SMT International Conference 2011 convened at the beautiful Don Cesar Beach Resort in sunny St. Pete Beach, Florida. Presenters included keynote speaker Jeffrey Berk (COO, Knowledge Advisors), Kevin Davis (CEO, Top-Line Leadership), Anders Gronstedt (CEO, Gronstedt Group), and many more.

The 2011 SMT International Conference 2011 convened at the beautiful Don Cesar Beach Resort in sunny St. Pete Beach, Florida. Presenters included keynote speaker Jeffrey Berk (COO, Knowledge Advisors), Kevin Davis (CEO, Top-Line Leadership), Anders Gronstedt (CEO, Gronstedt Group), and many more.

See the follwing speaker showcase and view the conference agenda below.

Agenda

Tuesday, October 11th

9:00 AM – 12:00 PM  Registration/Vendor Setup 1:00 PM -   1:30 PM  SMT Conference Welcome - Teresa Hiatt, SMT President 2:00 PM -   3:30 PM              Headline Speaker

Jeff Berk COO Knowledge Advisors - Demonstrating The Business Value of Learning in Sales Organizations

3:30 PM -  3:45 PM              BREAK 3:45 PM -  5:00 PM               Break Out Sessions – Concurrent

1. Selling to the C-Suite – Steve Bistritz
2. Know More! Selling – Sam Richter
3. 3-D Virtual Rehersal Studio – Duesterberg

5:00 PM -  8:00 PM    Vendor/Sponsor Appreciation Reception

Wednesday, October 12th

7:00 AM – 8:00 AM Breakfast in Exhibit Area 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM SPEAKER -

Kevin Davis, Sales Management Leadership

9:30 AM – 9:45 AM BREAK 9:45 AM – 11:00 AM Break Out Sessions – Concurrent

1. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There in Sales – Don Brown
2. Attract, Hire and Retain Top Talent – Teresa Hiatt
3. Game On Mobile! – Andrew Kimball & A. Chino

11:00 AM -12:45 PM Lunch and Vendor Exhibit Fair 12:45 PM – 2:00 PM Break Out Sessions – Concurrent

1. Thinking on Your Feet – Renie McClay
2. Closing Time: The Science of Closing Sales – Ron Hubsher
3. Sales Success at TechData – Loretta Calvin

2:00 PM – 2:15 PM BREAK 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM Break Out Sessions – Concurrent

1. Success with your CRM, Practitioner Case Study – Nik Nikic
2. Understanding Where You Have Been: How to Relate Back to Your Subordinate Co-workers – Dawne-Marie Thompson
3. A Game Selling – Leisa Erickson

3:30 PM – 3:45 PM BREAK 3:45 PM – 5:00 PM – SPEAKER

David Rubenstein, Yes, There’s Still a Place for Rigor and Accountability in Rookie Sales Training!

6:00 PM – 9:00 PM SMT Welcome Cocktail Reception followed by Dinner

Thursday, October 13th

7:00 AM – 8:15 AM Vendor Exhibits Open and Breakfast 8:15 AM – 9:30: AM Break-out Sessions – Concurrent

1. Sales Simulation, Applying Skills to Succeed – Steve Gielda
2. Shapiro Negotiations Institute – Mark Jankowski
3. It’s Not About Price: Value Selling in Today’s Markets – Walt Slaughter

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM Break & Hotel Checkout 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM SPEAKER - Gronsted/Conyngham, Simulations 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM Meeting Recap - Teresa Hiatt, SMT President

As the new SMT President I would like to thank you for your interest in SMT. I have been in the sales, sales management and training field for over 20 years. Working for organizations such as Canon and Ricoh. Throughout my career I have participated in many networking organizations, however, not one matched the potential of SMT. We possess great wealth in having some of the ‘best of the best’ belonging to SMT.

For me, SMT has been a place to make some fabulous connections with professionals in my line of business and also complimentary to mine. Highlighting a few benefits; I’ve successfully implemented best practices, improved metrics measurement and tracking, was published in a book, and continue to hone my public speaking skills. In a group such as ours, it is easy to seek out the professional or expert you may be looking for. I encourage you to reach out!

Whether they are called Generation Y, Echo Boomers or Millennials, the group of workers born in the 80’s and 90’s has some unique characteristics. This is the group that handled communications, media, technology and social networking right from the cradle. They are often the bane of traditional organizations due to the technology challenges they bring, but with the right understanding, they can be great salespeople for today’s business world because of their natural approach to their jobs, their customers and their active use of training programs.

Traditionally, salespeople were drawn to the sales profession because of the possibilities of a very lucrative career with a lot of autonomy. Salespeople were often hired, quickly given product info and demo training and turned loose on a territory with instructions not to come back until the product was sold. With hard work, salespeople of the past could build a base and create a revenue stream entirely through their own efforts. Provided they were successful, sales management left them alone, except for sales meetings where they could be used as an example for the new hires.

Today, most sales organizations are faced with complex solution selling environments, which require team selling skills, constant communication and managed activities. Sales teams have to work together to build strategic sales plans and exchange information, which was not a job requirement for the traditional salesperson. Millennials, however, are perfect in this role. They communicate easily and often, using real-time devices, email and CRM web tools easily. If they don’t know something, they can access their social network and have the answer immediately. Hey have little problem understanding the importance of sharing information and documenting sales activity.

Millennials approach a career looking for more than just money and freedom from management. They are looking for a way to be part of bigger whole, making a valid contribution to the team, life/work balance and professional development. They are loyal to the team and especially the team leader and will help other members of the team succeed as part of their own job satisfaction. This is a great characteristic when it comes time to meet quotas. They do not hold any great loyalty to the “company”, however, and that makes them high risk for turnover if the team environment is not healthy (meaning led by a good sales manager).

Customers love well-informed Millennials. Because of an innate connection to the world at large fostered by the instant communication age, Millennials enjoy helping customers uncover problems and find solutions. This generation is referred to as a “Hero” generation, meaning the desire to help the world is strong. This is precisely the right mind-set for today’s solution selling business model and the Millennial salesperson can easily build strong relationships in customer organizations with this attitude.

Training is easy with Millennials. In many cases of the past, traditional salespeople avoided sales or product training programs as intrusive demands on their prized selling time, but Millennials appreciate additional education and information opportunities. It just has to be in a media-rich, interactive, easy to consume format. A room full of Millennials will literally riot if forced to endure the traditional death-by-powerpoint presentations typically passed off as training. Think more of video clips, hands-on applications they can break and fix to learn how they work, interactive group learning with experiential examples, informal learning done through blog posts or even a sales simulation in a Second-Life world. If all that sounds new and different to the existing training offered, start making plans to totally revamp sales training.

There really are two choices when it comes to embracing Millennials into sales organizations, a heads-up proactive one where systems, tools and training are updated now in an orderly fashion to be easily usable by this generation, or a slow, painful reactive one where change is horrifically forced upon everyone by dire necessity when Millennials reach sufficient critical mass.
Which one will your organization choose?

Airplane crashes don’t hurt nearly as bad in a flight simulator as they do in real life, which is why pilots have been trained in flight simulators for over 100 years. Strangely, that concept has yet to be translated to most sales organizations where on-the job training is the norm. Sales reps rarely get the opportunity to practice and fail in a safe environment. Business communication systems leader Avaya was determined to change that by creating a “flight simulator” for its sales organization.

Working in partnership with its global sales organization and Visualize Inc., my firm, the Gronstedt Group, helped create a "Virtual Rehearsal Studio” in Avaya’s own web.alive environment. "The purpose with our session in web.alive was to run a collaborative learning and rehearsal session without the travel costs and time of class room training," says Rhonda Duesterberg, Avaya Global Sales Learning & Development Senior Manger (who will be a the SMT Conference to present the case!).

 Participants of the two-hour session attend virtually. Working in front of their laptops, they move their avatars around the 3-D world, interacting with other people by speaking directly to their computers via headset. As people move about, the voices changes directions; it’s sound and sight in 3-D. The avatars gather in an open-air setting along a virtual tropical coastline. The 3-D virtual environment gives participants the perception of being together, which keeps them focused, engaged and motivated. The sales reps were encouraged to hang out in cool lounges after the session to socialize and learn from each other. Virtual worlds provide an environment that proximates the informality of a water cooler conversation. It’s the same concept as Second Life in a browser-based and business-friendly environment that anyone can access from behind the firewall with minimal learning curve or bandwidth.

The virtual workshop, "Maximizing Your Sales Call Preparation," is focused on helping account managers improve their skills at preparing for a sales call. Sales reps take turns playing the role of Julia Parker, the CIO of International University, and the Avaya Account Manager, while other reps give feedback on the performance. The first role-play is performed between the facilitator and one participant in front of the group. Next, participants split in break-out groups where two participants role-play against each other and the other two provide feedback. These simulations are the last scrimmage before the big game. They put reps in real-life situations, and challenge them to deliver the value prop in the customer’s vernacular, to get out of pronouncement mode and into listening mode, and to transform the client business instead of taking orders.

The concept of training sales rep in a 3D virtual world is not new. IBM has actively used virtual worlds for over four years in training. IBM employees step into a virtual elevator to practice their “elevator pitch” with a chief information officer or rehearse an important client pitch in a conference room with IBM executives playing the role of clients. Ample evidence suggests that sales role-playing in a 3D immersive virtual world can be more effective than a live classroom-based role-play. Loyalist College in Ontario, Canada, found that virtual worlds role-playing increased the number of border agent students who passed a final evaluation from 56 percent to 93 percent when the test was moved from the classroom to the virtual world. The reason is simple, people “get in character” more naturally through their avatars and are less inhibited when they’re not face-to-face. Certainly you lose some qualities, like eye contacts and gestures, no solution is perfect.

The next step for Avaya will be to move from doing “old things in new ways” (moving an existing workshop to web.alive), to doing “new things in new ways,” by creating a persistent, multipurpose, 3D immersive environment in web.alive for learning and collaboration with game elements like points, badges, levels, goals, virtual rewards, time-pressure, high scoring lists, and cut scenes to provide engagement and give reps a reason to come back. Fortunately, the web.alive platform is built on a sophisticated game engine and equipped for such “gamification” of the learning process. More on that later.

Anders Gronstedt, Ph.D. (anders@gronstedtgroup.com) is the president of Colorado-based Gronstedt Group (www.gronstedtgroup.com), which helps global companies like Coldwell Banker, Deloitte, Dell, HP, Jamba Juice, Volvo Cars, Ericsson, Eli Lilly and United Healthcare and government clients like the City of New York improve performance with innovative communication and learning approaches, including next-generation digital simulations, mobile learning, social media, gaming and immersive 3D virtual worlds. His articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and he is the host of the popular weekly virtual world speaking series “Train for Success” (http://www.facebook.com/TrainForSuccess)

Julie Thomas

We find that Sales Reps and Sales Managers all over the world often get very frustrated. They have a piece of business or an opportunity that they are working to close. They’ve done everything the customer has asked them to do. They think it’s done, they forecast the deal. They show up to pick up the paperwork, only to find out that something has changed in the customer. And they’re left holding the bag, trying to back peddle and find out what happened.

Kelley Robertson

Every person has a different internal motivator. Money is a motivator for some individuals, challenge is a motivator for others. Being part of a group or a team is a motivating factor for somebody else. So as a sales manager it’s learning what’s important to your team and adapting your approach to each individual on your team.

Formal sales training is a published, multi-year training program relevant for building sales effectiveness in a reasoned, logical fashion over a sales professional’s career, typically 40 hours of live instruction per year, supplemented by virtual or eLearning. It is delivered by professional instructors who have a solid background in sales. It is measured, evaluated, trended and related back to sales results in quarterly KPI reports.

Companies that do not have a rational and consistent sales training program for all levels of salespeople are usually not rewarded with consistent sales performance. There are far too few companies executing at a best-in-class sales effectiveness level and the lack of a well thought-out documented multi-tiered training program can be a root cause. Let’s look at why some sales leaders do not invest in what it takes to build and employ a formal approach. Here are some of the excuses derived from interviews with sales managers and vice presidents by ES Research Group:

Those managers and executives think they do have a training program but it is not relevant to their current selling environment, comprehensive enough, or being used by the people who sell.

The managers are not process-oriented, and therefore believe that processes inherently inhibit productivity, rather than enhance it.

They do not believe sales training works, since they themselves were never trained to sell as part of a well-founded, comprehensive sales effectiveness strategy.

They cannot get budget allocated for sales training because they are incapable of presenting a credible business case including a target ROI.

They will not invest in training because they are compensated on operating income and training is seen as a large expense potentially impacting their bonus.

They will not allocate the time to have their sales people trained, feeling it takes away from selling time.

They believe they hire top sales people who do not need training. Anyone who does not make quota can be replaced by another top performer, so, sales management concludes, there is no need to train.

They have no idea how to select or engage with a sales training professionals and out of fear of failure, they do nothing.

They have invested in a CRM system and feel that that is all the process that their salespeople need.

Their sales people tell management that they have been through all the training they need and that it is just a disruption.

In many cases, especially for smaller companies or companies without training professionals on staff, sales training can be outsourced to sales training providers. If a training plan is designed, published, funded, executed and evaluated, it can have a significant positive impact to the bottom line.

The truth is that sales companies who do invest in formal training programs attract better employees, retain top performers longer, respond to customer needs better and see long-term sales productivity increases.

The following panel discussions will be offered:

Wed., Oct . 12, 2011 1:00 ET – Today’s Successful Sales Managers: Who Are They, What Do They Do, and How Do They Do It?
Panelists:
Dave Kurlan, CEO, Kurlan Associates
Martyn Lewis, Founder and Principal, 3gSelling
Steve Johnson, President, The Next Level Sales Consulting
Richard Lane, Partner, durhamlane ltd.

Wed., Oct. 26, 2011, 1:00 ET – CRM and Other Technology-Enabled Selling Platforms and Applications: What Works and What Doesn’t?
Panelists:
Bruce Wedderburn, Exec VP, Huthwaite
Rich Blakeman, SR. VP, Miller Heiman
Joe Vance, Senior Consultant, Performance Methods, Inc.
Donald Daly, CEO, The TAS Group

Wed., Nov. 9, 2011, 1:00 ET – Increasing Sales Effectiveness Across a Global Sales Organization
Panelists:
Jonathan London, President, Improved Performance Group
Henk van de Kuijt, Global Director International Business, Mercuri International
Richard Barkey, CEO, Imparta
David DiStefano, CEO, Richardson

Wed., Nov. 30, 2011, 1:00 ET – Selling To and Negotiating With Today’s Tougher, Strategic Procurers/Buyers/Sourcers
Panelists:
Julie Thomas, President and CEO, ValueSelling Associates
Brian Dietmeyer, President and CEO, Think! Inc.
Ron D’Andrea, President, BayGroup International
Stephanie Woods, Executive VP, Huthwaite

The Sales Thought Leader Series is sponsored by American Society of Training and Development (ASTD), Customer Think, Inside View, The Professional Society for Sales and Marketing Training (SMT), Outstart, SalesForceXP and Sales Management Association (SMA).

About ES Research Group, Inc.

ES Research Group (ESR) is the only source for independent research and advice on sales performance improvement programs and the companies that provide them. ESR offers a range of analytic and assessment reports, teleconferences and advisory services. www.esresearch.com.

CJ Hayden

It’s not enough that people want what you offer – it really has to be something that not only will they spend money to get, but they have to be able to justify that purchase to themselves and to other people. You have to provide exactly what your prospective clients need in order to make a buying decision. And the more concrete you can be about the results the client can expect, the more likely they are to buy.

One of the most important things to happen at the end of the conference will be to introduce the new Board of Directors and Officers for SMT for 2012. We have several positions to be filled in this year’s election. These positions are:

President, Vice President, Treasurer, and 3 Board of Directors positions.

We also have 3 Board of Director positions to be filled in this year’s election, as positions have a 2 year term limit.

We would now like to open the election process  by asking any member who would like to hold a position to please submit your name and a short bio and “why you would like to be an SMT Board Member” by email no later than September 30th.   Let us know which position you would like to hold and we will add your name to the ballot and hold our election before the conference.

You may also nominate another to serve, but they will need to confirm their willingness to serve before being placed on the ballot.  All candidates will need to be paid members in good standing to be placed on the ballot.

Below is a list of our current Board, their positions and the term period currently serving.

2011 SMT Officers

Teresa Hiatt, President, 2011
(Open) Vice President, 2011

Dee Campbell, Communications/Secretary, 2012

Ron Hubsher, Treasurer, 2011

Gary Summy, Past Prsident, 2011

2011 SMT Board of Directors

Kathy Beard, Director, 2011

Anders Gronstedt, Director, 2011

Pam Conyngham, Director, 2011

Gretchen Linzing, Director, 2012

Laurie Weed, Director, 2011

Debbie Groves, Director, 2012

Bob O’Haus, Director at Large, 2012

Renie McClay, Director Emeritus, 2012