Failed Sales Training? Here's your answer.

Another
failed sales
training?
A case for a
radical
approach that
challenges
traditional
dogma.
White Paper
Kumar Guru
Sales Coach
Isiddhi
(c) 2013 Isiddhi www.isiddhi.com

Meet Adam. He is a Business Development Manager for a large Business Intelligence
software company. Recently, his sales results has been disappointing as prospects have
preferred competitive vendors.To put things into perspective, over the last 3 months out
of 48 fully qualified opportunities, Adam has only converted 9 of them. Adam built trust,
asked questions and presented solutions as modus operandi. Unquestionably there is a
lost connection in the entire sales process that is impacting his sales outcome.This is a
concern for Dave, the company’s sales manager as his other BDMs are also experiencing
similar sales losses.
Dave invested into sales training to help Adam and his team.
1 month later.
Adam still not happy
Surprised?
We are not.
Study by ES Research Group proved
9 out of 10 sales trainings fail1
There is a purpose for introducing Adam and Dave to you in this paper.
We wanted to share with you the everyday challenges faced by
salespeople and their managers on the field.
There are simply far too many Adams out there fighting
in the trenches to deliver consistent sales results.
As a leader in this subject matter, we argue that businesses
by harnessing and deciphering the power of data will prepare their
team to tackle the most stalwart sales problems.
In addition, results has proven that data in conjoined with predictive
analytics has empowered sales management to accurately measure
revenue forecast and provide a broader view on sales operations.
"Maybe its our pricing
that lost the sale” said
Adam to Dave
(c) 2013 Isiddhi ~ www.isiddhi.com

Sales trainings are big business. Why do companies invest significant portions of their budget in sales trainings?
Given the 4 variables which one do you think influence your buyer’s decision most?
(i) Competitive Price (ii) Quality (iii)Total Solution (iv) Salesperson
According to more than 15,000 buyers, by 39% your salesperson wins2
The study above creates a compelling business case to invest in your sales team. However most sales training according to the ES Research
study produced disappointing outcome.To come up with a rational explanation, we must first ask ourselves what is the aim of sales training?
If increasing sales revenue is your answer, its not entirely correct.The aim of any sales training is to modify your salespeople selling behaviours
so that it aligns with your prospects purchasing drivers. What sales behaviours exhibited by Adam prevented him from winning the sale? How
would we know this? Ask Adam?
A whopping 87% of salespeople DO
NOT KNOW the complete story
behind prospects’ “NO”3
This is akin to a football post match
review where only 2 of your players
knew why they lost the game.
As a team manager how are you
suppose to architect tactical and
strategic game plan?
As a progressive
company, would you
cut down your margin
based on your
salesperson’s
assumptions?

Frustrated and bewildered - Dave
needed our help.
Dave narrated his story.
We empathised at first. However to
challenge his belief on price being
the differentiator, we quipped:
Successful sales training is not a two or three day event – it’s a journey.
Before embarking on a journey one must capture all relevant information
to complete a whole picture as to why sales wereWON and LOST.
“Dave, how do you expect to deliver successful sales training without
knowing what your prospects and customers said about Adam and your
competitors?”
“It is price.That’s why
we are not winning. I
trust Adam’s
judgement” said Dave.

How much ascendency
would this add to your
competitive edge?
Could this customer and
competitor intelligence
add substance to your
sales training?
What if you could use
the data to predict and
increase your future
sales win?
Imagine if you could obtain REAL story as to why your sales team lost and won.

Dave’s reaction is typical of most sales leaders that we’ve collaborated with.
Its based on limited information and assumptions.
We introduced Dave to our empirical method which is far more rational and scientific – Sales Autopsy™.
It is a 3 pronged steps that (a) audits (b) investigate and (c) design workable models to optimize better sales training and forecast.
We identified key selling gaps and formulated our own hypothesis:
Auditing by joint
sales calls with
Dave’s
salespeople.
(i) “Dave’s sales team higher lost ratio was
due to sales process focused on price”
(ii) “Lack of factual data to identify specific
selling gaps caused sales training to fail”
Sales Autopsy™
uses data analytics
that confronts
current sales
training practises.

Successful sport teams intently review their losses and wins.
They don’t blame the outcome on assumptions.
Their review will include post mortem videos and
identifying a pattern that will point out to specifics weakness.
This will form as a basis for training and coaching to improve their winning ratio.
The BIG Idea:
To test the viability of our
hypothesis and prove to Dave that
sales process was the agent for the
losses - we progressed the case.
This lead to 2nd stage of Sales
Autopsy™ = Investigation
Win/Loss
Analysis
To succeed in sales and business, one must undergo many failures. However
you need to have the right attitude about failure. A properly designedWin/Loss
Analysis is both hard data driven and narrates a story to answer your losses
and wins.The results from such a process will allow you to understand your
salespeople and position your sales training to rectify selling gaps. It is a
forward looking and strategic approach to your sales training.
Your salespeople may
know the prospect
but do they know
what the prospect is
thinking ?
Why should your sales training be any different?

Why Win/Loss Analysis?
Open and honest feedback from
your clients and prospects are an
absolute gold mine to improve
your sales , marketing and
product development strategies
This vital intelligence provides
specific selling behavior trends
that are impacting your selling
strategies.
The breakthrough allows you to
yield a more custom-made sales
training program.
“Win/Loss analysis is the
sales strategy answer to
militaristic Long Range
Reconnaissance Patrol
where you penetrated
deep inside your
enemy’s territory to
uncover their strength
and weakness.”
Far from being a monolithic
marketing surveys. It’s a
collection of approaches
and techniques that, when
systemically applied across
a specific set of selling
issues, delivers customer
and competitor insights.

Our research into 100 B2B Australian
companies found only 5% conduct a
win/loss analysis but more alarmingly
only 13% ever heard of win/loss
analysis.3 This is shocking since one
win/loss analysis (without any sales
training) can increase your sales up to
20% and 50% better sales forecasting
accuracy.4
In giving up 20% of your
sales revenue you are
empowering competition
to build their empire at a
great speed and in few
years you either be
dethroned or out of the
game.
Best sales teams hold their players accountable for continuous improvement. Feedback and
intelligence gathering from your prospects and customers is the best way to create a best
sales practice ecosystem.This informs to your customers and prosects that you are genuinely
in the business of self development. It adds credibility in your next sales cycle.
Companies that incorporated
data analytics approach into
their sales operations show
productive rates 5 to 6 percent
higher than those of their peers.

Some of the questions we asked for won accounts: Some of the questions we asked for lost accounts:
To unearth credible and definitive
picture we undertook
surveys (quantitative) and phone
interviews (qualitative)
for both lost and won accounts.
This gave Dave
enriched sales
intelligence.
 Which areas did the wining salesperson did
better than ours?
 What were the key primary drivers in your
decision?
 Out of 10 how well did we articulated our value
over price?
 How did our solution presentation compared to
others?
 Out of 10 how well did we understood your
needs?
 What specifically set us apart from the
competition?
 What specifically did our salesperson do to win
your business?
 Who were the competitors?
 Out of 10 how important was price to your final
decision?
 Did our marketing message resonated with your
needs?

0
5
10
15
20
25
5 6
13
16
24
19 17
DecisionDrivers%
Adam's selling behaviour:
Sales Process
0
5
10
15
20
25
15
19 21 22
3
10 10
DecisionDrivers%
Expectation from prospects and clients:
Sales Process
Win/Loss analysis is not just about
data. It narrates a story and installs a
mindset that puts customer and
salespeople at the centre of sales
training decision.To maximise the
value of this findings we departed from
the traditional “looking in the rear-
view mirror” to a progressive and
analytical approach.

Our recommendation to Dave:
 Concentrate on 3 critical influencers that carried the greatest impact on sales: (i) value story,
(ii) teaching new insights and (iii) understanding prospects’ need.
 Create a sales training action plan that focuses on these selling gaps.
 Formulate predictive analytics to accurately measure win ratio if one of the sales process were improved (eg: increase of
your value story from 5% to 15% will increase win ratio by 8.5%).
 SWOT analysis as a strategic blueprint to evaluate competitive disadvantage and long term selling sustainability.
 Design teaching methodologies that reinforces superior learning aptitude.
“Insanity is doing the
same thing over and
over again and
expecting different
results” Albert Einstein

The 3 pronged actions provided Adam with:
Customised sales training by Dave improved Adam’s selling effectiveness.
Instead of worrying about price,Adam focused on:
Superior
sales
toolbox
 Articulating a value story that educated his prospects and encouraged a very
early “buy in” to engage.
 Taught prospects business insights that built compelling business case.
 He not only asked more questions but asked better and challenging questions
which set him apart from validating salespeople
 Competitor Intelligence provided him with better judgement and intuition to
strategically attribute his solution capabilities.
 Presented compelling solutions that focused primarily on key business problems
and goals. (c) 2013 Isiddhi ~ www.isiddhi.com
How do we benchmark our Sales Autopsy ™?

Adam is consistently converting
opportunities to sales and is
happy again. Sales Autopsy™
has given Dave a new
perspective on sales training and
stronger game plan.
Final Outcome?
 Increased in sales per employee and better sales conversion.
 Adopted a culture and philosophy that embraced business improvement and good change or “kaizen”.
 Better understanding of competitive landscape and played with an eagle’s-eye view.
 Stronger alliance with sales training and sales forecast.
 Well planned and executed sales training that produced intended outcome.

When Dave approached us for guidance, his sales improvement process was colonized by forces of inertia.
He needed an extrinsic methodological approach to act as an agent that both confronted and disrupted his status quo.
However when we introduced our Sales Autopsy™ to re-engineer the current process, Dave was highly sceptical.
We welcomed his reaction.
History has taught us that any new radically challenging doctrine will be opposed at first.
It takes courage to embrace innovation and the best channel to encourage such a process is through
logical reasoning discourse. We knew that by conditional reasoning that breed facts, evidence and
payoffs will resonate with Dave.
This inspired him in accepting a unique and challenging approach to sales improvement process.
Through critically auditing his sales team on the field, analysing customer and competitor
intelligence and rendering the information to a custom-built sales training, galvanised Dave’s sales team to
greater selling heights. In addition, our predictive analytics provided Dave with a sharpened sales forecast aptitude.
In other words, Dave knew his destination however he needed an accurate travel time, map and a vehicle.
Sales training should not be looked as a knee jerk reaction to falling sales revenues or inadequate sales team performance.
It must be included as part of your mantra for a Business Best Practise. As prescribed, the guiding principal of any sales training is to modify
selling behaviours. To diagnose its symptoms and identify specific antinode you must undertake an investigative approach.
Traditional sales training that delivers canned programs without scientific nous will not deliver much value as proven by ES Research Group.
However a systematic steps of creating a hypothesis and testing it with advanced apparatus will deliver a much desired outcome.
c) 2013 Isiddhi ~ www.isiddhi.com
“What’s in it for me?”
“Hiding from facts will
lead you to failure-
eventually truth will
come out.
You must not fear facts.
Hunt for them
Use them
Don’t fear them.”

About ISIDDHI
In late 2012, before launching our consulting and training services, we studied the current ecosystem in sales training.We discovered most sales trainings were
presented as off the shelf programs that failed to specifically identify key selling gaps.Companies that subscribed to their programs experienced short term
improvement but this euphoria ended few weeks later. We questioned this approach and our curiosity lead us to undertake extensive research to solve the puzzle of
failed sales trainings.
Our study lead us to uncover fundamental flaws in the current sales training programs. It failed to acknowledge the importance of cold hard data, behavioural and
cognitive science.We knew from our research that event based sales trainings (eg 1 or 2 days sales training) without intelligence and reinforcement would be a
failed doctrine.These insights lead us to postulate that sales trainings needed a different approach to be rewarding. It needed a complete new way of thinking that
embodied innovation and dissent that aimed to upset the status quo.
We decided to take the bold step in not only challenging but also redefining sales training DNA. Our paradigm shift focused on intelligence (win/loss analysis) and
scientific teaching approach (weekly sales training/coaching) that strengthened the business case for sales training.We than added an extra dimension that was
lacking in today’s sales training – accurate sales forecast. To increase sales training ROI we integratedAustralia’s first and only world-class predictive analytics into
sales forecasting. SalesAutopsy™ which is a forward looking approach.This now has become the standardised benchmark for successful sales trainings.
As a testing laboratory we applied our methodology to a mid-size IT firm which:
 Uncovered the truth behind sales losses
 Empowered selling accountability from sales team
 Increased sales training ROI through tailored contents
 Captured competitor intelligence that lead to better value and marketing positioning
 Enforced proactive sales coaching that increased top line revenue by 27%
Our guidance lead not only to an incredible organic growth but also smarter use of their investment programs.
Contact us to learn how we can help you improve your sales results. Call 0481 310 033 www.isiddhi.com e:isiddhi@isiddhi.com
“Getting started on a successful data and
analytics journey is a complex challenge
for businesses and they often struggle for a
clear strategies that ties data and analytics to
improved sales performance.
Let our experience and expertise guide you
towards myriad of “aha” moments.”

Endnotes
1David Stein. SalesTraining:The 120-Day Curse (ES Research Group, 2011)
3Howard Stevens (Chairman and CEO of Chally Group). Achieve Sales Excellence: The 7 Customer Rules For BecomingThe New Sales Professional
(MA: Platinum Press 2007).
4 Guru, Kumar “Study into B2B Win/Loss Analysis Implementation in Australia”. Isiddhi. 26 June 2013 .
5Allision. W. Roger. “Sales Cycle Analytics”. http://www.salescycleanalytics.com/blog/2009/05/11/roi-on-winloss-analysis-will-get-executive
attention/. Sales Cycle Analytics™. Accessed online. 15 August 2014.
2Schroder, R. “From a Good Sales Call to a Great Sales Call” (McGraw-Hill, 2011

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