The Executive Sales Coach: Keith Rosen’s Sales Blog and Business Blog On Selling, Leadership, Managing Your Team, Business and Life » Business Tools

Kudos to Lee Salz and Business Expert Webinars. He had the vision, executed the vision and achieved a measurable milestone over a short period of time, no less. Great example of putting the muscle of activity and momentum behind the vision. Attraction in action, baby!

Here’s the release:

Business Expert Webinars
Delivers its 100th Business eLearning Training Session!

October 28, 2008, Minneapolis, MN – Business Expert Webinars (BEW), the leading provider of business eLearning, achieved a major milestone today when they delivered their 100th for-fee webinar.

“I am proud of this significant BEW accomplishment. I’m not aware of any other program that has delivered 100 for-fee webinars in this short period of time. BEW has clearly demonstrated that people are willing to invest in business eLearning as a way to enhance the skill development of themselves and their employees. As the economy has tightened, companies and business professionals have been forced to find alternative strategies for skill development. BEW offers an affordable way to increase business aptitude on a limited budget,” said Lee B. Salz, President and CEO of Business Expert Webinars.

“The BEW platform is incredible,” says Jeb Blount, BEW speaker and CEO of SalesGravy.com. “It has provided professional business speakers with a venue to reach a global audience. Participants learn relevant information that they can immediately use in their business career.”

Business Expert Webinars began delivering for-fee webinars in May 2008 and has built a portfolio of over 150 business speakers, with a schedule of over 750 live business eLearning seminars on a wide array of subjects.

About Business Expert Webinars
Business Expert Webinars (BEW) is the leading provider of business eLearning. BEW has an international community of business speakers that comprises best-selling authors, award-winning speakers, and business gurus delivering training for business professionals. For more information, visit BusinessExpertWebinars.com.

Are you toxic? Take the toxic leadership assessment here.

Are you leading your team or slowly and unknowingly eroding it from the inside out? Do you still navigate your ship using old school motivational tactics? Do you have your people living in fear? Are complaints rampant, as well as turnover? Are you spending most of your days putting out fires? Are you oblivious to the role you’re playing in any of this?

Do you ever stop to think that some of the challenges you’re faced with now might have something to do with how you might be managing your people and your business? The rules of business have changed overnight and the areas most impacted – sales and leadership.

How good of a leader are you? Maybe it’s time for you to abandon your role as Chief Problem Solver. Here’s your chance to get real about the behaviors and strategies you need to abandon today in order to get yourself out of your own way of producing the results you need. Then, you’ll be able to experience what my clients do: A 30% gain in sales.

In this assessment, you will find a list of 27 toxic management strategies that need to be abandoned. And for those managers, executives and business owners who take this assessment and react with, “Wait, this isn’t me.” I applaud you. Either you’re really that good – or really that blind (clueless and disconnected also come into mind- well, then there are those egomaniacal megalomaniacs, but need I digress). And make sure you take the coaching assessment to ensure you’re most effectively leading and coaching your people.) However, just to make sure you don’t have your blinders on, feel free to share this assessment with your team and have them fill this assessment out this assessment on you, anonymously, of course. Can you handle the truth?

Finally, for those people who are reading this blog and feeling as if they’re being managed by this type of manager, I give you this warning. If you have any desire to share this assessment with your manager or boss, make sure you know how they’ll receive it – as a subtle gesture of good will and compassion or a threat and an insult? If the latter, consider doing it anonymously.

take the toxic leadership assessment here.

Take the Coaching Assessment Here.

The rules of business have changed overnight and the areas most impacted – sales and leadership. How do you lead your team differently today compared to the way you did just six months ago? Have you benchmarked the skills needed to lead your team through tough economic times?

After all, I hear many managers tell me how they’re coaching their people, yet in the same breath, report how they’re still experiencing the same problems they’ve always had, and worse today. Then, how effective can your coaching actually be?

If you’re still experiencing the same problems you did before you started coaching your team, then it’s time to recognize the sign; something’s not right. Is it you, the person you’re coaching or your coaching approach?

So, if you think you’re coaching your people, take this Self Awareness Assessment to gauge your coaching acumen.

How effectively are you coaching your team? Just look at the results. Here’s your chance to get real about the areas you need to firm up and develop in order to get the results my clients experience – a 30% gain in sales. This assessment will help you benchmark the areas you need to develop as well as the strategies you need to implement in order to lead your team during good and bad times and most important, get them to thrive today.

Click on this link to go to the assessment where you will find a list of 27 coaching skills, competencies and strategies that the world’s most successful sales coaches, sales leaders and sales organizations have in common.

Take The Coaching Assessment to measure your true coaching acumen. Click here.

I hope by know, we’re all painfully aware of the costly lesson this economy has taught us. The skills, the thinking and the strategies that got us here today will not take us where we want to be tomorrow. And these uncertain times have highlighted more than ever, how we have collapsed American Entitlement with the American Dream.

The simple truth is, in order to earn more we need to learn more, especially as it relates to selling, retaining your current customers and leveraging new selling opportunities.

Here’s what I’ve observed over the last six months, how the current marketplace has impacted the way we sell and connect with our prospects and clients. Granted, some of these trends have been going on for a while now. However, these last six months have put more and more companies at this crossroad, face to face with this critical decision: adapt, innovate and change or suffer from corporate inefficiency, rigidity and declining profits. Upgrade your sales and leadership strategy to respond to these times. Here’s how.

1. Yesterday, it was more of a transactional sale. You show up and take an order or worse, you wing your presentation.

Today, you need to redefine your selling strategy and become a consultative sales champion in order to survive and thrive.

• If you’ve only gotten into sales over the last few years, you’ve never sold in tough times. More than ever salespeople need the training and coaching to stay on top.
• Benchmark best practices. What are the stages of the sale you need to move your prospect through?
• Leverage technology to manage your pipeline.
• Focus on key targeted accounts through better qualification and discovery process. (More and better questions.) Research each customer and know their business.
• Order takers don’t always have the strongest relationships. More time must be spent fostering stronger relationships with key clients. This doesn’t mean calling to ‘check in’ but have a better set of timely questions that will help you understand how the current economic times have affected the way they do business and make purchasing decisions.
• Become keenly aware of the lifetime value of every customer using better defined metrics.
• Doubling sales productivity isn’t always the answer. Consider by doing so, you’re also cutting the time you have to invest in your key accounts, in half.

2. Yesterday, you can sell features and benefits.

Today, you must reinvent your M.V. P. (Most Valuable Proposition) and develop core compelling reasons which will then move your product or service from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘need to have.’

• Less discretionary spending and tighter budgets means less allocation of funds for anything other than what is necessary. “Nice to have’s” Are being cut out of budget. You must position your product as a need to have.
• Saying you’re the best isn’t good enough. You do so by being clear with your value proposition and a faster R.O.I.
• You must focus on the cost of not making changes/ the pain of no change/keeping things the same vs. selling the warm and fuzzy benefits.
• Fewer selling opportunities + increased competition = customers demanding more value for less money.

3. Yesterday, managers were able to tolerate more mediocrity amongst their team.

Today, leaders must transform into coaches and be more fully accountable for their team.

• Get Out Of The Fear Based, Survival Driven Mentality and develop a coaching culture.
• Develop a 30 Day Tactical Turnaround Strategy for Underperformers
• Do Not Be Seduced By the potential you see in others.
• Relinquish Your Role as The Chief Problem Solver
• Stop coaching the uncoachable
• Become less tolerant of mediocrity and underperformers
• More diligent hiring and recruiting practices as companies cannot afford the cost of a mis-hire, especially with time of the essence.

4. Yesterday, you could get away with connecting with your key accounts on a less frequent basis.

Today, you must over-respond and over-communicate to the needs of your customers or risk losing them to your competition.

• Many salespeople are hiding under their desk in fear. A perfect opportunity for you to seize more market share.
• Insulate your key accounts/current customers. Less spending = less sales volume = increased competition.
• Become more than a salesperson, become a valuable resource and a trusted advisor.
• This presents a huge opportunity to mine for additional upselling and cross selling opportunities.
• Help them reach their objectives, save money and increase revenue. Their top goals!
• Retention is the new growth strategy? Doubling sales activity? You need a fine balance between being a great hunter as well as a great farmer. More strategic selling.

5. Yesterday, you could be more lax with your daily activity and do enough just to get buy.

Today, you must refine your daily habits and become a master of your day.

• Many entrepreneurs are willing to do the things they want rather than the things they need to do to drive the growth of their business.
• What are the non-negotiable revenue generating activities they need to engage in every day?
• How are they being held accountable for doing so? That’s were a defined daily routine comes into play.

• Time is your most valuable non negotiable commodity. Invest it in the right activities done the right way.
• You can’t hide anymore.

6. Yesterday, companies had a larger budget to invest in marketing to drive more leads and prospects to the sales team.

Today, more and more companies are shifting to cold calling to generate new prospects and new leads. These were also many of the same companies who used to be resistant to this concept! This is another learned skill set and strategy that needs to be developed and embraced by your sales team.

7. Yesterday, salespeople had larger travel and expense accounts to meet with and romance their prospects and clients.

Today, more sales are happening virtually, online and over the phone. This requires learning and adapting to a new way of selling via new communication channels.

Listen to My Interview With Author Andrea Sittig-Rolf on Friday, October 17, 2008 at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern as we discuss:

You can click here to tune in on that day and time.

Find out more here.

There were two books I read very early on during my college years that had a huge impact on me and on my career path. One of them was written by Tom Hopkins.

Today, Tom is offering something so valuable that I needed to share it with you. He’s holding a special event next month on November 15 and again on November 20 in Southern California for:

Hopkins says, “We’ve listened to what our students are telling us. In the current marketplace, they can’t take a full day out of the field to attend seminars. So, we’ve condensed these programs to offer just the top strategies that are working now. And the Saturday program is aimed at people who are in sales part-time like many of our clients in the network marketing industry.”

While many programs of this caliber run anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per attendee, Tom Hopkins International is being sensitive to the pocketbooks of today’s Southern California sales forces. These two programs are being offered for only $99.00 per ticket. Both the offer and seating for these events are limited.

Get all the information you need here, as I’m sure this will sell out fast.

Here’s what you can expect to walk away with:

Get all the information you need or register here.

For those managers and executives out there with a struggling sales force, here’s something you can do about it. Tap into this rich opportunity to get immediate solutions to your most pressing sales and leadership challenges from the experts.

Next Monday, October 6, 2008 I’ll be speaking at the Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference at the Four Seasons, Chicago. Below is the agenda. Click here for more information.

Agenda
7:30 AM REGISTRATION AND CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

8:30 AM WELCOME KEYNOTE

9:15 AM TOTAL LEADERSHIP: BE A BETTER LEADER, HAVE A RICHER LIFE

Total Leadership is a proven method for producing sustainable change in all parts of life that can be learned and practiced by individuals, groups, or organizations. It is informed by decades of research and practical application by Stew Friedman, a veteran Wharton School faculty member.

Speaker: Stewart Friedman, Founding Director, Wharton Leadership Program

10:25 AM MORNING BREAK

10:45 AM HOW TO BUILD AN EXECUTION-ORIENTED SALES CULTURE

A sales-driven organization is one where the activities of the sales force are aligned with a company’s mission, vision and values and where salespeople deliver value every day with every customer. Each of the panelists has excelled in managing a sales-driven organization. Learn the winning strategies and tactics from these experts so you can get your entire executive team to support your guiding vision.

Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and Publisher, Selling Power
Panelists: Sanford Brown, CSO, Heartland Payment Systems

12:15 PM LUNCHEON

1:15 PM HOW TO SKYROCKET YOUR SALES TEAMS’ PERFORMANCE - CASE STUDY: DHL

Sales force success is driven by a continuous management system that links business objectives, benchmarking, focused planning, individual assessment, and hands-on coaching. In this in-depth case study, you will learn exactly how DHL uses a scientific Sales Improvement Process to maintain peak levels of sales performance. This approach was pioneered with DHL’s 1,500-person sales force in the Asia-Pacific region; however, it can be easily tailored to sales forces in any industry, of any size, and with missions ranging from making small ticket, transactional sales to much larger, relationship-based sales. At DHL, this Sales Improvement Process was employed with a 150-person sales force in China, as well as the 15-person sales force in the Philippines.

Speaker: Malcolm Rees, Global Head of Sales, DHL Express Global Management

2:30 PM BREAKOUT SESSIONS

Breakout A: Coaching Salespeople into Champions
Technology has not only changed the way companies sell but the way managers build and advance their team. There’s less face to face time between your customers and your salespeople. To maintain your competitive edge, sales leaders must know how to quickly and efficiently coach, develop, motivate and retain their top performers in order to drive positive, measurable change. You can create a world class team by developing your own coaching skills; the missing discipline among today’s leaders. Learn how a tactical coaching system can empower your sales force to realize their fullest potential.

Moderator: Mary Delaney, CSO, CareerBuilder.com
Panelists: Dave DiStefano, CEO, RIchardson

Breakout B: Reviving Sales with Creative Incentives During a Slow Economy
Many industries are suffering from a slowdown. To stimulate sales, sales leaders often resort to price-cutting, or offer special incentives to their customers and their sales force. What strategies work best when it comes to planning, promoting and executing a successful incentive program? What incentives motivate customers to buy and what incentives motivate salespeople to deploy the extra effort needed to drive up sales? Learn how industry leaders deploy Incentives to achieve a strategic competitive advantage.

Moderator: Matt Harris, Vice President, Marketing, American Express Incentive Services
Panelists: Richard Blabolil, President, Marketing Innovators

3:30 PM AFTERNOON BREAK

3:50 PM THE FUTURE OF THE SALES PROFESSION

With many baby boomers retiring, US companies are beginning to suffer from a shortage of sales talent. Every year over 1.5 million College graduates enter the field of sales, starting their careers with inadequate training, burdening their employers with a high business ramp up investment. There is a silver lining on the horizon with 35 visionary Colleges that offer a complete sales curriculum. Every year, these colleges graduate 1,600 sales professionals who know how to cold call, write a sales letter, handle objections, close a sale and ask for referrals. Engage in this session to help advance your profession. Together we can transform selling into a respectable and predictable science.

Speaker: Howard P. Stevens, Chairman and CEO, The HR Chally Group
Panelists: Pete Peterson, Director, Program for Sales Excellence, University of Connecticut

4:50 PM CONCLUDING REMARKS

Speaker: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and Publisher, Selling Power

5:00 PM NETWORKING COCKTAIL RECEPTION

Post-Conference Workshop – Tuesday, October 7, 2008
This optional workshop will run from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon in Ballroom A (8th floor) of the Four Seasons Chicago Hotel.

8:00 AM MANAGING THROUGH CURIOSITY

Click here for more information.

A quick Wiki definition. (Would that be called a “Wiki-Wiki?”) A wiki is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, and edit the content.

Jigsaw’s Wiki is unique because it only contains valuable business to business information. Similar to Wikipedia, Jigsaw’s Company Wiki is a vibrant hub of user-generated content. However, any information and Wiki articles posted should contain only factual information and not opinions or marketing messages.

Jigsaw’s Wiki, however, is especially beneficial to marketers because all companies, big and small, are welcome. Unlike Wikipedia, “notability” isn’t required. It also features relevant, fresh business to business information, while leveraging Free Company Data- that business professionals turn to Jigsaw for Company information.

According to Jigsaw, any business can benefit from this free listing in a few different ways. First, linking to Jigsaw will help your search engine relevance, and as such, help your search engine results. And being a public domain, Jigsaw ensures the accuracy of your company’s public profile which you then get to promote to one of the largest business communities on the web today.

Give it a shot and let me know how it worked for you. It costs you nothing but a minute to sign up.

Here’s a great new resource worth using. It’s alltop.com. Alltop.com collects stories from “all the top” sites on the web. They have grouped these collections into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as sales, environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics and automobiles. At each Alltop site, they display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

Think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. Alltop is attempting to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. Their goal is simple: provide “aggregation without aggravation.”

The way it works is this: They import the stories of the top news websites and blogs for any given topic and display the headlines of the five most recent stories (except Moms.alltop which has fewer headlines because there are so many feeds). When you place the cursor over a headline, alltop displays part of the story so that you can decide if you’d like to read it. To read the story, click on its title. To go to the home page of the site, click on its domain name. That simple. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Just got back from my interview with Becky Surran at News 12 in Connecticut. (What an amazing, state of the art studio.) Below is a summary of what we discussed. And here’s the news clip for your viewing pleasure.

Watch the video here.

For many companies it’s a battlefield out there and the battlefield isn’t limited to the marketplace but the workplace. And again, all roads lead back to the manager or the business owner because the manager is the one who has the power to affect the environment and culture within any organization and as such, the one directly responsible for it.

Many managers don’t realize they have this power and the power to turn their people’s performance around. And it all starts with the realization that what got you here today won’t be the same skills and strategies that are going to get you where you want to be tomorrow. One strategy to stay away from is to simply wait it out and weather the storm. Not a good move. I see many companies today waiting themselves right out of business.

With all the layoffs and decrease in customer and corporate spending that many businesses are experiencing now, one of the top questions I’m hearing is, “How do I get and keep my people motivated and productive?” Here are several strategies that any business owner or manager can do today to better motivate their people and make that fundamental shift from surviving to thriving again.

1. Overcommunicate. Many business owners and managers are hiding under their desks in fear, avoiding their clients and employees. Instead, take a proactive stance and overcommunicate with them. For your employees, let know they are going through this together and not alone. Spend more time each week speaking with them to uncover what their fears and worries are. After all, if your employees fear a possible acquisition, company sale or the loss of their job, what do you think they’re spending their time doing each day? Everything except working to improve their current condition! This holds true for your customers as well.

2. Become a Hunter and a Farmer: Whether through natural attrition or your competition’s efforts to grab more market share, organizations are losing their customers. As such, many companies are telling me they are shifting their efforts from growth to maintenance. I say need a healthy balance of both of these activities. Over service your existing client base while focusing on new opportunities to attract more customers. and while your overdelivering on value, you’ll be able to create new selling opportunities with your existing clients as well as potential referrals.

3. Reinvent Your MVP. Your MVP is your most valuable proposition. It’s what makes you unique rather than the same. Many companies still rely on antiquated and often uncomfortable selling strategies. They no longer offer a competitive edge that separates them from everyone else and promotes a healthy, winning relationship with their customers. As a result, they find themselves in the costly and undesirable position of relying on price as a competitive differentiator; thus diluting their true value offering. If you find yourself selling on price you’re already in trouble. Rather than change their approach, they work harder and longer, only to produce the same results as before. What makes you unique? What makes you a client’s first choice? What additional value can you deliver that would make you stand out from the rest? More boutique and hands on customer service or even a better guarantee are just a couple of things you can do to reinforce value in your customer’s mind. And why they should keep buying from you.

4. Change The Fuel That Drives You: The rising cost of the fuel we’re all experiencing isn’t limited to what you may think. This also includes the fuel you’re using to motivate and drive your team. Change the fuel that’s driving you and your people. Make the shift away from being driven by fear, scarcity and consequence to a healthier energy source. And that would be using abundance and pleasure to motivate your people. Focus on their dreams and goals. Motivate using people rather than using consequence. Informing people that they won’t have a job unless they turn their performance around is a toxic strategy that doesn’t reinforce the changes you want them to make. Instead, focus on what they are doing well and what you want them to do better. Reinforce positive behaviors and take a stand for them, rather than tearing down their confidence.