Just finished one of our two and a half day Sales Management Boot Camps, and right now I'm in the zone of somewhere between exhausted and excited.

• 30 men & women-all heavily experienced managers
• 23 companies
• 15 different industries

 ...all looking for answers to one not-so-simple question:

What did the Campers learn?

• Hopefully, just a little. With 500 pages of content to cover, our caution is always to focus on just three tactics that each of our Campers can take out of these boot camps. With a small number of focused items, they can begin to put those to immediate use during this quarter.  If that occurs, our experience is that they will continue to cultivate those tactics putting them into formal practice over the next year.  

• There are no quick fixes.  With the practice of Sales undergoing revolutionary change, today's successful sales manager needs to be focused on structuring formal processes that can be tracked, measured and turned into best practices.  There are no more "tips & tricks" and no "silver bullets" when it comes down to effective and successful selling today.
   
• "Sales Enablement" is the future.  Back in the day, sales management was about POWER.  Those days are gone forever...unless, of course you want to be left only with the "C" level players.  
  
  5 and 10 years ago, the practice of sales management became the creation of Solution Selling with an underlying foundation in CRM management.  No question that Solution Selling has led to improved sales processes through better monitoring, but it's still mostly about CONTROL-both of the salespeople and the prospects.
  
  What is now rapidly unfolding and will become the dominant sales management play over the next few years is SALES ENABLEMENT.  Greatly improved efficiency and effectivity processes, highly integrated sales tools and real time technologies that better enable our salespeople to actually create value for their customers.
   

What did I learn?

What I learned is "How much more I need to learn".  It's like my teaching marketing at MIT and at Tufts.  Each semester I realize how exciting the process of teaching is...and how much more I need to learn.  The same with these boot camps.  

I go into the first day of these with a highly organized syllabus, hundreds of pages of content and an overly packed schedule.  Everything nicely organized and stacked like one of my woodpiles in Vermont.  And then I leave realizing how much more there is to read, to learn, and discuss with other sales professionals like the Campers and also people like Greg Flynn, the President of Brainshark, and Rick Burnes, the VP of Product Development at HubSpot who stopped by Tuesday morning to engage the Campers.

Sales Success comes down to... "Basics" & Technology

I'm not really sure that I brought anything revolutionary to anyone in this boot camp.  These were highly experienced managers who had been in the selling game for 10 and 20 years. Having said that, what we did do is to...

• ...replace perceptions and "gut feel" with hard data
• ...share best practices in real time among 30 executives
• ...fold "sales basics" into layers of formal processes and technologies
• ...take deep dives into sales process, tools, and metrics

Since the excitement of the Boot Camp is still ringing in my head, the questions that I pose for you to think about this weekend and then to kick around with the sales team on Monday are...

Just a quick note of thanks for the great boot camp this week.  You gave me a valuable gift these last few days....you pushed and stretched and challenged my thinking and for that Jack, I'm deeply in your debt.  I thoroughly enjoyed the program and got a tremendous amount from it that I can use to me keep pushing Admiral Metals forward.  Tony Kenneally, VP Sales & Marketing, Admiral Metals

Check this conference out!

David Meerman Scott and I will be speaking on October 21st &  22nd at Engage 2013: Succeeding in Export Marketing and  Sales Conference in New Brunswick, Canada.

With David's electricity and depth evidenced in his 4th edition of  The New Rules of PR & Marketing and my new focus on Sales  3.0 & Sales Enablement, this will be an exciting opportunity to  learn about not only today's-but tomorrow's-best sales and  marketing practices.

 Hope to see you there!