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After eight
years of trying, Adobe Technologies could not get the Channel
to use their carefully designed and highly effective long-term agreements.
Powerful sales tools, their agreements locked-in a customer's business
for up to three years. Adobe had been trying for eight years to
get the Channel to use them, but the Channel just did not "get it."
After the Liston
Group de-mystified how and when to use each one—as well as
showing the Channel what was in it for them--the Channel suddenly
started using them. Adobe used the Liston-designed training as the
centerpiece of their next year's reseller campaign, increasing the
Channel's use of long-term contracts by 400% over the previous year.
Their new training
was based on a familiar phrase; "Door Number 1, Door Number 2, ....making
their contracts an easy concept to grasp, and once the sales reps
understood Adobe's contracts, they used them, trading sales that
lasted months for sales that lasted years. Channel sales spiked
and held at a higher level, due to the nature of the contracts,
giving them several record years of profits--profits they soon used
to acquire Macromedia, Omniture and a few additional competitors.
NEC Computers
had scheduled $10 million of print advertising to kick launch of
their new 120-person consultative phone sales team, starting with
a series of full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal. However, with
the launch date only a month away, their new team's sales training
had not worked. After six weeks of 10-hour training sessions, their
reps still could not configure a system, even a basic one. With
tens of millions at stake, Liston was to make their training work.
A different kind of problem existed here; once fixed, their sales
team "got it" -- becoming highly effective at configuring systems
to meet specific needs in minutes.
NEC's new training,
which also integrated product information into their sales process,
took 50% less time, delivered the needed knowledge and skills, enabling
NEC to launch their new sales division on time. Product training---built
into their selling processes -- saved the day for NEC.
Surprisingly,
when Seagate Technology acquired CDC's disk division, he
merger resulted in a product lineup which was so confusing that
sales dropped 50% in the first 30 days. Liston was tasked to create
new training to remedy this problem and deliver it to 130 distributor
sites within 6 weeks.
Liston used
his proven method of building the product training around the selling
process, then compiled only the specs needed to sell each drive
in a new sales guide. The new guide eliminated 85 slides of drive
"feeds and speeds." The new training task consisted of just showing
the Channel reps how to use the guides and running them through
a few sales. .
This training
really "moved the needle." After only one 45 minute training sessions
Channel reps started having positive, confident, and higher-margin
selling experiences. And since this is what every sales rep really
wants--consistently positive selling experiences, the Channel "defaulted"
to selling Seagate, generating steadily increasing market share--without
having to "buy" it with the lowest prices or best spiffs.
From that training
campaign, Seagate's Channel share rose 21 points, from 33% to 54%,
in two years. This increase in market share also put over a hundred
competitors out of business. Once they could not sell against Seagate
on the basis of price, they could not sell.
Intel's Operation
Crush. When Intel launched the first in their family of Pentium
processors, they consistently lost 9 of 10 design-ins, for six consecutive
months. Having invested over 20 million to promote it, and forecasting
no improvement to their win rate, they hired an "outsider" --Liston--to
teach their sales force how to beat their arch-rival, Motorola.
To identify
the root causes of their losses, Liston went on sales calls with
Intel's reps, soon identifying the issues. He then created a new
approach to training by integrating the X86's advantages into a
more sophisticated sales strategy; one that apparently became the
basis of "Strategic Selling," the best-seller written three years
later by authors Miller and Heiman.
Liston delivered
his new training to 75 sales managers who then taught it to their
reports. Intel's win rate rose immediately and dramatically, and
within 90 days, achieved a 75% win-rate, causing Motorola to begin
reacting to Intel, which had never before happened.
Following these
wins, Intel won the most important sale in the history of the computer
industry, the CPU for IBM's Personal Computer. This campaign, known
as "Operation Crush," is documented in William Davidow's best seller,
"Marketing High Technology."
For Intel, the
new highly effective product-specific sales training made the critical
difference. Liston's new approach to training was documented a few
years later in Training Magazine, after Intel's NDA expired.
Liston is
granted patent pending status for a critically important business
process; Creating the Desire to Buy. Creating the
desire to buy is the central skill every sales course claims to
have, yet none has ever stated explicitly the the three simple steps
needed to motivate people to buy. Armed with this easy to learn
process, sellers may now sell virtually any product or service faster,
more effectively, and at higher margins than ever before.
Articles
Liston has authored
35 editions of sales guide for Seagate, Quantum, Samsung, and Fujitsu
printing over 1 million copies in three languages. He was the key
source for a Sales and Marketing Magazine article on how
to train international sales teams;Small World, Big Challenge.
He authored the only
article on product training ever printed, Product Training That
Works, in Training Magazine. These articles are on our
Downloads
page.
(C) 2010 Liston Group LLC, All Rights Reserved
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