According to recent media reports the world is full of zombies.  In fact in my town—Columbus, Ohio—there are enough zombies to form a zombie run. I guess zombies care about their health as much as non-zombies.

It doesn’t stop there, I can’t get away from zombies on TV, at the movies—even at B2B sales training workshops! Simply put, some of the folks who conduct these workshops are zombies. Perhaps you are a B2B sales consultant zombie and you don’t even know it!

Five signs you might be a B2B sales consultant zombie:

1. Your B2B sales training resources are old news—crusty and musty.

2. Your presentation skills put people to sleep.

3. Your workshops are 100% lecture and 100% boring.

4. Death by PowerPoint is your favorite means of engaging your prey—I mean workshop participants.

5. Your B2B sales training expertise is limited.

How to Transform Yourself from Zombie to World-Class

Creating and delivering an onsite workshop are not easy tasks for B2B sales consultants and trainers. Unfortunately, some people cut corners when developing a training session for a couple of reasons:

• Time—they don’t have the time to do it correctly
• Expertise—they don’t know how to do it correctly.

Here’s a list of mistakes made by consultants that lead to not-so-good outcomes and negatively impact the overall ROI of a workshop:

1. Skip Pre-Learning

It is always a good idea to expose workshop participants to the course materials before the onsite workshop. A great way to do this is have the salespeople take an online course that provides an overview of the key concepts to be covered during the onsite workshop.

As a B2B sales consultant, there is no better feeling than being part of improving the sales performance of a customer—especially when a customer was initially less than eager to follow your advice and use the B2B sales training expertise provided to them.

If you are a B2B sales consultant or trainer perhaps you’ve had a ticket to this movie that involves a VP of sales at the corporate level who decided to hire your firm to improve performance without engaging the sales leaders down the line during the decision making process. This type of shotgun wedding often begins on a less than positive note filled with tension.

Step by Step! 

Here are some things you can do to turn tension into traction: 

B2B sales consultants and trainers appreciate the value—and the revenue—of an onsite workshop. When workshops are conducted properly the sellers who receive the training also appreciate the experience because of the revenue created!

World-class B2B sales training organizations know how to create powerful on site workshops that deliver knowledge and enhance the expertise of the salespeople on the receiving end. Here are some secrets to creating powerful onsite workshops:

• Start with the end in mind—determine what you want the sellers to learn as a result of the workshop.

While there are many ways to approach building a sales meeting kit, here is one approach that will help you deliver a quality sales meeting every time. Follow this process and build your B2B sales training resources:

Begin with the end in mind.

Before building the sales meeting, think through what it is that you want salespeople to learn and what you hope they will be better at once the meeting is over. Start by completing this statement:

When salespeople leave this meeting, they should be better at (fill in the blank) and I’ll know they are better because they will do (fill in the blank) more consistently.

When conducting a multi-hour workshop it is always a good idea to add an activity—also known as a group energizer—to the event to the enhance engagement and energy level of the participants. The best energizers involve two elements:

• Some type of physical activity

• Something that causes participants to focus and think.

Here’s an energizer you can try the next time you are conducting a B2Bsales training session—it is called Group Juggling! This energizer works best with 10-12 people, but it could work with smaller groups as well. If you have a larger group split into groups of 10-12. You will need 6-8 Koosh balls for each group of 10-12 people.

Here are the instructions:

Networking online for B2B sales consultants is a double-edged sword for the following reasons:

In order to grow your B2B sales consulting business, you need to network with new business prospects

AND

Your customers—B2B salespeople—need to learn this skill to improve their sales performance.

Here are six tips you can use as well as pass along to the sellers you consult:

1. Make it Easy to Find Contact Information

After you’ve taken time to build your brand, don’t hurt your chances of connecting with new prospects by making people struggle to find your contact information.

Grow my consulting business is the name I've given this dream I keep having. I have it so often I thought it made sense to give it a name! Perhaps you've had the same dream or for some the same nightmare if you are a B2B sales consultant or trainer.

The grow my consulting business dream consists of the following:

• Paranoia tied to creating enough B2B sales training resources to stay relevant
• Fear of losing an existing customer—specifically a large spending key account—due to spending too much time creating sales training resources
• Running, chasing, never catching the solution 

And then I wake up in a cold sweat—wide awake and destined to the couch to watch ESPN until I can shake the dream from my memory and doze back to sleep.

Being a business owner is tough. It takes a lot of hard work to launch a business and to stay in business. Many business owners look to B2B sales consultants to help increase sales, optimize marketing efforts, and provide strategic input from an external perspective.

As a sales consultant, you are being trusted with someone’s most precious life work: their revenue development. Business owners seeking help with sales strategy look to you for guidance on their products and sales plan and it’s up to you to point them in the right direction utilizing your B2B sales training expertise. Like any relationship, it takes work, time, effort and trust. Your clients are putting trust in you to deliver. As a sales consultant, it’s important to work with the client to exceed their goals.

To create a successful relationship, there are several things you should consider. Here are six things clients value most from a sales consultant.

Growing your B2B sales consulting business can be an intimidating task. You have so much to do serving customers that it’s hard to imagine being able to allocate time and effort to growing the business itself. It can be done, however, it requires focus on the right areas. Think of it this way: Use the same amount of energy, merely concentrate it in some different areas.

Here are a few areas to consider:

Align Your Resources