Are "Best Practices" Worth Following?

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  1

  dave.stein@...

  02/13/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  We've seen the best practices approach used very successfully within a sales organization. When building a methodology, uncovering, understanding, and reverse engineering what the successful salespeople do is an effective way to save time and the risk of trying outside approaches that may not apply.

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  julien.dionne@...

  02/13/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  To be relevant, best practices need to evolve.
  
  The management consulting ivory-tower approach is outdated, there is no doubt. The value of dealing with consultants is that they have seen similar challenges (recently) with dozens of other companies of similar size, industry, etc, and hopefully have fixed them. Management consulting firms can leverage all of these experiences, lessons learned, success, failures, etc, and adapt them to a specific situation.
  
  Having worked for large and small management consulting companies, as an independent consultant, and in the industry, I have seen "best practices" used correctly and incorrectly over and over. I blog about sales performance management at http://leapcomp.com... on topics including best practices.
  
  Julien Dionne
  http://leapcomp.com

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  sean.reily

  02/14/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  When I hear ?Best Practices? I think of the best practices of your sales team not general sales methods.
  
  Any sales team will be made of individuals who are best at one specific segment of the sales process.
  
  Cold calling may have some general rules about scripts and handling objections however only your best callers on your team will tell you what works for your industry. The same would be for closing, farming or any other part of your sales process.
  
  What your best people are doing are 'your' Best Practices.
  
  Sean
  
  http://professionaloutsidesales.com/
  

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  JacquesWerth

  02/16/09 | Report as spam

  Sales Process Simplification is better

  The term ?best sales practices? as applied to an entire sales force usually means that all salespeople are required to apply a specific step-by-step sales process. It could be sales force of a competitor or the sales force of your company. Either way, it might significantly improve the productivity of the sales force ? if a highly effective sales process is identified.
  
  How can a company determine what their own most effective sales process is?
  
  There are many consultants that do what they call ?best sales practices research.?
  The objective is to determine how the best one to two percent of a sales force actually sells. However, most of them fail to effectively ?reverse engineer? the sales practices of the best salespeople due to the research methods they choose.
  
  Most consultants ask the highest performing one or two percent of the company?s salespeople to explain in great detail how they do each step of their sales process. The consultants homogenize what they learn, document it, and that becomes the new standard sales process of the client company.
  
  That seems to be a good and logical endeavor until you learn that most of the best salespeople don?t actually know what they do when they are selling. Therefore, the result is well-intentioned but largely fictional.
  
  OTOH, a sales process simplification program includes the kind of research necessary for the task. It is especially useful if an SFA or CRM program is used track the compliance to the new sales process by each salesperson.
  

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  scohil

  02/17/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  I do not think that practices performed something -- or someone -- which is sui generis (like an inimitable product or exemplary athlete) can be defined as "best practices" per se. What worked for Michael Jordan to become the best basketballer of his generation (all time?) will not work for the 5'11" non-shooting point guard. Best practices ought to be those things which can be generalized across a population -- that is, they are practices which can be shown to contribute to success for a statistically significant number of practitioners.
  
  We can learn from Coke (if we want to be a consumer brand). But perhaps best practices would be those common factors that contribute not just to Coke's success, but also to Pepsi's, not to mention McDonald's and Kleenex?'s.
  
  What makes something a best practice (IMHO) in selling is not something that one superior guy claims he does to succeed (I write "claims" because he probably does not even know why he's successful really -- people being frequently wrong and occasionally lying). What would make it a best practice is that it can be shown to contribute to success across the performance of many sales people (for instance, consider the research done by Huthwaite International into effective selling: 25 industries, 20-plus countries, over 35,000 sales interactions).
  
  In that sense, best practices would be worth following because they are truly best practices.

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  rafa1702

  02/19/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  Best practices

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  rafa1702

  02/19/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  I know this is a bit of an oxymoron, but the problem is that no one can be sure that "best practices" are really best for you. However, lacking any othe alternative, "best practices" are a lot better than no practices at all. Do you remember what Winston Churchill said about democracy?: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Well, I think the same goes for best practices"
  Rafael
  Madrid

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  rafa1702

  02/19/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  I know this is a bit of an oxymoron, but the problem is that no one can be sure that "best practices" are really best for you. However, lacking any othe alternative, "best practices" are a lot better than no practices at all. Do you remember what Winston Churchill said about democracy?: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Well, I think the same goes for best practices"
  Rafael
  Madrid

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  Aristo Ioannidis

  02/19/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Are ?Best Practices? Worth Following?

  They serve a purpose at a point in time. You will be pleasantly suprised that what you think is "best practise" today will become "best practise" in 5 years time.
  
  
  Full Circle! You can count on it.