Thinking About How to Gamify Sales Training

We would like to increase the participation in our sales training by making it  social, fun and rewarding.

I  just read, (and highly recommend), Jonah Berger's just released book , "Contagious".  There are many examples of how companies create "social currency."  We ,and I'm sure you, are looking for ways to motivate our salespeople to do the things that will make them successful.  The key areas, we believe, are: 1. connecting with people who can help them in their tasks (this is especially important in a matrix organization such as we have at IBM)  2.  Encourage them to learn about the products and solutions they sell, where we have sold them successfully and who competes with us.  3. Encourage them to learn more about the industries they sell into. So they understand key metrics and challenges of their prospects/customers and. 4. encourage them to learn about the process and tools to help them sell.

To accomplish this we have established an internal social community of all sellers who are in the training or have been in the training at some time.  This is our "Virtual Water Cooler."  This community will form the foundation for our gamification.  Along the lines of "Four Square" we will invite community members to compete to be the Mayors of each of these four aforementioned areas.  They will accumulate points by checking into various activities ( personal networks, online courses, articles recordings, forums wikis) earning one point for each activity. At the end of two weeks the person with the most points will be declared the Mayor of the area.  This person will be recognized with thier sales leader and remain the mayor for two weeks while the process is repeated.

All of this is in the planning stage at the moment. I will let you know how we make out.  I would love to hear about your efforts to gamify your sales training. Please share in the comments.

"Winning is not everything, but the will to prepare to win is!"

Just about everyone is familiar with Vince Lombardi's famous quote: "Winning is not everything it is the only thing!"  He said it. Of that, there is no doubt.  However, later on when pressed on the quote, he modified it to: "Winning is not everything  but the will to prepare to win is!" Everyone wants to win, but who is willing to make the sacrifice to do what is really required to in order to win?  What separates winners and losers is their commitment to prepare to win.  Did you ever run a marathon?  If you did you will realize that the marathon itself is difficult, but more difficult, by far, is the preparation to run the marathon.  Those countless hours running in the rain , dark and cold, the muscle aches, the injuries and, the accompanying diet and the discipline and sacrifice required to practice day after day.  The marathon is tough but if you are prepared it becomes more of a celebration of your accomplishments over the last 3-6 months.

In sales we know that winning is more than having the best product, the lowest price or the most features.  It is truly all about your preparation.  Below are the 10 most common areas of sales preparation.  Ask yourself  have you done all you can to…

1.      Really understand the solution your are selling, the challenges is solves, the value it delivers, its key competitors and its differentiation.

2.      Understand the industry challenges your prospect faces? (understanding  the industry lingo and metrics).

3.      Understand the specific challenges of your prospect ,  their key competitors where they sit against their competitors, in their industry and market.

4.       Identify the key individuals to sell (business and financial and executive) and what they want to see from the solution.

5.      Discover with each of them their specific problems issues and concerns and what your solution can do to help.

6.      Arrange for demos, ROI/business value assessment and executive visits by your extended sales team that address these specific concerns and issues.

7.      Sell your solution inside your own company? (Sell inside to client exec and to management to secure necessary selling resources and approvals to win).

8.      Anticipate and prepare for the competition

9.      Anticipate and prepare for the customer objections

10.   Anticipate the unexpected and prepare to win!

And then when the signed order comes through you like, Lombardi ,will know the “finest hour.” Which he describes as” when you lie upon the battlefield, exhausted, but victorious!”  Winning,  really,  is all about the will to prepare to win. Winning becomes the easy part if you have prepared.

Make the most out of your Sales Kickoffs

OK.  So now you all have attended your sales kickoffs/FastStarts for this year.  As a result, what are you planning to do to improve your sales game?  These remind  of a similar type event I used to attend while coaching football.  February is the month, like salespeople, that football coaches attend clinics.  Like you they are trying to improve their game.

As a coach, in the 70's I remember going to clinics where we could listen and interact with the "giants" of the game: Bear Bryant, Lou Holtz and even John Madden. You got to meet the giants in your company: the worldwide sales leaders, marketing leaders, industry experts,  key business partners and successful colleagues.  Like most of you,we would be there 3- 4 days.  And like you it was information overload!  So how can you get the most out of your recent event?

1.  Have a goal.  To me as a coach,  it was a goal, that as a result of this clinic ( Kickoff/FastStart in your case), I would find something (even just 1 thing)  that could improve my game.  You can't do everything you learn at the FastStart, so find the one thing, that if you do it, it can have the most positive effect on your sales game.  What, one thing,  did you learn, that if you practice it, it can help you improve your sales game? That can be your goal.  It is hard to focus on one thing, you heard so much but you must narrow in on what will help you the most.  In football, you heard about different offenses, defenses and  special teams.  There were individual techniques, motivation, practice plans and product demos. Really great stuff.  You too had a variety of sessions, marketing road maps, product demos, client and industry presentations, success stories from your colleagues, tools to help you, competitive update and  pricing plays.  With all of this great information,  focus on using the few key things that can have the most impact.

2. Get more information on your selected objective/goal.  This session cannot provide you everything you need to be successful.  You must follow up and  go deeper.  You may have learned about 1 solution that you believe could help some of your clients.  Follow up with the presenters, ask them where you can learn more. One of the great benefits of these events is you get to interact with your colleagues.  Find those colleagues who have experience selling these solutions and pick their brains.  In football, we would find the thing that interested us and we would contact the presenting coach and follow up with him, maybe arrange a visit to his school, look at some of his game film, even observe his team in spring practice.  Also we would find other coaches that were already running this system and pick their brains as well.

3. Make an action plan. Select your clients and prospects that would benefit from this solution.  Make plans to contact them and introduce them to the solution.  Follow up internally,  to effectively utilize your teams resources to help with an effective demo, maybe a business value/ROI assessment.

4.  Make it Happen!  Persistence and practice.  In football just having a great offensive playbook won't help you.  You must practice it, work at it relentlessly you may even lose a game, but keep at it, getting better all the time.  You too may not be successful at first.  You may even lose a sale.  But persist, continue to get better and you eventually will win

The Sales Accelerator- Lessons Learned

As I mentioned in my last post, while with Sterling Commerce, we created a sales performance support tool called The Sales Accelerator.  The tool organized information for salespeople.  The problem, today, with sales information is not the lack of it (we have tons) but rather, finding the right information when you need to know it. We chose to organize the information into the following categories, which became tabs in the tool: People, Process, Product, Industry, Tools and Training.  All of the information was placed under one of these tabs.  The product was successful and used effectively by the sales force for five years.


Over time a number of challenges emerged.  The first was, since we built the tool, people believed we were responsible for the information.  What we did was organize the information to be effectively consumed by the salespeople.  Once we placed the information in the Accelerator people assumed we were responsible for keeping it updated.  We could not do this effectively for the massive amount of information we were organizing and placing in the tool.  Information became out of date.  So over time the effectiveness of the tool diminished.  We should have clearly stated to the people supplying the information that they were responsible for its accuracy and timeliness.

A second and related challenge was that we assumed responsibility for the physical updating the information.  At first this was a manageable task, but as the tool grew, it quickly became a more than full time job (which we already had without the added responsibility of managing the tool).  We should have provided the owners of the information access to and an easy way to update the tool.

The strength of the tool was it's intuitive organization and how this matched the complete flow of actual work done by the sales force.  Now I work in training and coaching salespeople, worldwide, who are new to IBM B2B & Commerce products.  We have a wealth of good information for these people to consume.  However, this information is scattered among media library sites, wiki's and various web pages.  So I'm going to create another sales performance tool called the B2B & Commerce Virtual Water Cooler.  This time the tool will actually just be a community site using the Accelerator structure to house links to the information.  It will contain little or no information itself but rather use its organization to link to the actual information.  I will let you know how this works out.  Good bye for now. Next time I will speak of the three key ingredients for sales effectiveness and more: Belief , Practice and Execution.

The Sales Accelerator, a Sales Performance Support Tool

In 2004 we introduced a sales performance support tool, The Sales Accelerator, to Sterling Commerce. The tool was in use for five years until it was replaced by a second generation tool "The Sales Center." I would like to use the next two entries to look back at the tool and challenges it faced over it's five year lifespan.

The Accelerator was created to help with information. In today's world information is the problem. Not a lack of information but rather the opposite, an abundance of information. The problem became finding the right information and delivering it to the user in a timely fashion in a manner they could easily access and process.

What is the right information for sales? I believe we understand the categories of information a salesperson uses. We can use these categories to organize the information. I believe there are 5 basic categories of information. 1 is Information about people/groups we interact with in the sales process. This section we called People. 2. Information about Process . What is the Sales Process? What do I need to do to sell? 3. The information about the Product salespeople need to know to sell it. 4. Information about the Tools you use to sell. Lastly number 5. information about the Industry in which you sell. The tool is organized into these five major areas. A tab for each from the main page that people should be able to find the information they are looking for in three mouse clicks. Nesting beyond this is confusing. Using these categories, 3 clicks is a realistic goal. In the sections below I will speak to the organization of information within each category. But first we should mention that there are those people who feel any organization is unnecessary because with a Google" like search you can find anything without any clicks. I believe the organization or structure of the information is important to understanding it and using it effectively. So the "Google" search will help find the information but the structure is still key. Lets look at the organization/ structure of each of the key areas.

People: During the course of a sales salespeople need to know information about the people who they interact with during the sale. This includes many groups (marketing , contracts, development, services , delivery etc.) When you clicked on people you see all the groups sales would interact with. Then by clicking on a group they would find the information they need. What do they do for sales? 2. When do they do it? 3. What do they need from sales to do it? The problem is many of these groups are responsible for maintaining the information about their group and what they do for sales. They tend to provide way more information then the three things sales need to know from them. That is why a sales advocate/ enablement/ operations etc. will review content to this area of the tool before it is posted.

Process: The process tab when clicked on shows a graphic of the sales process steps. When you click on the step, it reveals the tasks that make up that step. The third click reveals how to perform the task, step by step.

Product: When you click this tab you get a list of the product and solutions. When you select the product, for each product, you find information about the 7 w's of the product. We talked about this in detail in an earlier entry but to summarize about they are What is it I'm selling? , Who do I sell to?, Why do they want it?, What is the value? What does it cost? Who is the competition? and Where have we done this?

Tools: When you click on this tab you see a list of tools arranged by sales process step/stage. When you click on the tool. You will find a page that describes the tool, explains or links to training aids to use it and provides a link to the tool.

Industry: When you click on the Industry tab, you see a list of the industries we sell in. Clicking on the industry reveals the specific information for that industry. In the Accelerator we presented the information by industry challenge, who within the customer organization faces this challenge and how our product solution met this challenge. I have experience from another company where we presented the information in a unique fashion. We used an organization chart of a customer/prospect company within tr industry. and revealed the information when you clicked on targeted individuals within the company. This is also discussed in an earlier entry.

In the next entry we will discuss the lessons learned from The Sales Accelerator case study.

Industry Information Packaged for Salespeople

When I worked at NCR, I was working with the Computer Systems Group (CSG) which later was spun off and now is Teradata, named after it's core software product. Like many companies this group was making the transition from selling hardware to selling software and services. Key to this sale, also like many sales today, was to sell to the business user. Teradata was and still is great product. Key to it's sale was getting to the key executives within the key industries where it had been or could be effectively used (Transportation, Communications, Health care, Insurance, Utilities and Retail).

In the course of the sale, the salesperson could introduce the internal industry consultants, who were well known and respected in their industries and they could speak to the very specific industry challenges that Teradata solved. The problem was there were 5 or 6 industry consultants and over 200 salespeople. The consultants needed the salespeople to get to the right person in a company and qualify that there was an opportunity and THEN bring in the industry consultant. That was the learning challenge. In short, give the salesperson enough industry information to identify the opportunity. We did this in a very unique way. I spent time with each industry consultant and we created, for their industry, organization charts with key target individuals identified. So we developed hot linked organization charts for each industry. When you clicked on a target individual it would open up the business challenges faced by this individual. You could then drill into each challenge and a series of questions would appear that the salesperson could use to probe for pain and then opportunity. The result became what was known as the Industree tool (tree for the branching ability of the tool to go to different people within the organization and identify their challenges and then provide probing questions) and on-demand, on-line, web available resource.

From my perspective this tool was unique in that it took the industry information and put it in a sales friendly format. It was delivered to sales by an organization chart. The content was delivered in a people framework. Salespeople sell to people so this was a key connection. This was vastly different than the typical industry presentation of business challenges by industry, it ties the challenges to specific roles within a company and then delivers the role unique content

It is the sales trainers job to deliver the marketing material, industry (without changing them in message or content) and otherwise in a sales friendly format. This is not easy but essential to help the content stick.

This was a performance support tool example. In our next entry we will talk about a performance support approach for managing and delivering all sales information/content.

Product Information packaged the way salespeople use it: The 7 "W's"

What information do salespeople need regarding the product? Often times marketing tries to make this determination and they create the information from what they think the salesperson needs. Since marketing is going to create the material, at least initially, it is important it be assembled in salesperson's terms. This what I call the "7 W's": What is it that I'm selling? Who do I sell it to? Why do they want it? What is its value? What does it cost? Who is the competition? and Where have we done this? This simple formula can take mountains of information and reduce it to a usable sales friendly package.

What is it that I'm selling? At least initially, this is a simple description of the product and its capabilities/functionality. This generally does not include a lot about how it does what it does. This is the technical part of the conversation and is necessary in dealing with technical audiences. It is my experience, that when this is necessary, this conversation is best delivered by the sales engineer.

Why do they want it? This is the business challenge that the product/solution addresses. Most marketing materials contain this information but it needs to be modified for sales. It needs to be presented in terms of who specifically in the target company has this challenge and questions provided to help the salesperson probe this person to uncover if it in fact it is a challenge this person faced.

You can see that the next "W", who to sell to? is intertwined. If you look at salespeople, their job is to sell to people. So when training them you have to be certain that the materials are set up to identify these people and help the salespeople explore these peoples challenge.

The next "W", what is the value? also needs to be related to the individual target individual(s) with in the target company. What is the specific value?, not just financial to that person.

If you can determine the value for the targeted individual you can put this in perspective to the cost information of the product solution. So yes they need to know the cost but they need to have it justified by the value.

Salespeople need to know the competition and their position and pricing to anticipate objections and competitive tactics.

Where have we done this is very important information for the salesperson. Prospectives are many times more receptive to the opinions of their counterparts at companies in the same industry. So success stories and customer references become key components of the information required to successfully sell products.

To successfully train on a product/solution be sure you can repackage the materials to answer these 7 questions.

In the next entry I will give an actual example of how we took industry information and aligned it, packaged it and distributed in a way that matches how salespeople think and work.