Todd Youngblood

Todd Youngblood

The YPS Group, Inc.
Todd Youngblood is passionate about sales productivity. His 3+ year career in Executive Management, Sales, Marketing and Consulting has focused on selling more, better, cheaper and faster. He established The YPS Group, Inc. in 1999 based on his years of experience in Sales Process Engineering – that is, combining creativity and discipline in the design, implementation and use of work processes for highly effective sales teams.
  • Challengers 39; Relationship-Builders 7
    0 comments 258 reads
    Posted on 2012-01-20

    As a sales pro, which team would you rather join? The one that scores 39 points or the one that can only score 7? (And does it make you a bit uncomfortable to reject relationship-building as your strategy of choice?

    Let’s back up a bit and consider the old saw, “In God we trust, all others bring data.” In my experience, virtually all decision-making executives have it burned into their brains. It’s therefore also burned into my brain.

    So here’s some data that has captured my attention BIG TIME. It’s a continuing analysis, including more than 6,000 sales reps across a wide array of industries. The research exceeds all standards of scientific rigor and statistical significance. It concludes there are five types of sales reps, with super-star reps spread across the five groups as follows:

    • 39% – The Challenger
    • 25% – The Lone Wolf
    • 17% – The Hard Worker
    • 12% – The Reactive Problem Solver
    • 7% – The Relationship Builder
      • ...
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  • Please stop
    0 comments 494 reads
    Posted on 2011-12-15

    Brace yourself. The sentence in the next paragraph has been specifically designed to make you uncomfortable, trigger your gag reflex and cause you to roll your eyes uncontrollably. Ready?

    We are an innovative, market leading, premier provider of high quality, customer focused solutions, reliably delivered through trusted partnerships grounded in our rich history of great service and superior people.

    Are you OK? Able to continue? I know, reading that clap-trap all lumped together in the context of a blog post, exposes a whole collection of company-describing words as meaningless drivel. You’re embarrassed for the knucklehead who would try to pass that sort of trite, cliche-ridden, totally undifferentiated nonsense off as a “value proposition.”

    Speaking of value propositions… Any of those words or phrases on your web site? Or in any of your proposals? Or plastered on your sales collateral? Or pop out of your mouth during sales calls?...

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  • You’re wrong again, my friend
    0 comments 433 reads
    Posted on 2011-10-29

    As my friend and business associate knows, the snarky title of this post is said with a smile…  He IS, however, a little off on his reasoning in a recent post of his own.  He begins by saying,

    “Engaged in friendly, spirited banter with a business associate the other day. We had just returned from a trade show radio gig, and had 50 radio interviews with CEOs to edit. Naturally, we split the batch in half.

    And naturally, we each named and organized our respective batch of files differently.

    My associate? Named the files according to the company...

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  • In sales? Then like it or not, you’re also in the publishing business.
    0 comments 795 reads
    Posted on 2011-09-16

    Make no mistake.  Do NOT kid yourself.  If you are in sales, you are in the publishing business.  It’s a new niche of the publishing world, but one that’s real, and more importantly, at the front end of virtually every buying process.

    Consider a typical business buying process.  It consists of stages like:

    1. Develop the various Strategies required to realize the organization’s Vision and Mission
    2. Design, implement and execute Business Processes to fulfill the Strategies
    3. Identify issues, constraints and problems with the Strategies
    4. Determine the Needs for addressing those issues, constraints and problems
    5. Identify Sources of Supply to fulfill those Needs
    6. Choose the optimal Source of Supply
    7. Buy, implement and maintain the “X” provided by that Source of Supply

    OK, now pick any of those seven steps, and think about what the decision team will do.  They...

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  • You Are Too Narrow-Minded (…yes, YOU!!!)
    0 comments 363 reads
    Posted on 2011-09-09

    Know your customer!  Great advice.  It’s essential for success.  But…  Even though it’s necessary, it’s no longer sufficient.

    Let’s say the arrow to the left represents all of your customer’s people, processes and resources.  “Stuff” goes in the left side of the arrow, gets processed and then products and/or services come out the right.  (See Michael Porter’s classic Competitive Advantage for a detailed discussion of the Value Chain.)

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  • Mike Janis of Deloitte on selling a “Business Within A Business”
    0 comments 760 reads
    Posted on 2011-09-04

    Here’s a Dreamland Radio interview you really don’t want to miss.  Mike Janis of Deloitte shares some great insights on the power of focus, value propositions and sales tools.  Listen to a few more detailed insights underneath comments like:

    • “If they have responsibility for five clients,  you don’t get them on the phone and talk to them about all five clients.”
    • “It’s really about the business opportunity the benchmark uncovers.”
    • “It adds a level of stickiness.”

    Mike’s a real pro and an experienced sales leader.  He’s got hard-won battle scars – and the insight that comes with them – from his tenure with IBM, Gartner, Hackett...

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  • The Stupendous Worth Of A Compelling Value Proposition
    0 comments 575 reads
    Posted on 2011-08-30

    It’s an old habit.  When I read on airplanes and come across an intriguing passage or concept, I jot down notes on whatever scrap of paper I can find.  While cleaning out my briefcase last night, I came across these two gems.  (My apologies to the author – don’t recall the book or article these came from.)

    • “The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than in all the written material available to a reader in the fifteenth century.”
    • “In 1900, a well educated person could still grasp the existing knowledge in almost every field of science and the arts (in fact, this was what a college education was supposed to provide).”

    So what do those two factual tidbits tell you?

    I can’t say I’ve ever read an entire edition of the New York Times, but I do read a lot more than that amount every month.  And as far as grasping all the existing knowledge in any single field – science,...

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  • Death Of A Business Model (Yours too?)
    0 comments 624 reads
    Posted on 2011-07-29

    Being in the railroad business made most railroads blind to the transportation business.  They missed the opportunities to gobble up market share nabbed by trucks and airplanes.  Most railroads are gone.  Easy to articulate the strategies they coulda’ woulda’ shoulda’ implemented.

    Bethlehem Steel was in the steel business.  A realization they were in the durable materials business, might have saved them.  They’re gone too.  Their coulda’ woulda’ shoulda’ strategies are not quite as obvious, but it doesn’t take too much effort to conjure up several.

    Borders was in the brick and mortar book-selling business.  Soon to be gone forever.  What business coulda’ woulda’ shoulda’ they been in?  Education?  Leisure?  E-commerce?  Gathering place for intellectual discussion and/or coffee and quiet reflection?  What strategies coulda’ woulda’ shoulda’ they implemented?  Certainly not selling dead, processed trees with ink blots in a 140 character, electronic world.

    “What...

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  • “Work with those ready to be worked with.”
    0 comments 863 reads
    Posted on 2011-07-22

    “Work with those ready to be worked with.”  Pretty simple advice.  Pretty sound too.  Especially when it comes to embracing new techniques, technologies and tactics for selling more faster.  Or selling anything for that matter.

    As usual, I came by this powerfully pithy insight from contact with someone way smarter than me.  This time it was Bert DuMars, VP of e-Business and Interactive Marketing for Newell-Rubbermaid.  His insight really whacked me right upside the head.   Since I sell and facilitate Sales Process Engineering for a living, I often ask if virtually any sales organization can benefit from The YPS Group’s Sales Process Engineering methodology. ...

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  • What’s The Impact of Sales Management Turnover?
    1 comments 1,268 reads
    Posted on 2011-07-16

    My friend, Bill Cook, posed an interesting question in a recent post about “The Revolving Door of Unaccountability.”  He’s looking for opinions about the effects of high turnover in the sales management ranks.

    Here’s my take…

    Both top tier and bottom tier sales professionals tend to perform well or poorly pretty much regardless of the quality or tenure of the leader.  It’s that mass in the middle that’s impacted the most.  High management turnover hurts this bunch – sometimes badly.  They need CONSISTENT coaching and CONTINUOUS attention.

    It gets even worse typically, when the new leader arrives.  That person will naturally be drawn to the top performers since they’...

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