“You’re not an expert when you say you are. You’re an expert when others say you are.” told to me by Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions. I agree. This is why winning awards like this matters.

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OpenViewLabs published a list of the top sales (and marketing) experts. Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers and the host of the popular weekly show, Mad Marketing TV, is honored to be on this very short list of “powerful thought leaders.” (It’s in alphabetical order by last name, so I’m right after my friend Sharon Drew Morgan.)

We also wish to congratulate our many good friends on this list too – especially Mad Marketing TV guests Brian Carroll and Mac McIntosh. Everyone on this list is a super marketing or sales thought leader.

I look forward to reaching out to these experts to invite them to appear on my Mad Marketing TV show too. Jeff appreciates being named one of the top 50 “Most Influential” in Sales Lead Management – another important award.

To learn about Jeff’s company visit Find New Customers, as well as his Fearless Competitor blog. To learn about Jeff, visit his About Me profile.

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Looking to connect with some of the top sales minds in the business? The research team here at OpenView Labs recently applied their talents toward identifying the most influential sales/marketing leaders on the Web today. Browse below for our list of 25 of the most powerful thought leaders in the world of sales management, lead generation, and more.

(Editor’s note: For more details on how this list was compiled, check out this blog post from Brandon Hickie on developing a prioritization scheme for market channel research.)

Greg Alexander, Sales Benchmark Index

Greg started Sales Benchmark Index to provide sales consulting services to leading organizations across both private and public sectors. He is an active speaker and writer, co-authoring books such as Topgrading for Sales: World Class Methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives.

Follow on Twitter – @GregAlexander

Bob Apollo, Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners

Bob is the Founder and Chief Strategist at Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, a U.K.-based B2B sales and marketing consulting firm. He’s written hundreds of articles on sales and marketing, and contributes regularly to the Inflexion-Point blog and Entrepreneur Country.

Follow on Twitter – @bobapollo

Trish Bertuzzi, The Bridge Group

Trish founded The Bridge Group in 1998 with the goal of helping technology companies build better and more successful inside sales teams. She’s a frequent contributor to the company’s Inside Sales Experts Blog, and was recently named one of the “Top 20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management” by SLMA.

Follow on Twitter – @bridgegroupinc

Ian Brodie, IanBrodie.com

Ian provides “straight talking marketing and sales advice for consultants, coaches and other professionals.” Based in the U.K., he offers coaching, training and consulting to help individuals and organizations reach their goals for business growth.

Follow on Twitter – @ianbrodie

Brian Carroll, InTouch: B2B Lead Generation

Brian is the executive director of applied research at MECLABS, a science lab and consultancy that helps leaders optimize the financial performance of their sales and marketing programs. He is the CEO of InTouch and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.

Follow on Twitter – @brianjcarroll

Paul Castain, Castain Training Systems

This “VP of Jedi Mastery” has trained and mentored sales professionals for over 28 years. He owns the site Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook and hosts the The Sales Playbook Podcast.

Follow on Twitter – @paulcastain

Jonathan Farrington, JF Corporation

Jonathan is a globally recognized business coach, mentor, author and consultant. The Chairman of The JF Corporation and CEO of Top Sales Associates, he also contributes sales tips regularly to his popular blog.

Follow on Twitter – @jonofarrington

Colleen Francis, Engage Selling Solutions

A sales trainer and consultant with over 15 years of experience, Colleen is the founder and president of Engage Selling Solutions. She also writes the blog, Sell More & Work Less, where she contributes frequent tips for sales managers and professionals.

Follow on Twitter – @CFrancisVoice

Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power Magazine

Gerhard is the creator of Selling Power Magazine (and Blog) as well as the Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference. He’s authored 16 books on selling and sales management, and broadcasts a daily video series where he interviews various sales leaders, CEOs and marketing experts.

Follow on Twitter – @gerhard20

Jeffrey Gitomer, Ace of Sales

A founding partner at Ace of Sales, Jeffrey manages the popular Sales Blog and is a renowned speaker and presenter. He’s also the author of such books as The Sales Bible and The Little Red Book of Selling.

Follow on Twitter – @gitomer

S. Anthony Iannarino, The Sales Blog

Anthony is the president of SOLUTIONS Staffing and a sales coach at B2BSalesCoach.com. He regularly contributes new tips and ideas for sales managers and professionals on his site, The Sales Blog.

Follow on Twitter – @iannarino

Jill Konrath, JillKonrath.com

Jill is a best-selling author and speaker with a focus on using fresh sales strategies that work in today’s business environment. She writes a popular blog and has authored several books, including SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies.

Follow on Twitter – @jillkonrath

Kendra Lee, KLA Group

As an IT sales and prospect attraction specialist with the Denver-based KLA Group, Kendra has been a featured speaker on selling to SMB companies at various international conferences, events and meetings. She is also the author of the award-winning book, Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads They Need.

Follow on Twitter – @KendraLeeKLA

Alen Mayer, AlenMajer.com

With over 20 years of experience in international sales and business development, Alen is recognized as a leading expert on B2B sales training. He has authored several books, including Selling Is Better Than Sex and Trigger Events or How to Find Your Next Customer.

Follow on Twitter – @mayeralen

Mac McIntosh, Business-to-Business Sales Lead Experts

Mac is a seasoned consultant and speaker who specializes in helping companies get more high-quality B2B sales leads.

Follow on Twitter – @B2B_Sales_Leads

Sean McPheat, MTD Sales Training Specialists

Sean is the founder and Managing Director of MTD Training, a U.K. company that offers sales training and management solutions for companies of all sizes. He is a popular speaker in the sales training circuit and the author of the best-selling book eselling®.

Follow on Twitter – @SeanMcPheat

Sharon Drew Morgan, SharonDrewMorgan.com

Sharon has worked for over 20 years as a thought leader in the fields of decision making and sales. In addition to her own blog, she also manages the New Sales Paradigm website and has authored the best-selling book Dirty Little Secrets.

Follow on Twitter – @sharondrew

Jeff Ogden, Find New Customers

Jeff is the president of Find New Customers, which focuses on “demand generation made simple.” He writes the popular blog Fearless Competitor and hosts the B2B marketing show Mad Marketing TV.

Follow on Twitter – @fearlesscomp

Lori Richardson, Score More Sales

Lori is a blogger, speaker, inside sales trainer and B2B sales detective for Score More Sales, a sales strategy organization that she founded in 2001. Her motto is, “Keep your focus, keep it simple, track your metrics, and make a 1% improvement every day.”

Follow on Twitter – @scoremoresales

Kelley Robertson. Fearless Selling

As president of The Robertson Training Group, Kelley works to help sales professionals master their conversations and win more business. He’s an accomplished keynote speaker and presenter, and has authored two books, including The Secrets of Power Selling.

Follow on Twitter – @FearlessSelling

Lee B. Salz, Sales Architects

Lee is the founder of Sales Architects, a company that specializes in helping companies hire and onboard top sales people.  He is a leading sales management strategist and author of the book Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager.

Follow on Twitter – @lsalz

Tibor Shanto, Renbor Sales Solutions

Tibor is an accomplished sales speaker and author of the award-winning sales book Shift!: Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers. You can read his frequent thoughts and musings at The Pipeline, the Renbor sales blog.

Follow on Twitter – @Renbor

David Steel, The Steel Method

An expert and motivational speaker in the areas of sales and social media, David manages the Steel on Sales blog and has written the popular book (now a free eBook) The Care and Feeding of Highly Aggressive Sales People.

Follow on Twitter – @dsteel

Elinor Stutz, SmoothSale

Elinor is an international speaker, author and CEO of SmoothSale, LLC, a sales training company based in California. Her site maintains a running blog of sales tips (as of January 10, it was at tip no. 653!), and speaks frequently to help others “fully thrive in business, sales or their next career move.”

Follow on Twitter – @smoothsale

Mike Weinberg, The New Sales Coach

Mike is a coach, consultant, and speaker with a focus on helping organizations generate new sales. He is currently writing a book on prospecting and new business development, due for release in fall 2012.

Follow on Twitter – @mike_weinberg

For more on sales management and business development, check out our Sales topic page.

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Sharon Drew Morgen, author of the new book entitled, Dirty Little Secrets: Why Sales Can't Sell; Customers Can't Buy; and What You Can Do About It.  You can listen to my interview with her by clicking on Interview with Sharon Drew. Sharon Drew's remarkable conclusion is that the solution sale is only a tiny part of the Decision Process and that the vast majority of the issues that the customer must deal … Read More

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1. The people or technology that are providing a work-around for the Identified Problem.
2. All of the rules that kept the status quo in place
3. All of the initiatives that are working around and maintaining the Identified Problem.
4. All of the people and departments that will be affected by the change that the new solution will bring.
5. The budget: Where will it come from; the accounting practices regarding how the project will be monetized and for how long; what has to be moved around.
6. Current vendor issues, including the relationships the buyers have had with vendors over time.
7. Wildcards: whatever other stakeholders, financial, technical or people issues that need to be managed.

How does one go about identifying the part of the iceberg below the waterline?  The answer is the Buying Facilitation™ conversation. The Buying Facilitation conversation is very different from a typical sales conversation.

Buying Facilitation Questions are not the typical BANT questions salespeople ask — about Budget, Access to Power, Needs and TimeFrame.  Instead, Facilitation Questions go to the heart of the customer’s system.  For instance, contrast these two approaches from a salesperson selling email software:

Traditional Sales

• What are your goals for your email project?
• Who will be involved in the decision?
• What is your budget?

Buying Facilitation

• How have your tried to address your email challenges in the past?  Why didn’t it work?  How will you know that it cannot be made to work?
• How will you know it is time to replace your current email software?
• How will your email software selection be deployed in such a way to eliminate chaos and risk of failure?

Sharon Drew describes this as a GPS approach.  The customer needs to go somewhere and chooses the destination.  You guide them there.

What are the benefits of this approach?

1. Dramatically shorter sales cycles — cut by 1/2 or more.
2. End of discounting.  Sharon Drew says “Money is never the issue.  Never, never, never.”
3. You become a trusted guide and member of the decision team.
4. Elimination of competition.

To learn purchase this book and learn about Sharon Drew Morgen, please visit Dirty Little Secrets and Sharon Drew Morgen.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Find New Customers.  We make lead generation simple.  With almost 7 out 10 companies saying a lack of quality sales leads is their biggest challenge, we help companies implement demand generation programs to find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.  He can be reached at (516) 495-9350 or jeff.ogden at findnewcustomers.com.

1. Planning is imperative.  Need a deep understanding of value, targets and personas. Too many CEOs expect instant results. Results come from careful planning and research. This takes time.
2. Data is critical. Brian Kardon, Chief Marketing Officer of Eloqua, said “In God We Trust. All others bring data.” This was borne out when e-mail marketing experts like Joel Book of ExactTarget, John Rizzi of e-Dialog and Ben Rothman of Acxiom all talked about reacting to what people do online and personalizing your communications.  This rifle-focus approach takes data.
3. A service mentality — the best companies help buyers do their jobs and improve their lives. Scott’s Miracle Grow shares specific personalized lawn tips. American Airlines shares interesting travel destinations. What are they not doing? They are not selling!

These luminaries included:

• Kevin Temple of Enterprise-Selling
• Trish Bertuzzi, the Bridge Group
• Sharon Drew Morgen, expert in Buying Facilitation
• Paul Dunay, Buzz Marketing for Technology
• Jon Miller, VP Marketing and Co-Founder, Marketo
• Brian Kardon, Chief Marketing Officer, Eloqua
• John Rizzi, Chief Executive Officer, e-Dialog
• Ben Rothfeld, Jedi Knight of email, Acxiom
• Joel Book,Principal, Marketing Research & Education Group, ExactTarget
• Eric Goldman, Managing Partner of Gossamar, Inbound Marketing Expert
• Blake Cahill, SVP, Marketing at Visible Technologies
• Craig Rosenberg, The Funnelholic

We’d like to thank each and every one of those men and women for sharing their expertise with us.  Much appreciated!

Companies today need a Chief Content Officer.

Join us every Thursday at 8pm ET/5pm PT for Twitter chat about b2b demand generation. Just go to http://tweetchat.com/ and enter hashtag #b2bchat.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple.” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the e-book, Prospect Driven Marketing (and he’s about to start on his third white paper) and holds a BBA in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to drive more sales leads by improving the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.

In this interview she shares the real reasons why buyers don’t make the expected buying decisions, and how sales people can help potential buyers make good buying decisions much faster than as is typical.

I was struck by Sharon Drew’s book and her ideas.  Having been a VP of Marketing shopping for software, I was stunned by sellers looking only from their solution placement point of view.  All of their questions pertained to our business “needs” and their competitors, with no discussion whatsoever on our internal issues and challenges.

We had a Board of Directors divisions and internal questions and challenges (what Sharon Drew calls “behind the scenes” stuff) , yet not one of them picked up on this.  And these were experienced sellers in well-known software firms.

We wish to thank Sharon Drew for taking the time to share her remarkable insights with our readers.

What was the background for writing Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it?

I have been writing books on Buying Facilitation(R) since my first book came out in 1992 (Sales on the Line). In Dirty Little Secrets, I finally explain it in simple terms that make it easy to understand: sales only handles needs assessment and solution placement; buyers need to manage behind-the-scenes ‘stuff’ privately, and don’t always know the route they must take til they get there. Sellers can help if they learn a few new skills.

You expressly state in the book that this isn’t a sales manual. Why not?

Buying Facilitation(R) is a neutral navigation, decision facilitation model that leads buyers through their behind-the-scenes decision issues (such as relationships and company/family politics, feelings, rules, vendor or partner issues) that need to be addressed to get buy-in to make a decision. It’s systems based, and the goal is to help manage the private issues buyers go through internally that sales folks and outsiders cannot be privy to.

Sales manages the needs assessment/solution placement end of the buying decision. It has no capacity to help manage the behind-the-scenes buy-in issues. But because buyers have to do this anyway, sellers are left out and have no influence over the process.

That’s where buyers go when they say “I’ll call you back.” and then disappear. And this is why only 7% of sales close. Imagine! Sales has a 93% failure rate, and we build this in to our projects because this figure is endemic in the assumption of the sales model.

You make the provocative opening statement that both sellers and buyers are not very smart. What do you mean by that?

It’s a term the industry uses every moment: “Buyers are stupid.” I hear this every day. (Editor’s note — I’ve expressly heard CEOs say ‘Prospects are stupid.’) Sales folks assume that because THEY can see ‘the problem’ and THEY have the solution and the buyer does not do ‘what they are supposed to do’ that the only conclusion is that they are stupid.

The book shows what the seller is missing and how to address it with a different took kit. So I’m kinda throwing it back in their face: You say the buyer is stupid, but I’m saying you’re both stupid because buyers actually DON’T know how to go through the buying decision process because of all of the variables, and sellers DON’T know how to help them navigate through their decision issues because sales doesn’t handle that end of the buying process.

You state that the current sales model is incomplete. What is missing from the current sales model. How can it be made more effective?

Because the sales model is based on needs assessment/solution placement, I’ve added a decision facilitation model to the front end – an additional skill set – called Buying Facilitation(R) that helps buyers navigate through their off-line, behind-the-scenes decision issues that they must handle before they can make any decisions about a purchase. That makes it a one/two punch: first help buyers navigate through all of their decision issues and pull together a Buying Decision Team, and THEN sell.

Buyers have to do this anyway, and the time it takes them to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. They will do this with you, or without you. So you might as well add a new skill set and do it with them.

Why must sales techniques and ideas change?

Because sales only manages a very, very small percent of what a buyer needs to make a decision. And, the success rate of sales, across the board, averages 7% success. there is no other field that allows for a 93% failure rate. Imagine a doctor or even a baseball player, or an airline, with a 93% failure rate.

Love that point that sales fails most of the time.  How do buying decisions really get made?

First, Sales treats an Identified Problem as if it were an isolated event. It’s not: it’s part of a system that maintains it daily.

Buying Decisions get made only when the entire system lines up behind change – it’s really a change management situation. Buying Decisions get made when the people, policies, rules, relationships (the system), buy-in to change, and agree to do something different. This happens only when the ‘system’ recognizes it will remain in balance once something new enters. This is why the sales model has such a low success rate: sales pushes solution (i.e. ‘change’) into an existing system that fights back if it thinks it will be unbalanced.

How can sellers help buyers in their purchasing process and with decision-making to make better choices?

Buying Facilitation(R) is a decision facilitation model that leads buyers through all of the internal, off-line, behind-the-scenes decision issues that they must go through privately before getting buy-in to bring in a new solution. It’s based on systems thinking,and employs a form of question that I developed called a Facilitative Question that actually teaches folks how to consider and manage change – using their own values and criteria. These questions are used in a specific sequence of how decisions get made (the book explains each of the decision sequences and what happens in each).

An example of a Facilitative Question: How would you and your decision team know when it was time to bring in an additional resource for those times the ones you are using are insufficient?

Good point that Facilitative Question did pertain to a product or specific placement problem.  In the end, how can sellers and buyers help one another to become smarter?

Using Buying Facilitation(R), the seller becomes the servant leader to the buyer, helping them navigate their decision issues well before the act of sales even begins. The buyer becomes the neutral navigator; sellers help Buying Facilitator’s listen better, serve better, and think in systems. When sellers use BF, buyers can buy much quicker and more efficiently and include all of the right people with the right decisions. So sellers are helping buyers close the right business, with more prospects, and place their product into the most appropriate client situations. It becomes win-win.

Now that your ground-breaking book is out, what’s next for Sharon Drew Morgen?

I have been teaching this material since my first program in 1989. My goal is to start an institute and teach the material to coaches, teachers, doctors and other professionals, negotiators, etc. It’s a wonderful collaborative communication tool that has a universal application.

Join us every Thursday at 8pm ET/5pm PT for Twitter chat about b2b demand generation. Just go to http://tweetchat.com/ and enter hashtag #b2bchat.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple.” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing.  He’s been retained to pen a new white paper and holds a BBA in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.