mind. Once we determine that a new design will work, it has to pass a three-part test. Is it easy to use? Can people learn it quickly? Does it lend itself to coaching by sales managers?
Use technology to your advantage. Today’s most successful sales organizations use technology to compete. So any implementation process must leverage technology. And not just the obvious things like CRM and planning tools. Technology should also be a major factor in learning, coaching, and real-time enablement.

Finally, we use a two-part, battle-tested approach managing transformation projects.

Get it right from the start. Using the carpenter's wisdom of "measure twice and cut once" we start by diagnosing your situation as a system. Then we design your solution with the whole problem and the the whole system in mind.

Get it done. Most of the activities required to transform a sales organization are not hard to understand. But they are devilishly hard to do. We focus on teaching new processes and skills using real-world scenarios-- not case studies and role plays. From there we ensure that managers understand how to coach for the behaviors you want in a well-defined and repeatable management cadence.