E•Safe Technologies is an end-to-end, IT partner that provides strategic, information management solutions to companies seeking to achieve business resilience. For more than 20 years, the professionals at E•Safe Technologies have worked with IBM, VMware, Cisco and other leading IT partners to deliver the services enterprises need to stay competitive in a rapidly changing IT environment.

In the mid 2000s, E•Safe recognized a dramatically changing I.T. environment; products were becoming commoditized and client needs expanded beyond the company’s previous competencies. The company therefore invested heavily in expanding its offerings & competency in new areas: security, data management & Cloud Services, while maintaining its expertise in the traditional server & hardware market.

Although the company broadened its portfolio, revenues in the mid-to-late 2000’s remained flat. The chief concern was that only a small % of its sellers figured out a way to sell these new offerings. The 80/20 Rule was alive & well as the business relied on this small % of its sellers to produce the majority of revenue.

Gary Sharp, E•Safe’s Vice President of Sales, realized that in the company’s transition to sell additional technologies, the selling culture had become “product-oriented”. Even though the company added the capabilities that the market demanded, results didn’t change. His staff had difficulty selling these newer, emerging technologies, because they rarely were able to call on Decision Making level buyers: the more strategic, right brain thinkers vs. the lower level, more analytical technical buyers). Gary’s staff became product experts: information-oriented, left brain thinkers and sellers. They gravitated towards prospects that had an apatite for this technical messaging. The interactions became technical-to-technical conversations, with prospects that couldn’t make buying decisions. As a result, the company had difficulty engaging with decision-making levels buyers.

When Gary Sharp & Ben Zoldan started conversations in late 2008, Gary didn’t adopt the model at first because to him, it was just, “Another sales training”. After several conversations, including a pipeline, quarter end debrief together, Gary and Ben recognized the sales staff was chasing a lot of deals that never closed as forecasted. The majority was being lost to “No Decision”. These opportunities were primarily lower level, technical buyers “evaluating” technologies. When they tried gaining that access to higher levels; they continuously got pushed down. The typical sales call led with: “Let me tell you about...” “We’re the world’s leading...” And, “I’d like to show you/demo this new product...” It was all product-oriented that technical levels wanted to hear. His salespeople didn’t develop real connections/relationships with decision making level buyers because they weren’t satisfying their needs for those types of conversations.

The turning point for Gary was learning how people use their left and right brains to make decisions and where relationships are formed and what part of the brain people use to build rapport/make connections. He knew his sales force was geared up to be left-brain dominant: analytical, logical, information & fact-oriented. Gary explored how the more senior level, strategic thinking buyers are actually RIGHT BRAIN dominant and concluded that he needed to align his sales force with those right-brain attributes, not replace the left-brain messaging.

Gary decided to implement the training and Ben trained his staff in late 2008, just as the economy collapsed. The training enabled Gary’s staff to:

• Enter into conversations by sharing stories, rather than going into product pitches. This created curiosity, hope, trust, & interest with Sr. level buyers. His staff became really effective stories teller, using a proven framework.
• Use a 2 way conversational framework to understand the buyer’s situation and use an active listening approach, vs. a telling approach.
• Then, position the use of offerings through anecdotes that the more Sr. level buyers could relate to.

Even in 2009, without adding any new salespeople, even in that economy, Gary grew revenues by 174%, without changing anything else in the business. He got every seller except one at or above quota. They were also able to activate a pipeline full of qualified opportunities with Decision making level buyers, because they were able to have more meaningful, vision-oriented, right-brain conversations.

Learn more about E•Safe at www.E-Safetech.com

Reliance GlobalCom, Inc. is a global provider of fully managed, end-to-end networking services. Reliance provides services to enterprise customers in and between major metropolitan markets in the United States, Asia Pac and throughout Europe.

In the Spring of 2006, Reliance began working with Ben Zoldan, in order to achieve two primary objectives:

1. Meet aggressive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth targets.
2. Get more salespeople performing at target levels.

At the time Reliance began working with Ben, revenues were growing, however, not on track to meet the aggressive targets set by its Board. Only a small percentage of the sales force was achieving their quotas. “We anticipated that the experience & skill sets that our sellers brought with them from previous organizations would bring us results. Each quarter, however, we experienced the 80/20 Rule, as only a small percentage of our sellers produced a disproportionate amount of the revenue,” said Mike McGlone, Vice President of Global Sales. “The biggest difference between the small % of sellers that produced, and the majority of others, was clearly the intuitive nature of how our best people simply connected with their buyers. The remainder of others exhibited very stereotypical behaviors and never gained the trust & rapport that our best reps gained. The problem we saw was that our best reps did this intuitively; they just connected with the people they were trying to sell to; they broke down barriers.”

In the late 2000s, Reliance revenues flattened, and the industry became commoditized with other key players entering the market. “No longer were we able to just win on product superiority. We had to win on the relationships our front-line salespeople created, especially with the economic downturn.” McGlone stated.

In order to ramp up revenue production, Reliance used Story Leaders to enable their sales force to exhibit the behaviors of the intuitive top-performers: to connect with, to build trust, to un-act like all the traditional, stereotypical salespeople before them. The goal was to enable the B & C Players to be able to act and behave like the A-Players: get them sharing stories, the company story, other client stories, get them to use stories as a pathway to inspire new possibilities. The result; get buyers to lower the guard, get seller and buyer sharing stories; leading to a more meaningful human-to-human connection.

“We were able to clone what the very best salespeople do naturally. Our salespeople have become more successful by learning how to better connect with the people they’re trying to influence, and getting them to do this on purpose." - McGlone

Upon training, Reliance achieved the following early results:

• In the two quarters immediately following its training, Reliance increased revenue by 41% compared to the same period the previous fiscal year.
• These two quarters marked the two largest sales quarters in the company’s history, marking a full year of sequential quarter-over-quarter growth. Revenues exceeded the targets set by the Board.
• Without any product changes/enhancements, the business achieved 2 full years of 35% year-over-year top-line revenue growth.

You can learn more about Reliance GlobalCom at www.relianceglobalcom.com