OUR STORY
SalesLabs has been fortunate to engage with a global portfolio of clients prepared to experiment and push the envelope. This allowed us to do hard research on what it takes to sell better, and how adults learn skills and methodologies in a way that sticks. Our approach has helped customers identify, pursue and win $50 billion more than they thought possible. AI will take it further.
Click the dates below to view our milestones.
Timeline
Our Travel Companions
1970s
Whilst PIRBIC was refining the approach that would one day become the core of our first series of services, Xerox was packaging a training system called 'Professional Selling Skills' designed by Michael Bosworth, which would be spun off and end up under the Achieve Global brand. Neil Rackham founded Huthwaite soon after, and went on to release the mega hit 'SPIN Selling'. Neil would later graciously write the Foreword to our first business book, calling it "timely and important". In the same year Miller, Heiman and Tuleja wrote 'Strategic Selling', and phrases like 'the economic buyer' and 'blue sheet' became cultural touchstones. All these sales training products would later be aggregated under TwentyEighty, then sold to Korn/Ferry in 2019.
1980s
The early work by Brock, Act!, Goldmine and Microsoft to replace Rolodexes and provide sales forecasting and reporting tools paved the way for Salesforce and others. Ziglar, Tracy, Blanchard, Kirkpatrick and Hopkins became household names. Around this time Art Jacobs joined the dots between sales process and military strategy, and embedded these lessons into the Power Base Selling workshop, which featured in Jim Holden's book. Art then partnered with Alston Gardner to create the Target Account Selling (TAS) suite of training at Target Marketing Systems (later called OnTarget) which became a juggernaut. These methodologies focused a generation of salespeople on finding the 'compelling event', 'the inner circle', and knowing the difference between a frontal, flanking and fragment strategy. OnTarget's training and consulting products changed hands and morphed into software that was serially divested to Siebel, then Oracle, then The TAS Group (which outbid us for the IP and then rebranded as Altify). This was acquired by Upland Software in 2019.
1990s to present
Covey, Moore, Kotter and Christensen stimulated new thinking in their books, and in the same era Bosworth wrote 'Solution Selling' which Keith Eades expanded as a flagship training course for Sales Performance International (SPI). This introduced 'pain, power, vision, value, control' and 'the nine boxes' into the sales vernacular. SPI's growth was helped by Mike Duff and Martin Judd internationally, and by Tim Sullivan applying methodical systems thinking to the firm's growth. Kartesia, a financial liquidity specialist, acquired SPI and created an economy of scale by merging the company with Richardson in 2019. Meanwhile a few progressive business schools were developing centers for professional selling, and we saw intercollegiate sales competitions, chartered institutes, magazines, tertiary education courses and conferences further promote professionalism in selling to the present time.
Tribute
We salute these colleagues and others who have made individual and collective contributions to the quality of thought in sales. Over time SalesLabs has worked with or shared the stage with a few, and greatly valued rolling up our sleeves together. With so many of these authors, consultants and founders having engineered an exit or now retired, we celebrate their contributions in moving business selling from an erratic dark art to being run as a measurable process that is central to responsible corporate governance.
Position
The global corporate training market is projected to reach $487.3 billion by 2030. The sales training sector is typically valued at 10 percent of this in any given year. SalesLabs is now one of the world's only multi-decade sales training, performance coaching and governance firms to maintain its independence instead of becoming another product line in a larger company. The trusted position we occupy in the revenue growth advisory sector demands neutrality. A consulting firm cannot advise on the efficacy of a client's sales software if it is owned by a software company. Nor can it impartially assess the skills of a salesforce if its parent company handled the hiring. We believe the objectivity needed to properly tune a sales organization gets diluted when sales training firms are merged or acquired by PE, HR or software companies.
Beliefs
We believe salespeople are entitled to tailored, personalized coaching based on observation of their actual skills over time. This approach works.
We believe sales managers are entitled to learn the strategic, political, financial and operational aspects of their role, and not be expected to succeed as a leader just because they were a good salesperson. We also believe they are entitled to on-the-job mentoring from a qualified party outside their company, to whom they can honestly confide in and receive impartial advice. This approach also works.
We believe shareholders of publicly traded companies are entitled to invest where every senior director understands that no quarterly or annual forecast can be relied on if it is not built from sales forecasts that have been validated and de-risked through rigorous governance procedures, and where salespeople are properly skilled and certified to deliver results in their mission-critical role.
We believe we do our best work for clients when executives partner with and empower us to drive meaningful uplift across their sales organization and channel partners. These services may include analysis of the sales function to identify untapped potential for improvement; tailor-made training and skills coaching; mapping the SalesDNA of each person on the team, to ensure the right people are in the right roles; and the development of sales academies, playbooks and 'war rooms' to improve forecast accuracy, win rates, and overall corporate governance.
