ASK MORE, TELL LESS Many of the skills of a great coach are equally effective for a great leader - emotional intelligence, able to provide feedback, capable of creating strong working relationships, comfortable challenging the thinking of another, willing to ‘speak the truth’ when it’s most important, and the list goes on. Of course the question is which coaching skills might a leader adopt to get the best results in these all-important human interactions. Click below to download this White Paper.

How does being a strong leader equal a boost in sales? What sets you apart as a sales manager? Or maybe you’ve made a costly hiring mistake, and aren’t sure how that happened!? To discover more about your management strengths and how to have a rock star sales team, check out SalesFuel’s free white paper: "The Best Sales Manager I Ever Had."

High-quality coaching requires not only effort and collaboration between sales managers, reps, and sales enablement professionals, but also agreement on coaching effectiveness and best practices. Without agreement, it’s hard to make improvements and drive increased sales success. To find out how these stakeholders feel about coaching effectiveness, we surveyed nearly 300 sales reps, managers, and sales enablement professionals, asking them fundamental questions about their perceptions and preferences. While we found alignment in some areas, reps, managers, and sales enablement leaders differed in their opinions about coaching quality, coaching needs, and even the impact of coaching on results. Left unchecked, differences between key stakeholders on coaching quality and value can pose a significant risk to revenue goals, and even threaten the relationship between reps and managers. Click below to download and learn what the data showed, what it means, and how you can use this information to improve coaching efforts at your organization.

This preview chapter will allow you a peek into this guide to the iterative organization, the only kind of organization that can learn and adapt fast enough to keep up in today’s world. For anyone running a team of managers, or advising someone who does, it describes the fundamental behaviors that create iteration, explains how to implement them, and includes videos and online assessment to get the process started. Iterate defines what management really is and helps readers create a fast, flexible, focused management team that does it well. Ed Muzio, award-winning author, CEO, and "one of the planet’s clearest thinkers on management practice," provides a research-based blueprint for a management team that will take the next best step for the organization in any situation. This book enables senior leadership, front line and middle management, and human resource executives to equip their teams with both knowledge and practical skills so that they not only understand their own purpose but also perform that purpose well amidst ever-changing conditions. Iterate will help readers create measurable business results on any management team, of any size, in any industry where complex work and frequent change are the norm. Click below to download this preview.

The following excerpt is from "A Practical Guide to Getting Sales Teams to Prospect," by Wendy Weiss, The Queen of Cold Calling™ In The Feeling Good Handbook, Dr. Burns lists "Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking" that occur when people are depressed. My years of training and coaching sales professionals have made it clear that people who are not depressed can fall into these twisted ways of thinking, too — and many, many sales professionals, unfortunately, employ "twisted thinking" when it comes to prospecting. Click below to download this excerpt and for the link to download the complete eBook

Branded currency plays a critical role in a merchant’s marketing mix and customer retention strategy. Gift cards, points, loyalty, rewards and promotional value all help merchants expand their market share, reach new corporate customers and retain those customers. As branded currency continues to evolve and promotional and loyalty programs grow more complex, merchants are increasingly teaming up with specialized prepaid card companies to turbocharge their B2B gift card sales. From basic fulfillment to lead management and fraud prevention, this guide is designed to walk merchants through the considerations of setting up and launching a successful B2B gift card program.

How to use video in your sales enablement practice to help your reps ramp up more quickly, sell more efficiently, and share best practices more easily. Click below to download this Whitepaper.

Across the nation, sales managers are struggling. They struggle to keep up with deadlines, with reporting, with setting and hitting goals, and with managing and motivating their sales teams. SalesFuel hears these sentiments at every conference, at every training session, and every day from our own clients. There is not enough time. And most definitely, there is no time for sales coaching. The developers and researchers at SalesFuel were tired of hearing sales managers say, "Oh, I’m swamped with bazillions of things to do. I don’t have time to sit down and have hour-long conversations with each sales rep every week." So, they created a tool specifically to address this no-time epidemic and to disrupt the way we think about managing sales forces forever. It is time for a sea change in sales management. And, it’s time for adaptive sales coaching.

We have identified five potential areas of failure in sales process/sales methodology implementation in the midst of data-driven sales transformation.  These areas are broad and multifaceted, but we have explained them within the context of the business issue, and their effects on process implementation, as well as the way that shifting process implementations can affect business issues.

Soft skills play a key role in your sales reps' ability to successfully turn a prospect into a client. This eBook discusses how your sales team can put themselves in their prospects' shoes emotionally, overcome any objection thrown at them and close the sale. Click below to download this eBook.

The book represents an ingenious guide on how to achieve peak performance in sales, your career, and life. It is written by 27 exceptional entrepreneurs and sales leaders. If finding excellence in sales were like climbing to the top of a mountain, we offer you here 673 years of climbing to the top of the sales mountain. You can hike your way up to the summit in 52 pages. The book has two main parts: "The Process" chapter represents the most important hard-earned lessons, on the following topics: Sales Development, Negotiation/Closing, and Customer Success. "The Career" chapter is profound in its simplicity. "The Career" chapter tells you about our heroes’ North Star or what key ingredients brought success, in their long and fruitful careers. This book is a treasure trove. We hope you find the guidance you are searching for and some new valuable insights as you browse through these pages.

A New Look at Sales Onboarding Sales organizations onboard new employees differently now than they did just five years ago. This transition to modern learning practices reflects exciting new opportunities for today’s professionals in Sales Enablement and Training as well as Learning and Development to transform onboarding into an organizational capability that drives growth. We’ve helped over a hundred organizations build out successful modern onboarding programs and gained perspective on themes that consistently emerge among top performers. We’ll illustrate these throughout this guide while giving you tactical recommendations for driving better and faster onboarding today Click below to download this White paper.

Everyone seems to recognize that sales managers should be coaching. But how? What exactly should they do to maximize their limited and valuable time to get the results they need? In this eBook on Sales Coaching Excellence, Mike Kunkle of Transforming Sales result explains how to maximize results from coaching: Determine where to spend your limited coaching time Use the ROAM model to analyze gaps and know what to coach Determine how to close the gaps (the best solution) Use a behavioral model for field training that gets results Use a behavioral model for sales coaching that gets results Get into a regular cadence of coaching   Download Transforming Sales Results' eBook, "Sales Coaching Excellence" today and get started on your journey to a best-in-class sales force.

Are you struggling to improve adoption of your sales methodology or deliver outcomes with your sales performance improvement initiatives? Do you want to guide behavior changes in your sales force? Or do you simply want to improve the outcomes and ROI for your sales training? Click below to download your copy of Transforming Sales Results' latest eBook, "The Sales Learning System with the 5 Stages of Sales Mastery & Behavior Change: How to Get Adoption and Deliver Outcomes with your Sales Performance Improvement Initiatives."

Map our your unique sales process in minutes. A well-designed sales process allows the replication of best practices, introduces a shared sales language, discipline, and minimizes risks for both buyer and seller. It's a powerful concept. But, where to begin? Download this interactive Excel tool to: Define your ideal customer profile. Identify which prospects to pursue (and which not to). Capture knowledge and best practices from your team. Outline qualifying criteria, milestones and steps that build value. Sequence steps and milestones to ensure pipeline momentum. In short: plug in your information and get some inspiration from this tool - finish with a killer sales process to increase win-rates and deal sizes!

Sales is in an effectiveness crisis, with 47% of sales professionals failing (according to CSO Insights studies). It's easy to blame outside factors. But the truth is, if we're going to turn sales performance around, we have to take a good, hard look at sales process.  To achieve consistent results, your sales team needs an actionable and measurable sales process consisting of your best practices. It needs to be repeatable and easy to follow. Download this white paper to: Learn why mapping out a formalized sales process is worth the effort. Get practical guidance on how to do it successfully. Learn how technology makes effective execution achievable for any sales organization. See inside an organization that increased their profit margin by 50% by better executing their sales strategy.

Why Your ROI Story Is Stronger Than You Think If you’re in charge of training a sales team, you know how hard it is to ensure they properly receive and retain training while in the field. But since organizations often treat sales training as an unavoidable cost of doing business, you may find it even harder to justify investing in technology that would improve your learning program. Sales, sales enablement, and sales training leaders often don’t realize how much investing in sales training technology contributes to a stronger ROI. That’s because most companies haven’t instituted best practices for identifying the business impact of better sales learning. Most limit their tracking to activity metrics like usage and adoption, or they capture anecdotes about how a recent training contributed to closing a specific deal. Quantifying the full return on your sales training investments helps you more effectively champion your initiatives and win more resources. That way, you can improve your team’s performance and create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Here are four sources of ROI you’re already delivering that you should capture to demonstrate how sales training contributes to the bottom line of your organization. Click below to download this eBook.

Business leaders look for predictability. They seek insight from mounds of data to get just a glimpse of the future. They demand their sales and marketing executives put the business on the right path to meeting or exceeding sales and margin goals. Sales executives create detailed business plans to identify new opportunities and retain existing customers.  They train sales reps and channel partners on product benefits and teach them to overcome objections. They develop compensation plans aligned with corporate goals to encourage growth. Marketing leaders identify competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They define buyer personas and construct profiles to ensure the right messages reach the right prospects. They carefully map out every step of the buyer’s journey to know when and how to influence behaviors. All this to increase the likelihood of success, to gain more certainty and predictability. Shouldn’t your sales incentive program work this hard to engage your participants? Knowing how and when to nudge your participants could mean the difference between blowing past your goals and scrambling to explain a disastrous failure. This eBook maps the sales incentive journey which participants embark upon when engaging with a program. We’ve developed it from insights gained during almost 50 years of observing and influencing participants, and it can help put your program on the road to predictable success. Click below to download this eBook.​

Competing in the world of selling today means understanding the changing world of your buyers and adjusting your sales approach accordingly. The biggest change for sellers is that the game has gotten harder, and sellers need to execute at a higher level than ever before to compete. Committing to this level of change is the difference between college sports and pro. The players are bigger. The game is faster. The conditions are more challenging.

In today’s sales environment—where product and service solutions and customer relationships are growing more complex—there is an increasing need to continually raise the skill level of salespeople. Managers play a critical role in making sure those skills are learned and used. Statistics speak loudly that manager support/coaching is the number one action that can amplify organizational sales performance: Organizations can gain a 29% increase in top-line salesforce performance due to the skills of sales managers, independent of the skills of their salespeople. Manager coaching has a great impact on performance over and above the impact of training alone. In our study, while just training salespeople resulted in a 43% improvement in performance, when manager coaching was added, overall performance improved 67%, a 24% improvement over training alone. Unfortunately, sales manager coaching is at an all-time low, resulting in as much as 85% of sales skills never being used to drive performance. Why aren’t sales managers dialing up the decibels?  

Team selling today is no longer required just for blockbuster business-to-business sales pitches. Whether you are in consulting, investment banking, or technology or are a financial advisor, home remodeler, or lawyer, pivotal meetings with customers and prospects now often involve more people — on both sides of the table. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, "…the number of people involved in B2B solutions purchases has climbed from an average of 5.4 two years ago to 6.8 today."

Think about the best manager you ever had. We are assuming, of course, that you’ve had at least one good manager in your lifetime. C’mon, there’s got to be at least one. Think back to all the teams you’ve been on. This person could’ve been your boss at that horrible minimum-wage high school gig that you only showed up for because this person made it worthwhile. Maybe you had a strong leader during your college part-time work. Or, like many in today’s workforce, your first full-time, professional manager played a major part in developing you during your formative years into the kind of executive you are today.

Coaching and leadership are about people. People are unique and to compound the situation they behave differently under varied circumstances. So is it not an overstatement to suggest that there is a framework that can be applied to achieving greater success with people and through them? I will answer with my standard mini-exercise. Assume you are a recruiter. You are asked to identify a Field Commander for a hot war zone as well as a Guidance Counsellor for an all-girls high school. Did your mind automatically paint different pictures as to who will fill the roles? Intuitively, you recognize the differences but what are the factors that brought you to that conclusion? Also, what if the roles were not so far apart, could you intuitively distinguish among candidates? That is role and the value of a reliable framework. For decades, as a member of member of the Extended DISC™ network, I have been using an approach that I call DISCerning Communication to drive healthy interpersonal relations among a cross-section of groups. When people experience others communicating with them in a manner that is comfortable for them the opportunities for positive cooperation increases exponentially. Someone referred to it as communicating from inside the head of the other person. Course after course, webinar after webinar, article after article I receive encouragement to present DISCerning Communication principles in a concise publication to a wider audience. This is your invitation to join the mission and make a positive difference in how we communicate and relate to others.

Most sales managers I know have a love/hate relationship with the prima donnas on their sales teams. They love the star player’s passion and hard work; they hate the self-centered behaviors that demoralize or discourage the rest of the team. That leaves sales managers with a dilemma: If they come down hard on a prima donna, that salesperson may just take his/her talents elsewhere. Not good. But a sales manager can’t afford to ignore the situation, either, because prima donnas are often engaged in behaviors detrimental to the team. A simple truth in sales management is that what you don’t confront, you condone. What can you do then?