Budgets are tight in this new pandemic economy. If you’re in charge of training a sales team, you know how hard it is to justify any new investment in your program these days.

You can’t do your job if you don’t know what’s going on.  So, you gather your team for a mandatory staff meeting.  Maybe they grumble and complain about how this impedes their autonomy, or maybe they gleefully prepare dog-and-pony slides in which they play the hero. Either way, you end up sitting through a meeting where each of your team members answers the unasked question of "how’s it going" in his or her own way, and you’re left to decode what’s really happening, what problems they’re glossing over, and what results you can actually expect next week, next month, and next quarter. 

New research with buyers reveals a behavioral blueprint for sellers. Spoiler alert: buyers respond favorably to leadership behaviors, and not so much to outdated sales-y behaviors. Buyers want leadership, and so do sellers. That's why Sales Managers have to manage sales using sales enablement strategies AND lead people using techniques for sales ennoblement.

In today’s COVID-19 economy, EVERY sales position counts! Sales managers are being asked to generate more with less, so you simply cannot afford to make a hiring mistake. The good news is there has never been a deeper pool of talented salespeople to choose from in the past 10 years. The bad news is there have never been more toxic salespeople on the market. Is your hiring process geared for the unique challenges of hiring the right salespeople?  

With work from home and social distancing, email prospecting has become more important than ever and how you write your emails has changed significantly. Remember the rule to put the call to action right at the front? Not any longer. How about the rule to forget what your second-grade teacher taught you? Now you have to remember it!  

As a Sales Manager, your role is to manage sales AND lead people. This handy reminder includes simple models for building 2-way trust, actively listening, giving quality feedback, and coaching -- the essential ingredients for enablement and ennoblement that you'll need to lead.   Click below to download this Infographic.

Sales training and enablement is tougher than ever before. Whether your sales force is across the street or across the country, you’re working overtime to support your team.  

Forget Photoshop and pricey stock photography—you already have everything you need to create professional looking image-centric slides in PowerPoint.

US companies spent 15 billion on sales training in 2018 according to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report. For companies who didn’t focus on management training to make that training stick, they likely lost up to 13.5 billion of that investment to the Forgetting Curve- where up to 90% of new information is lost within a week of their training ending.

New clients are the lifeblood of every business.  With Covid 19 many businesses are reporting their sales pipelines are getting week.  Deals are stalling, pushing out and if you sell to the airlines, or hotels, cancelling.  It is critically important to discover new ways to dramatically increase the number of conversations your sellers / channel is having with prospects. More at bats is one of the more effective ways to de-risk your pipeline and increase for forecasting accuracy. For many leaders this KPI will mean life or death to their business over the next 6 months.

Hiring right has always been important, especially for sales roles, which are like the Olympic athletes of business or corporate astronauts (they need to have "the right stuff"). Right now, this is even more true than it usually is, and even more important that your new sales hires can sell (possibly remotely, for a while) and deliver the results you need.

Looking for a way to accelerate sales results, but can’t get buy-in for new tech? Sales readiness technology helps you directly impact the bottom line by targeting activities that move the needle: training, onboarding, coaching, and in-field productivity.

There are a thousand programs out there that teach you "How-To-Sell"--  most of which are really good. What they miss is how to handle the natural adversities and occupational hazards of the sales profession. Sales is one of the few roles where the better you are, the harder it may be to keep your job.  

Measuring the impact of learning and readiness initiatives on revenue is the billion dollar question. In today’s uncertain environment, the answer is even more important. Rapidly changing markets, disrupted supply chains, and increasingly knowledgeable customers mean that companies must upskill employees to compete. But the ability to optimize learning—and maximize productivity—takes deep insight into how employees think, learn, and perform, insight which many companies lack. Today, there’s a new breed of platform that combines learning, communication, and collaboration tools with analytics for a holistic view of learning and development’s impact on results. Workforce readiness technology allows organizations to move beyond assessments and scores to understand how to target activities that move the needle.

In this interactive webcast, we'll explore specific referral acquisition strategies.  The key to warm referrals is to give and then to get. All too often referrals are lost because one party is looking to get and forgets to give. 

There are no best-sellers written about middle performers who stayed in their lane. But there are libraries written about the well-loved top performers. And bottom performers get plenty of attention, in part because sales managers would rather drag them along than replace them.  Here is why the next chapter in your company’s history should focus moving the middle.

Managing remote workers has always been challenging, particularly with sales teams where everything is measured on productivity and results. With more employees working from home than ever, sales managers must learn to manage a distributed workforce from a distance. For those organizations new to the world of a remote workforce, managing from a distance has presented unforeseen challenges.  So how do we know, then, if our sales team is cut-out for remote work? How do you gauge how well your team will adapt? We don’t have all of the answers today, but we can take a look at what successes and challenges remote sales teams have experienced, what new challenges organizations are seeing and how they are addressing them, and how sales managers can support, engage, motivate, and assess their newly remote workforce. We can use this information to help our salespeople adjust and thrive in a remote environment. 

For decades, room gifts or a gift bag at check-in were a staple of corporate events. Elegantly presented, perhaps with a note from the CEO or other executive, these tokens of appreciation may have been politely commented about among program participants over breakfast or lunch the next day. Many companies are turning things up a notch. At today’s annual sales meetings or other offsite occasion, gifting experiences are becoming an event within the event — a high-energy affair in which colleagues "shop" together for styles that tailor to their specific needs and wants with a single brand experience.

Make winning sales presentations. Learn the tricks the pros use to get audience agreement and sell a product, solution or idea. Use the latest behavioral psychology and neuromarketing techniques. Use what you learn during class to make a clear, compelling presentation that gets buy-in and improves your success rate. It’s easy—when you know how to do it.

The United States is in a crisis. The Corona pandemic now combined with protests in our streets are shaping what will become the new normal for organizations. Many of our first responders and front-line employees have friends and family members who have been directly impacted by these events.

As sales people, we are always looking for our next prospect. We’re picking up the phone and making calls to brand new people, we’re reaching out to strangers on LinkedIn, and we’re asking for introductions and referrals from our clients and networking partners. While all this activities are important, we’re ignoring the people that are already in our network who we probably should be nurturing.

Just like any good work person knows the tools of their trade, its vitally important as trainers and coaches we understand which behavioral assessment tool best fits the required need.

Has your sales team gone from in-person to virtual selling overnight? Selling while physically distancing is a new approach for many teams. It means big changes for your field sales reps and for sales managers.

Anecdotally, we all know it. Some have experienced it firsthand. Academic and corporate research supports it. Yes, sales coaching can make a significant improvement in the performance of your sales force.