Dave Stein

Dave Stein

ES Research Group, Inc.
After a career in sales, then as a sales consultant, trainer, and author, Dave Stein is now founder/CEO of ES Research Group, Inc., which publishes independent evaluations and comparisons sales training companies and their programs and services. ESR is recognized as the leading authority on sales training programs and sales performance improvement. For the past twenty years Dave has focused on sales performance improvement, sales effectiveness and especially sales training.
  • Role-Playing: Making Your Formal Sales Training Programs More Effective
    0 comments 505 reads
    Posted on 2012-05-18

    Sales training: role-playingToo often companies invest significantly in a major sales training program only to see little improvement.  Again and again sales managers say, “sales training programs are a waste; my people just do what they’ve always done sixty days later.”  Of course one mistake many companies make is to treat sales training as an event rather than a ongoing process.

    There is one trend ESR is happy to see: the growing appreciation among sales managers that reinforcement is a critical part of learning.  It’s what extends the experience of learning long enough for new behaviors and habits to take hold.  One age-old reinforcement tool—...

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  • More on Storytelling
    0 comments 479 reads
    Posted on 2012-05-01

    For today’s sales leaders it’s almost impossible not be analytically driven. Every aspect of our sales lives are driven by key performance indicators, dashboards, and pipeline metrics. Making the number is what it is all about.

    ES Research Group is a strong believer in management by numbers—after all, if it can’t be measured, it can be managed. One area where we think it’s all right to think outside the analytical box is connecting with customers through storytelling. I’ve written about that before here and ...

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  • Visualize ROI, With Your Customer
    0 comments 390 reads
    Posted on 2012-04-06

    If you’ve been reading this blog, you know how important financial and business acumen is for effective B2B selling.  The reasons:

    • It supports demand creation approaches and initiatives
    • Enables reps to carry on business value-oriented conversations
    • Enables product/service links to customer’s specific long-term business objectives
    • Provides basis for gaining and maintaining access to senior executives
    • Supports reduction or elimination of commodity pricing demands
    • Removes selling focus on product specifications
    • Can be a significant differentiator for salespeople
    • Raises effectiveness of Consultative/Solution/...
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  • Staying Ahead of the Sale
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    Posted on 2012-03-17

    One of the many things I learned from years of flying my plane is the concept of “staying ahead of the plane.”

    Picture this: It’s 11:00 at night, raining heavily, ceilings at 200 feet, wind gusting to 25 knots. You’re flying a single-engine Cessna into Martha’s Vineyard airport. You can’t see anything outside the airplane.  You have an...

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  • Psychometric Testing in the Sales Hiring Process
    0 comments 500 reads
    Posted on 2012-03-07

    Too often sales executives find that newly hired sales professionals do not possess the particular traits needed for the jobs they were hired to do. ES Research Group estimates that this happens 25-33 percent of the time, depending on the industry. In all cases, those salespeople endured or even thrived throughout a rigorous interview process, and in most, they underwent specific skills training after they began at their jobs.

    If under-performing salespeople went through interviews and completed specific job training and yet still lack traits need to achieve results, where is the gap?

    ES Research Group knows that one missing link is to test the candidate using a scientifically rigorous psychometric instrument that is directly connected to the candidate’s specific job profile.　　

    First, understand what a psychometric test is and is not. It is not a personality test, such as the Meyers-Briggs assessment or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). A...

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  • Sales Performance Improvement Is More Than Just Sales Training
    0 comments 452 reads
    Posted on 2012-03-01

    When Shakespeare famously penned, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” it’s clear that he didn’t live in the age of Google searches and brand positioning. Today, he might still have found success as a writer, but his florist business would probably go nowhere.

    I’ve been fielding a lot of calls lately from sales training company executives and individual sales trainers who tell me everything from “sales training is dead” to “I don’t consider myself a ‘sales trainer.’” I see where they’re coming from, but I assure them that sales training isn’t dead. Yes, it’s facing some unprecedented challenges, but that’s another issue.  Sales training is alive, thriving, and in the throes of what you might consider growing pains.

    What’s on the table is more...

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  • The Best B2B Customer Service I’ve Ever Seen
    0 comments 1,391 reads
    Posted on 2012-02-21

    Great teams of any sort are rarely great without great leadership. When I think of great team leaders, I think of Kristi Fox, Second Vice President of Group Client Relationships, at Minnesota Life, a Securian Company.

    The Client Relationship Department at Minnesota Life includes 24 associates who manage group life insurance relationships nationwide. Many of those clients are Fortune 1000 companies.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with Kristi Fox and her team, and have seen them in action.  Their commitment, quality of service, and performance is the best I have ever seen.  That’s why I’m delighted Kristi agreed to an interview for this blog.

    First, some dazzling statistics:

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  • Some Thoughts About LinkedIn
    0 comments 532 reads
    Posted on 2012-02-15

    This past weekend I read a book excerpt in Fortune magazine entitled, The real way to build a social network. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, co-authored The Start-Up of You, the book from which the excerpt was taken.

    What got my attention in the first place was the opening: “Forget Dale Carnegie. He understood how important connections were, but missed out on the...

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  • The State of Sales Training 2012 (Part One)
    0 comments 993 reads
    Posted on 2012-01-17

    On December 7, 2011 ESR delivered a webinar presentation on the state of sales training (download the MP3 or PDF—free registration required).

    It was an hour full of valuable intelligence and insight for sales training companies and sales trainers in corporate L&D organizations.

    Here are some of the points I made during the event. First, a quick review of 2011. (A look at 2012 and beyond will follow in Part 2.)

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  • Yesterday I Sold My Plane. So, Here Is What I Learned From Flying.
    0 comments 795 reads
    Posted on 2012-01-11

    Posted on January 10th, 2012 by Dave Stein

    Yesterday I sold my plane. It is a 1978 Cessna 182Q. Seats 4. Cruises at 160 MPH. What a wonderful plane it is.

    I bought the plane in 1995 after Datalogix International, a company where I was a principal, went public. I flew nearly 2,000 hours in the plane with trips to Florida, Atlanta, Chicago, Canada, Lake of the Ozarks, and many dozens of airports up and down the East Coast. I made 20 trips down the “Hudson River Corridor” at 900 feet, which always included a loop around the Statue of Liberty at 500 feet. (...

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