Wrapping up World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies

So I just finished reviewing the second round of proofs for World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies by Brian Lambert, Tim Ohai, and Eric Kerkhoff (who just stopped by my office to say hi) and sent what should be the last batch of corrections to the typesetter. The book is scheduled to upload to the printer this Friday. The week in which a book goes to the printer is always such a flurry of activity: You have to scan the last set of proofs to ensure no errors crept in during the rounds of proof corrections, you have to pester the typesetter to correct the tiny details that few will notice, you have to get the print request together for the production manager and the printer, and you have to work with the cover designer to get the cover copy and design just right. Each of these tasks has its own set of steps, so the last week always seems like a bunch of picking and scratching to uncover hidden flaws and get the details right. And you can nitpick all you like, but sometimes that goofy typo still gets by you; it gets by you until you have the printed book in your hand in all its new and shiny glory and then it leaps out to mock you.

Every book involves a lot of people and work to get right, but with a project like World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies, that's especially true. This book represents the culmination of a lot of research, including literature review, expert input, surveys with more than 2,000 people in the sales profession, and successive model iterations to continually refine the final product. And what is the final product? The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model, which looks at the sales profession as a system, enabling organizations to stop wasting money on ad hoc, just-in-time sales training that doesn't work and to start building a bedrock salesforce that can expand, adapt, and deliver results for their organizations.

The book will debut at ASTD 2009 International Conference & Exposition and is available for pre-purchase at the ASTD Store. You can learn more about the study and the book from Brian Lambert, ASTD's director of Sales Training Drivers, who is also the man I pestered and pestered and pestered for answers to what seemed at times like thousands of queries (I am sure he loves me). But they were all answered in the end, and, with any luck, I also caught that nasty little typo that always seems to be running around here and fixed it...