At ASTD 2012 International Conference & Exposition, 3GS Discusses Training the Oracle Sales Management Team

Join us at the ASTD 2012 International Conference & Exposition as Martyn Lewis, Principal & Founder of 3GS, discusses how 3GS developed and delivered a live virtual sales training program that enabled a vice president of sales at Oracle to transform his sales management team in a short period of time while keeping staff in the field and completely eliminating travel-related costs.

Non-Traditional and Blended Learning Approaches: Transforming the Sales Management Team at Oracle
ASTD 2012 International Conference & Exposition
Session #M210
Martyn Lewis, Principal & Founder, 3GS
Monday, May 7, 2012
2:15-3:30 p.m.
Room 708/710
Colorado Convention Center
Denver, CO

Find more information on our website.

In this session, attendees will learn more about:

• Specific training strategies and technologies, as well as a highly innovative model for creating live virtual classrooms
• Maximizing the engagement and significantly increasing the ROI of training programs
• Strategies for handling obstacles to creating effective live virtual learning experiences

Session Description

The vice president of sales at Oracle needed a program for training his sales managers that would be measurably effective within a short period of time while keeping staff in the field and completely eliminating travel-related costs. This session demonstrates how a live virtual sales training program constructed to totally engage participants in short weekly sessions conducted over several weeks was able to achieve highly successful results.

Case Study Highlights

• The vast majority of sales managers who went through the program—more than 80 percent—completed all work assignments
• The majority of participants reported that the approaches and tools they learned in the program were relevant and applicable to their jobs
• Managers overwhelmingly agreed that the live virtual training approach – which borrowed techniques from broadcast media and was highly interactive and more effective than any other approach used in the past.
• Post-program participant satisfaction rates for content, delivery, facilitation, and engagement were all superior to benchmarks based on previous training events conducted in a physical—rather than a virtual—classroom
• Within three months of the program, the sales management team saw measurable and sustainable increases in average deal size, win ratio, and velocity of deals through the buying-selling process
• The program saved $60,000 in travel-related costs

May 15 Live Webcast of Oracle Case Study

For those who can’t attend the ASTD conference this year, Martyn will be delivering a live webcast of his ASTD presentation. Be sure to register for this must-attend event!

Transformational Training: A Case Study on Non-Traditional and Blended Learning Approaches at Oracle
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
10:00-11:00 a.m. PT / 1:00-2:00 p.m. ET

Visit our website to register for the webcast.

3g Selling Featured on the ES Research Group Sales Thought-Leader Panel Series

Join us on January 25, 2012 when Beverly Lock, principal at 3g Selling, will be a panelist on ES Research Group’s Sales Thought-Leader Panel Series. Beverly’s panel, “Sales Leadership Strategies in a Virtual, Mobile, and Social World,” is a must-attend for sales managers and sales executives looking to get a handle on the new rules of engagement for sales leaders in today’s technologically-enabled world.

Register for the event.

Event Details
Sales Leadership Strategies in a Virtual, Mobile, and Social World
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 – 12:00 ET / 9:00 PT / 1800 GMT
Moderator: Dave Stein, CEO, ES Research Group (ESR)
Panelists:

• Dave Kurlan, CEO, Kurlan Associates
• Jim Brodo, VP Marketing, Richardson
• Beverly Lock, Principal, 3g Selling
• Donal Daly, CEO, The TAS Group

ES Research Group describes the Sales Thought-Leader Panel Series as “a panel of sales thought-leaders who will discuss and debate what works and what doesn’t. No slides, no scripts, no promotions. Live questions, via audio, from the audience.”

Find more information about the entire panel series at www.esresearch.com/thought-leaders.

Powerful Pipelines for Sales Success: A New Promotional Offer for Live Virtual Sales Training

This week, 3g Selling launched a new promotional campaign for our Powerful Pipelines for Sales Success live virtual sales training program.

See the announcement here.

For a limited time, organizations can register their sales managers and sales reps for the program and save 20% off the normal registration fee.

Interested in this offer? You can sign up here.

Who Should Register
Anyone with the responsibility for maximizing sales results from an account, a territory or a portfolio of channel partners, and/or those who manage such roles.

Program Summary
This program provides a unique way in which to take business and planning fundamentals to the profession of salesperson—and in a manner that sales people will embrace.

Central to the program is the belief that the sales pipeline is the very core of what selling is all about. In a totally unique way, the program reveals that the traditional sales funnel should rarely be actually shaped like a funnel. Using the ground breaking work of Martyn Lewis from Market-Partners, participants are shown how this traditional view of the sales funnel and pipeline could not only disguise what is really happening in their businesses but also be a detriment to performance, forcing time to be spent in the wrong sales activities at the wrong time.

Webinar on Sales Forecasting: The Key to Optimizing Your Sales Strategy

Sales Forecasting Webinar
Research, New Thinking and Best Practices
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
10:00-11:00 a.m. Pacific / 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern

All too often, sales forecasting is seen as a zero-value-add exercise in reporting.

This webinar—delivered by 3g Selling founder Martyn Lewis in partnership with Advantage Performance Group—delves into the crucial role sales forecasting plays in optimizing your selling strategy and supporting the role of the sales manager as business leader and coach.

Register for the webinar.

In this webinar you will learn:

• Why current approaches to sales forecasting yield little result while burdening sales organizations with unnecessary administration
• The 5 typical mistakes made in forecasting approaches
• An optimal approach to best practice sales forecasting
• The 7 secrets of creating an accurate sales forecast
• Why the sales forecasting process is key to effective coaching

Why Can’t I Just Hire People Who Know How to Sell???

After decades in sales management and training, what still drives me crazy is the widespread belief that creating a great selling organization is about hiring good sales people. Time and time again, I’ve discovered it’s not the people you hire that counts in making a successful sale, it’s your strategy.

Sales managers need to craft a selling strategy that defines three things:

1. How you are going to engage in the market
2. How you will add value to your customer
3. How your product or service differentiates itself

Sales is a discipline, like manufacturing, engineering, and accounting, which, like any discipline, is built on standards. Sales is not an “intuitive” art form based on some sort of innate abilities and gung-ho attitudes. Let’s call it what it is: a discipline. You can’t simply hire sales people and let them run – there must be an overall playbook for sales as there is for other serious business operations.

In the playbook my sales and marketing consulting firm has developed over the years, there are three mandatory stages to designing how a sales force needs to operate:

1. Start by understanding the target market’s buying process. It is the buying process that makes things happen, not the sales process.
2. Craft a sales strategy to fit the company. Although this may seem obvious, it’s far from easy or obvious in most cases. For example, most companies we work with say they want their sales force to focus, but then they don’t know how they want to respond to opportunities that might exist outside of that focus. They say they want the sales force to call high, but then can’t articulate what would be of real interest to targeted executives when the sales force does call high. A well-thought out strategy, which examines all possible scenarios, will determine how the company will sell.
3. Design the sales process. The overall sales process needs to identify the three “w’s:” who is going to do what when, so as to synchronize with the customer’s buying process and also move that buyer forward, to complete the selling process.

Based on the outcome of this three stages, we can determine what skills are required by sales people to be successful in their role; we can equip them with the right tools to do the job; and we can manage, measure, and coach in a way that is both consistent and objective. In other words, we can turn sales into a discipline, with standards, tools, and measurable outcomes.

If we had allowed manufacturing to continue the way we have treated our sales force, factory workers – no matter how good their intentions – would be working without overall coordination and without defined procedures. This was the case on the manufacturing floor decades ago, until competitive forces encouraged companies to embrace process, to coordinate and manage functions. Now the same must be done for the sales function if it is to become a high-performing component of business.