In the News

An important article about what customers want from the people who sell to them, by Jonathan Hodge, the CEO of BTS Scottsdale and Lou Schachter, the managing director of the global sales practice at BTS. Hodge and Schachter make the case for today's salespeople to move beyond product knowledge acquisition by improving their business acumen skills in order to understand their clients' businesses better.

Leadership and innovation are the glam aspects of entrepreneurship. But the job description of many founders also includes a whole lot of selling. Entrepreneurs must sell investors on their ideas, employees on their workplaces, and customers on their products, value, and reputation.

Cutting edge authors, Richard Hodge and Lou Schachter, leverage Web 2.0 tools to promote hit sales book, The Mind of the Customer. The book examines tactics and lessons learned from world-class sales forces. It also shows sales professionals how to get to the next level of success with a new approach to selling based on helping customers achieve their key business objectives.

Its important to remember that quality is in the eye of the beholder, finds Alan Earls. Quality counts for nothing, if customers arent interested in the product or cant afford it. Sometimes, in the virtuous cycle of building better products and manufacturing processes, manufacturers lose sight of that.

In the piece Learning to Earn: Sales Training That Uses iPods, Video Games, and Other Gizmos, (December 26, 2006), Successful Meetings Magazine interviews Rommin Adl about the trend toward more engaging approaches to sales training at corporate meetings. Instead of a PowerPoint presentation with a talking head, people want learning that has a higher impact," says Rommin Adl, By making learning fun they help salespeople retain more of the information imparted, which in turn makes the reps more likely to change their selling behavior. Those two factors drive results the whole point of training in the first place.

What should a venture capitalist look for in a company's sales force when evaluating a potential investment? Hint: it's not what you think.

You've got 12 minutes: Explain how your product can help a prospect succeed.

If there's only one department in an organization that conjures the words "bottom-line impact" more than any other, it's probably sales. After conducting research with more than 100 executives who make large-scale purchasing decisions to identify what they consider important in sales professionals, as well as studying some of the world's best sales forces in companies such as UPS, Nokia and Lexus, Lou Schachter, senior vice president of The Real Learning Company and co-author of "The Mind of the Customer," uncovered four key pillars for effective sales training: understand, create, communicate and manage.

In The Mind Of The Customer, Richard Hodge and Lou Schachter expound on how Lexus, Nokia and UPS are evolving the art and science of their corporations selling process to match the changes in consumer behavior

Contrary to what most sellers think, top executives do shape the ultimate purchasing decisions in a company. In fact, a recent survey by The Real Learning Company, an Arizona-based sales management training firm, found that top executives get involved in buying early and often in the game.

Picture a Lexus. What comes to mind? Few brands are as well associated with success as Lexus. In fact, Lexus has been America's best-selling luxury brand for six years in a row... How does Lexus do it, and what can we learn from them about customer-centric selling?

Imagine you are finally meeting with the c-level executive you have been trying for months to see...How do you advance the account relationship? What can you do to stand out from the competition?

Managing a Sales Staff Means Understanding How Your Workers Communicate. By Bob Rosner.

In The Mind of the Customer: How Great Companies Like UPS, Lexus and Nokia have Reinvented the Sales Process to Accelerate Their Customers' Success (McGraw-Hill, 2006), Richard Hodge and Lou Schachter outline tips and best practices gleaned from interviews with nearly 100 sales executives at the world's most successful corporations. The focus of their book is on a new approach to selling based on helping customers achieve their key business objectives.

Which qualities do customers admire most in salespeople? Hint: They are more obvious than you think. Good customer relations are vital for success in business but you knew that, right? Well, maybe it's time for a refresher course on what customers want from your salespeople. A recent study looking into the buying habits of executives highlights the top qualities purchasers expect from sellers.

Solution selling, the leading business-to-business sales model for the last twenty years, is finding itself eclipsed. The notion of selling integrated solutions, rather than point products, has been so widely adopted that it no longer serves as a differentiator. What matters to business leaders today is not solutions but results.

As every sales rep knows, it takes a lot of work to secure a meeting with a top-level executive. So if you get one, its important not to blow it. Richard Hodge, founder of The Real Learning Company in Scottsdale, AZ interviewed more than 150 vice presidents and C-level executives of global companies when he and Senior VP Lou Schachter were researching their book, The Mind of the Customer (McGraw-Hill, 2006)

Book Excerpt: The Mind of the Customer: How Great Companies Like UPS, Lexus, and Nokia Have Reinvented the Sales Process to Accelerate Their Customers' Success.

In the book, The Mind of the Customer by Richard Hodge & Lou Schachter, there is a passage that talks about the idea that it is the manager's responsiblity to develop a customer-centric system and processes. The authors highlight steps that managers can take in making this system work.

While your reps are probably brimming with knowledge about your products and can deliver a forceful pitch with confidence and panache, they may be coming up short when it comes to an often overlooked, but vital selling skill: Asking questions.

To transform your business, be passionate about customers results. How does your product impact clients rivals and help your clients gain market share? How does it help your clients customers? What other key needs does it fill?

Marketing & Sales MS magazine (2006) publishes an article written by   Dr. Philios Andreou from BTS Iberia describing the main challenges of   Marketing for the new era in terms of demonstrating a return on investment. Also discussed are the 3 key Marketing focus areas:  Customer Retention,  Customer Segmentation and Customer Value-based Propositions.

Businessweek featured BTS client Texas Instruments (TI) in a story about the rise of the chip maker, including a story about a BTS business simulation used to drive corporate strategy. Says the author, . And he (Chief Executive Rich Templeton) sent 2,000 employees through a two-day boot camp designed to help them better understand customer gripes. Employees played the role of phonemakers, agreed to certain launch dates, and then were told that TI couldn't have the chips ready on time. "We wanted them to really feel the customers' pain," says Jeff McCreary, TI's head of sales. The effort paid off: As the industry rebounded, TI gained market share for two straight years. Even as its biggest customer, Nokia Corp., has seen its share slide, TI has picked up business from ground-gainers such as LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.

CRM Magazine quoted BTS SVP Dan Parisi in a story about a BTS business simulation implementation at Texas Instruments (TI). The simulation itself, says Dan Parisi, senior vice president of BTS USA, "is a dynamic and realistic replica of a TI customer, with all of a typical customer's technical challenges and resource scarcity."

Learning Circuits quotes Dan Parisi in a story about how Texas Instruments inspired its people to renew focus on the customer after years of focus fed by the technology boom. The story describes how BTS developed a customer loyalty course for TIs top 300 executives, which was so successful that it expanded to an additional 2,000 TI managers, and earned BTS a coveted Supplier Excellence Award from a grateful TI. Parisi is quoted as saying, in postscript, In 2001, TI had some dissatisfied customers. But at the end of 2003, it was receiving supplier excellence awards from the very same customers. Within 24 months, TI turned the entire company in a much more customer centric direction.

Both Rommin Adl, EVP of BTS USA and Dan Parisi, SVP of BTS USA, are quoted in the Stamford Advocate in an in-depth article on BTS work with clients like TI. States Adl, The return on investment (in BTS simulations) is 10 to 12 times the cost. Participants walk away from sessions with an action plan.

In Training Magazines in-depth profile on business simulations for training, Adl is quoted commenting on the growth of the simulations industry, and BTS in particular, BTS USA in Stamford, Conn., has been growing at a steady clip of 20 percent per year -- despite the bursting of the tech bubble earlier in the decade. This year, says Adl, our growth rate in the U.S. will be in excess of that. The story also interviews BTS client Humana about their the effect BTS simulation had on the implementation of their corporate strategy.

Dan Parisi is quoted in this overview of the growth of business simulations and their implementation at major organizations. Commenting on a BTS simulation designed for client Texas Instruments, Parisi says You go through the simulation, you do customer videos, you come back together and look at some objective data on the dollarized impact, and its a really comprehensive way to get them to think emotionally and then logically about customer loyalty and why they need to change. In the final paragraph of the article, Parisi notes, If you have scarce people, scarce budgets, and you want to invest in people development, youre not going to go through lecturesyoure going to put them in simulations You create an experience that becomes part of the culture of the company.