build a sales force of experts
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How to succeed with your sales teamTRANSCRIPT
How to Build the Expert Sales Force
The Missing Link in Across-The-Board Sales Performance Improvement
By John Doerr and Mike Schultz Co-Presidents of RAIN Group and Co-Authors of Rainmaking Conversations
Copyright © RAIN Group 2011 1
How to Build the Expert Sales Force
The Missing Link in Across-The-Board Sales Performance Improvement
Copyright © 2011 RAIN Group
Feel free to republish excerpts from this report as long as you link back to
http://www.RainGroup.com for attribution. You are also welcome to send it anyone who
would be interested or possibly benefit from this white paper.
For more information about RAIN Group visit www.RainGroup.com.
Contact us at [email protected] or call (508) 405-0438.
Copyright © RAIN Group 2011 2
Give sales leaders four sales wishes and they
might sound something like this:
1. Improve overall sales performance.
Do you ever think, “I know we should be
getting more out of our sales force, but how
much better can we get and how do we get
there?”
2. Increase account penetration, cross-
selling, and up-selling. Whether you have
10 practice areas or 10,000 product SKU’s,
most organizations have tremendous
untapped opportunity to sell more to
current customers.
3. Launch new products and services
more successfully. You have a new
offering and have done so much to bring it
to market, but when it comes time for your
team to begin selling this “great new thing”
they don’t adopt it fast enough or know it
well enough to sell it.
4. Reduce new sales hire ramp-up time. A
true pain point for many organizations
selling complex products and services is
getting individuals up to speed fast enough.
It can take 12, 18, even 24 months for a
new sales person to become knowledgeable
enough to reach full sales productivity and
be credible with prospects.
Now ask yourself this: If you could improve in
any of these areas, how would that impact your
revenue?
Before you read on, take a minute to answer
this question. Pull out a pen and paper. Open an
Excel spreadsheet. Or just think for a minute:
how much of an increase in sales are we talking
about?
Once you have your answer, read the rest of
this white paper to find out how you can make
these four wishes a reality by tapping into the
power of building a sales force filled with
credible experts.
Throughout this white paper we use
the term “sales people” to mean
anyone who is expected to bring in
new customers and revenue to your
organization. They may be full time
sales people but they can also be
consultants, technical professionals,
department leaders, partners,
managers, and so on.
If You Had Four Sales Wishes What Would They Be?
Copyright © RAIN Group 2011 3
Ask 10 different sales people at your
organization to describe the value your products
and services deliver. You’ll likely hear ten very
different answers. Some will be compelling,
leaving you wanting more. Others will leave
you disappointed and scratching your head.
When you’re selling complex products and
services, what you know drives results.
According to Aberdeen Group’s research report,
Optimizing Lead-to-Win, best-in-class sales
organizations are markedly better in five success
areas:
1. Overall product and service knowledge
2. Understanding clients’ and prospects’
business challenges
3. Ability to map solutions to challenges
4. Retaining top sales talent
5. On-boarding and training new sales people
Figure 1: Sales Performance Self-Assessments by the Best-in-Class
How Best-in-Class Organizations Outperform the Rest
Source: Aberdeen Group, May 2010
Copyright © RAIN Group 2011 4
The common thread in these success factors:
getting necessary sales knowledge into the
heads of sales people. The more you know, the
more you sell.
Sales knowledge is a little discussed area that
separates the best from the rest.
Let’s take a closer look at each factor:
1. Demonstrating product knowledge in
the sales process.
If you can’t speak intelligently about your
product or service, the needs it fulfills, and
the impact it has on the customer’s business,
you’ll never be able to sell it.
2. Understanding prospects’ business
challenges.
Uncovering needs is sales 101, but you can’t
uncover the full breadth and depth of needs
until you have a solid understanding of how
you help your customers succeed. That
means you need to know their worlds
backwards and forwards.
3. Mapping products and services to the
prospect’s business challenges.
Only when you view your solutions through
the lens of customer needs and challenges
will your product and service knowledge
have meaning for the customer.
4. Retaining top sales talent.
The faster your sales people are able to get it
(fully understand your solution set and how
you help customers) the more successful
they will be, the more money they’ll make,
and the more likely they’ll stay. When they
don’t get it fast enough, top talent may leave
due to frustration before they blossom.
5. On-boarding and training new sales
hires.
It often takes 12 to 24 months to get new
hires ramped up and selling at full
productivity. If you can get the necessary
sales knowledge into their heads faster, you
can reduce ramp-up time.
Even though most leaders know that knowledge
is key to sales success, when it comes to getting
that knowledge into the heads of their sales
people, many organizations fail.
It’s not that organizations don’t try to get people
the information they need. They just don’t do it
well, and they are rarely innovative about it.
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Consider how management, training, and
marketing typically communicate with sales
people:
Death by PowerPoint: Product and
service training consists of days of endless
PowerPoint presentations. After the first
half day sales people have zoned out. And,
as is well established, retention from this
type of classroom training is only about
10%.
Non-stop information flow: Sales people
receive email after email containing PDFs of
different product sheets, collateral, sales
tips, company updates, client success
stories, sales tools and resources, and more.
Inconsistent formats: The material people
receive is always in a different format, so it’s
difficult for them to find the nuggets of
knowledge they need.
Online knowledge base = information
dumping ground: Online knowledge
repositories that are all the rage are often
mismanaged, confusing, and frustrating.
They become information dumping
grounds, making it virtually impossible to
find what you need. It couldn’t be worse if
Kafka himself were managing it.
Information overload: Because none of
the information design and flow is managed
systematically, sales people receive so much
information – too much to absorb – that they
often stop paying attention altogether.
Inaccurate and out-of-date: When sales
people have to go back and find something
that they remember once seeing, they have
no confidence that what they eventually
find is still accurate and up to date.
On top of all this, sales people end up spending
valuable time re-creating the wheel. They do
research that others have already done, rewrite
emails and letters that have already been
written, rewrite proposal material and sales
collateral that’s otherwise available, write their
own sales tools and tip sheets, and so on.
This is all sad and painful, and too often true.
We’ve seen organizations where sales
people receive 22 times the amount of
information they need to succeed.
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Building the expertise of your team can have a huge effect on your team’s overall sales performance,
ability to grow accounts, ramp up time, and the success of product launches.
Congratulations! We Just Awarded that Assignment to…Someone Else
Consider this scenario: You deliver an engagement at ACME, Inc. The client loves
how you solved Problem A for them. They’ve spent $100,000. They will save
$2,000,000 over the next 4 years. Working together was a joy. Everything went
swimmingly.
About 3 months later, a VP at your organization says, “I was just talking to the folks
at ACME. Didn’t we work with them a few months ago?”
You: “Yes, we did. It went great. We saved them $2,000,000 by solving Problem A.”
VP: “Did you see that Problem B existed?”
You: “I knew that the situation existed. We studied it. But it’s not my area of focus.
Is that a problem we solve?”
VP: “Yes, we do. And we are perhaps the best firm in the world at solving it. For
another $100k, we could have saved ACME another $2,000,000. Instead, they’re
working with our biggest competitor in that area.”
You: “Well, if I only knew it was that much of an issue. And if I only knew we solved
it.”
VP: “Too bad. I only just found out about the issue myself because our competitor
announced the new contract. Should’ve been our engagement.”
There is a Better Way to Get Your Sales People to
Become Experts
Copyright © RAIN Group 2011 7
We know from research and experience that the
best-in-class companies are superior at
demonstrating product and service knowledge,
uncovering the full set of customer needs in the
areas of their solutions, and mapping products
and services to those needs.
In other words, they use their expert knowledge
to help customers succeed.
The questions are, how do they do it, and how
can you get all of your people doing it?
3 Keys to Building a Sales Force of
Credible Experts
The companies that are best-in-class with sales
knowledge follow these three keys to success:
1. Embrace the concept of sales
knowledge fluency. Sales people know
what they sell and sell what they know. If
your people cannot speak fluently about
your product and service offerings and ask
the right questions to uncover specific needs
that your solutions fulfill, then they are
leaving money on the table and losing you
deals.
Best-in-class companies work hard to get
their people to become fluent experts.
2. Build and manage a top-notch sales
knowledge base. From the day a sales
person walks into an organization to the day
they retire, they are flooded with
information. Typically, only about 20% of
this information is essential for them to
know. That means they are wasting their
time sifting through the other 80% of
information that is either “nice to know” or
just doesn’t matter.
Best-in-class organizations teach their sales
people what they need to know, and don’t
waste time doing it.
3. Train to sales knowledge fluency, and
get there quickly. The faster you can train
to fluency, the faster your sales people can
take off the training wheels and step on the
gas.
Best-in-class organizations get their teams to
expert knowledge levels, and they get them
there fast.
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Think for a minute about what it’s like talking to
someone at your company that really knows their
stuff. If you ask them a question, they have the
answer right away. If you double check the
facts, they’re right.
If you ask them a complex question, you can tell
they know what you’re asking about because
they in return ask great clarification questions
that demonstrate their own knowledge. They
ask questions like a physician diagnosing a
health problem. They get right to the heart of the
issue and they don’t waste time on tangents.
This is what it’s like speaking with a fluent sales
person. Fluent sales people are able to speak the
language of your prospects, of your solutions, of
your markets, and of your company.
We define fluency below:
The knowledge your sales people have, must be
correct (accurate). They have to be able to recall
it without hesitation (speed). They cannot have
gaps in their knowledge that would hamper
their ability to sell (appropriate breadth and
depth).
Most organizations only train sales people to
accuracy. While this is a good start, it leaves
people to their own devices to get to fluency and
many never do.
Leaving the world of sales for a minute, assume
you train a financial manager to use a particular
spreadsheet function. It’s okay if, when they go
to use that function, they hesitate for a moment,
thinking, “Hmmm, how do I do that again? Let’s
look at the help file. Oh, right. Here we go.”
They can still get the job done.
Assume, however, you train sales people only to
the level of accuracy. A customer asks a question
and the sales person says, “Wait, I know this
one. I had training on it. It’s…it’s…it’s…” Even
if they get the right answer, that 5 seconds of
hesitation killed their credibility and the sale.
If a sales person doesn’t respond
immediately when they hear a buying
signal, they miss the sale.
If a sales person doesn’t ask the right
question at the right time, they miss the
opportunity to uncover additional needs
and sell the broadest solution set.
If a sales person doesn’t have a good
answer for an objection, the sale will die in
the 11th hour.
Even if they get it right (accuracy), if they don’t
have the other 2 pieces of the equation they will
lose credibility and miss opportunities.
Fluency = Accuracy + Speed + Breadth &
Depth of Knowledge
Key to Success #1: Embrace Sales Knowledge Fluency
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Best-in-class organizations go beyond accuracy and train to fluency.
When we observe the top 10% of sales people in virtually any industry that sells complex products and
services, the sales people are fluent. Even if you push, poke, and prod and do it for a good amount of
time, you still leave saying, “They really know what they’re talking about.”
For best-in-class companies, accuracy is not enough. They embrace the concept of sales
knowledge fluency.
Figure 2: Fluency Needed for Maximum Sales Performance
Copyright © RAIN Group 2011 10
Creating and managing a sales knowledge base
– a repository where all critical sales knowledge
is housed – is an essential step towards creating
a fluent sales force.
Some companies don’t have a knowledge base
at all. Every time a new sales person (partner,
VP, consultant, or anyone who is expected to
take part in sales conversations), is hired,
someone on the team scrambles to put together
a pile of reading and set of slides for them to
review. This even happens at large companies.
Other companies have some level of a sales
knowledge base. It might be a simple list of
“when someone joins the team, get them this
information;” or, “when we a launch a new
product, give people that information.”
Regardless of the state of your sales knowledge
base, you’re probably thinking, “It’s nowhere
near where it should be.” You have a lot of
company. Few organizations have a great sales
knowledge base.
This is good news for you because the likelihood
of your competitors having one is slim, leaving
opportunities for your sales people to be viewed
as credible experts and to win more deals.
Key to Success #2: Build a Top-Notch Sales Knowledge
Base
Imagine for a minute that your favorite
newspaper or news website was
organized differently every day. Every
time you open it up the information is
in a new spot on the page and labeled
differently. Some days when you visit it
has the content you’re looking for,
while other days, it’s not there.
One more thing: sometimes when you
visit, you find critical content reported
with both typos and factual errors.
Sounds far-fetched, but this is exactly
how sales management, marketing,
and training send important
information to sales people every day.
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Getting your sales knowledge base to where it
should be is essential if you want to create a
sales force of experts. To do it right, you need a
sales knowledge base that:
1. Contains only need to know information
for sales (and directs to nice to know
information)
2. Is managed proactively with rigor and
vigilance, and is always up-to-date and
accurate
3. Is built to support both learning and
reference
4. Contains the appropriate breadth and
depth of information needed for sales
success
With these four elements attended to, you can
be sure your sales people are getting exactly the
knowledge they need to speak fluently with
customers and sell the broadest solution set
possible.
Let’s look at each of these 4 elements more
closely.
1. What People Need to Know to
Sell
Before we get to specific content areas that
support sales success, it’s important to draw
boundaries to help us figure out what should
make it in to the knowledge base, and what
should be left out.
Think about the content for your sales
knowledge base in the following way:
Need to know fluently: For need-to-know
information, sales people must have rapid
and accurate recall. Usually this is about
20% of the knowledge in a sales knowledge
base.
Which Person Would You Trust?
Prospect: “If we were to move forward with
this, what happens next?”
Non-fluent sales person: “After we agree to
move forward, which is the first thing to
happen, um…we’ll go through a number of
steps in a process…actually, it’s a 3 stage
process and it’ll take a little while to get
through. Once you get the paperwork that
you’ll get from me…I mean, from customer
service. They’ll either call you or send you an
email…”
Fluent sales person: “After we agree to move
forward, which is the first thing that needs to
happen, we’ll go through a 4 stage process
that will take us about 2 weeks. The first
stage is working through a little paperwork.
Once you sign into the system you’ll get an
immediate email generated from customer
service that will ask you a series of
questions…”
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Need to access easily: This is knowledge
with which sales people should be familiar,
be able to access easily, but not be expected
to have on the tips of their tongues.
Usually this is about 80% of the knowledge.
Nice to know: Nice to know information
refers to those pieces of information on the
periphery that allow sales people develop
deep expertise in a particular area and
enhance credibility.
For example, knowledge that a Wall Street
Journal article recently touted the benefits of
the particular product or service you offer
might help you substantiate your credibility,
but so would the other 500 articles in
various publications that do the same. Sales
people don’t need to see every one of them.
Often, nice to know information
overshadows need to know information
because there’s so much of it. A good sales
knowledge base should provide references
to helpful information, but should not
contain these pieces of information outright
in the main knowledge base.
Don’t need to know at all: A good amount
of the information sent to sales is
information they don’t need to know at all.
For example, deep technical information
about how something works, 3 pages of
detail about a competitor that 99% of the
sales force has never competed against,
detail about 66 competitors in their space, 30
minute updates on the progress for building
a 3rd manufacturing plant in Tennessee, and
so on.
The first essential element to building a sales
knowledge base is to make sure it only contains
the need to know information.
2. Proactive Knowledge Base
Management
Building a sales knowledge base is not a one-
time proposition. It must be managed tightly
and proactively.
Without this, the amount of information
mushrooms, the organization of the information
falls apart, and the accuracy of the information
diminishes. That means sales people can’t get
Which Person Would You Trust?
Prospect: “OK, that sounds good. I’m curious
to know what the questions are that your
team will ask me once we get started.”
Non-fluent sales person: “You know, it’s been
a while since I’ve seen them. Hold on, I can
go ask someone.”
Fluent sales person: “There are about 25
questions, and they’re straightforward. For
example, they’ll ask you things like A, B, and
C. Off the top of my head I don’t remember
them all, but if you want to see the list of the
25, I can grab it for you in the next few
minutes and we can walk through it
together.”
Copyright © RAIN Group 2011 13
through it all, can’t use it efficiently, and don’t
trust it.
Once they don’t trust it, they don’t use it. That’s
the end of your sales knowledge base.
3. Make it Easy to Use and Easy to
Learn
There are 2 core goals of your sales knowledge
base:
Support easy reference: Sales knowledge
bases must be organized to support easy
reference. As noted earlier, in most
situations only about 20% of the knowledge
must be learned fluently, with the other 80%
ready to be accessed when needed. Thus the
information in the sales knowledge base
must be easy to find or sales people will
waste precious time and energy searching
when they should be selling.
Support learning: The sales knowledge
base must be organized to serve as a basis
for learning. If the knowledge base is
constructed correctly, much of the
knowledge learning can be done through
self-study, allowing for a great reduction in
classroom training time.
4. Provide the Breadth and Depth of
Information
Once you know what information needs to be in
the knowledge base, you need to organize it in a
way that is easiest, most complete, and most
helpful for sales people to consume.
To help do this, we’ve developed the Universal
Sales Knowledge Framework as a guide. The
Universal Sales Knowledge Framework is a
comprehensive and logical structure for the
knowledge needed for sales. At the top-level we
organize information into eight essential
knowledge areas:
1. Expectations: What sales people are
expected to produce, the actions they’re
expected to take to produce them, and
guidelines to help them get there.
2. Market Context and Company Value
Proposition: Descriptions of markets you
serve, what’s going on in these markets and
the world of your customers, the general
competitive dynamics, current trends, and
how your company delivers value to the
marketplace.
3. Categories of Common Customer
Needs: Regardless of the complexity of the
market and the customer, customer needs
can be categorized and labeled, making it
easy for your sales people to work
systematically and categorically to uncover
possible needs.
Once you have this done, you can build a
“Customer Needs Profile” that graphically
depicts the various categories of customer
needs. A graphical depiction of the
At one company we know well, sales
people looked in an average of 20
different places before they found what
they were looking for.
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Customer Needs Profile is extremely helpful
in training fluent sales people.
4. Company Capabilities as Solutions to
Needs: Most sales knowledge training starts
and ends with product or service
knowledge. It does not position products
and services as solutions to customer needs.
Organizing your capabilities around the
customer’s world makes it easy for sales
people to uncover the full set of needs, map
solutions to customer needs, and sell
benefits versus features.
Organize Capabilities around the Customer’s World:
Connect Markets, Customer Needs, & Solutions
Example: Company solution mapped to specific customer need.
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5. Competition: Details of how and why your
company is preferable in specific situations
given other available options.
6. Sales Strategy, Tactics, and Resources:
Descriptions of all facets of your company’s
sales strategy overall and how sales people
can succeed in the variety of sales situations.
7. Post-Sale Delivery: Descriptions of what
happens after a customer agrees to buy from
you.
8. Account Development: Working closely
with number 6 above, this area outlines the
company’s strategy for maintaining,
deepening, and broadening relationships
with customers.
Best-in-class companies make sure these 8 essential areas are in place so their sales
people know exactly where to go to find the information they need to sell.
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A sales person can be at your organization for
years sometimes and still not be able to answer
questions about your solutions, uncover
customer needs, identify buying signals, or
speak fluently about your company. The faster
they can, the more they will succeed, and the
more your company will succeed.
As we noted in figure 2, a select group of top
sales people typically make it to fluency on their
own at their own pace. However,
Only a small subset of sales people get there.
Many top out at accuracy.
The knowledge learning process is painful.
It takes much longer than it should.
Assuming your sales knowledge base is ready,
it’s time to build a training program to get sales
people to fluency systematically and quickly. No
more circuitous processes that take 2 years. No
more depending on luck.
When we build sales knowledge fluency
learning programs for organizations at the
RAIN Group, we refer to the process as SPEED:
Sales Person Expertise Expedited Development.
The basics of the SPEED process are as follows.
1. Define fluent knowledge needs: The
first step in developing a SPEED learning
process is to define what information in the
sales knowledge base is “need to know
fluently.” Once you build your knowledge
base, typically about 20% of it can be culled
out as necessary to be on the tip of the
tongue, ready at all times to use.
2. Identify knowledge nuggets: The next
step is to break down that knowledge into
very small nuggets of information, and
build flash cards (or, as we call them, SPEED
Cards) for each nugget. Even if you have
hundreds or thousands of information
nuggets, you can categorize each one into
major areas, and then further break them
down into sets of 20 or so cards each. This
makes it manageable for learning.
3. Categorize knowledge into buckets:
Third, step back and look at major
categories of information and types of
conversations that sales people might have
that “add up” to a discussion around
particular topics. For example, how would a
sales person answer:
• What is it that your company does?
• What needs do you tend to solve for
clients?
• How do you compare to the
competition?
• I see that you have a special method for
solving this particular kind of problem.
Can you tell me about it?
• I’m interested in doing XYZ. Can you
give me an overview of how it works?
When you know the critical “mini
conversations” sales people commonly
have, you can create graphical job aids (we
call them SPEED Graphics) to help sales
people learn.
Key to Success #3: Train to Fluency. Get There Quickly.
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4. Train to fluency: While most training
programs stop at accuracy, SPEED trains to
fluency. When you have your SPEED cards
and SPEED graphics built, you roll them
out, along with the sales knowledge base, in
a systematic hybrid self-study and live
blended training and reinforcement
approach.
5. Test and certify knowledge: The last part
is testing for fluency. In the expectations
section of the Universal Sales Knowledge
Framework you should define what sales
people are expected to know, to what level
of expertise, and how knowledge
certification will work.
Companies that follow this process and
implement it well not only build an army of
fluent sales experts, they build it quickly.
Best-in-class companies get their teams to expert knowledge levels and get them there
fast.
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A few years ago, we were working with a Fortune 500 provider of logistics services. As a part of this
process, we asked them to send us all of the information they send to sales people over the course of six
months.
A few days later we received a delivery of 3 large boxes full of documents. When we unpacked
everything and organized it, it filled 18 large 3 ring binders.
After sifting through the mounds of documents, and removing all the “nice to know” and “not needed”
information, we used the Universal Sales Knowledge Framework to categorize everything and remove
duplicate information. When we finished building the sales knowledge base, we had decreased the
amount of information sales people were expected to learn by 86%. What filled 18 binders, now filled
only 2 ½ binders.
What’s more, after launching the SPEED learning program, the company cut down the initial ramp up
time of new people from 40 to 12 weeks, and helped them achieve fluent knowledge levels across the
board.
Within 12 months, existing sales people increased the average number of products and services sold to
customers from 5 to 7 (a 40% increase), which amounted to tens of millions of dollars in increased
revenue.
Putting Sales Knowledge Fluency to Work
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The four sales wishes we introduced at the
outset of this white paper are within you reach.
You can:
1. Improve overall sales performance
2. Increase account penetration, cross-selling,
and up-selling
3. Improve the success of your product and
service launches
4. Reduce ramp-up time of new hires to get
them selling at full productivity faster
Companies spend significant time and effort to
make these happen, but rarely do they consider
the impact of building sales people into fluent
experts. For many, it’s the missing link to
achieving across-the-board sales performance
improvement.
Let RAIN Group Help You Build a Sales Force of Experts
Contact us to learn more about how we can help you improve overall sales performance and
build a sales force full of fluent experts. Contact us at www.RainGroup.com, call 508-405-0438,
or email us at [email protected].
Your 4 Sales Wishes Can Come True
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RAIN Group is a sales performance improvement company. Located in greater Boston, we help
companies that sell complex products and services to develop an army of rainmakers – top sales
performers who drive exceptional revenue growth.
We’ve helped tens of thousands of sales people in hundreds of organizations increase their sales
significantly.
We help our clients:
Enhance sales skills and improve sales results
Increase cross and up-selling success
Recruit, hire, and retain the best sales reps
Greatly reduce the learning curve for new hires
Increase the success of new product and service launches
Bottom line: We help our clients win more deals, win them faster, and win them at higher
margins.
Contact Us
Learn more about how RAIN Group can help you develop an army of rainmakers at your organization.
Call: 508-405-0438
Email: [email protected]
Visit: www.RainGroup.com
About RAIN Group