$6 Billion Waste?

A response to David stein's question

'How do you fix sales ineffectiveness'

“The root causes of sales ineffectiveness are clear." according to Dave Stein on his popular blog. "There is plenty of sound advice about how to fix the problem. There are companies you can read about and observe, that have achieved sales excellence.”

Ok Dave, go on.

The 100 year old art of Sales Training is backed by an astonishing 30,000 books available on 'How to Sell' through amazon.com alone, though there's only a third that number on 'Sales Techniques'. 

Old yet proven tools are rejected as 'old school' by many of these books, yet no definitive, industry standard exists as would in another profession, be it "Gray's Anatomy" for doctors or "Salvato's Environmental Engineering" for sanitation engineers.

Fair point Dave.

He cites the number of blogs, training companies, webinars, eBooks, articles and white papers available - many offering solid advice. He lists an eye-popping array of highly respected surveys and research, still with no leading light regarded as the benchmark.

He puts it all in financial context by pointing out that US corporations spent about $6 billion on sales performance improvement in 2008 yet sales productivity, prior to the recession, was down. 

Hey, that doesn't look good! 

But hang on a minute. How much of that literature, blogature, and coursework is about sales theory and how much is about the essential element common to all transactions - the human being? 

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Comments

[www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmGb3vYmi4qxisOoAJOZ-vH1_kBxmQyG64]

Yes it is the human element that fails us all. In our experience over the 16 years of working with sales people and sales managers it normally comes down to 'will'. We look at commitment as part of 'will'. There are three levels of will as I see it:
WIT - whatever it takes
Coast to Coast - coasting through the motions of be effective from the begining of the day to the end of the day (5:00PM sharp)
WITALAIITU - Whatever it takes as long as it isn't too uncomfortable.
Hire WITS and everything else gets easy

[Christian Maurer]

Interesting analysis. Was hoping to find an answer for how to fill the void of a definitive industry standard for selling. I even went through he down loadable article but did not see anything to this effect. Hard working and sticking to the guns does not seem to be the solution to me.