SALES TRAINING

Empowering Performance: A Sales Manager’s Guide to Success

 Being the best sales manager is not selling the most. It is creating a sales force that produces results. Everyday, sales managers are called to lead their teams. Their success depends on their ability to successfully get others to follow them.

This program is intended for anyone in a sales management position, whether you are new to sales management position or you are looking to fine-tune current management skills. This program teaches sales managers how to create and drive a sales force to achieve remarkable results. Through interaction and skill practice participants will learn how to hire, retain, motivate, develop, and lead a team to achieve the results needed.

 What You Will Do:

Gain a clear understanding of the primary responsibilities to increase sales performance

Learn how to find, recruit, and hire top sales people

Identify the most effective ways to coach and develop a sales team

Analyze the best ways to coach and develop a sales team

Determine ways to motivate a sales force to produce remarkable results

Set up systems for measuring performance, setting goals, and tracking progress

A sales manager’s success depends upon his team’s success. Becoming an effective sales manager takes determination, patience, drive, and an undying will to help other succeed. As a sales manager, you will achieve success through effective leadership.

 Program Objectives

A major goal of this program is to provide sales managers with the skills necessary to effectively lead a sales team and to identify the key characteristics that will lead to success.

The program is divided into five modules, each with specific learning objectives.

1. Learning to Lead Your Sales Team

•  Recognize qualities of successful sales people
• Define your role as a sales manager
• Understand the qualities of top sales managers
• Create a common vision for your sales team
• Execute your plans to accomplish goals

2. Building Your Sales Team

•  Identify your hiring needs
• Assess your company’s reputation
• Discuss where to recruit sales people
• Determine how to recruit
• Develop a system to manage your leads

3. Developing Essential Sales Management Skills

• Facilitate effective sales meetings
• Understand how your employees learn best
• Define your responsibilities as a coach
• Recognize challenges coaches face
• Increase performance through individual development plans

4. Achieving Results as a Sales Manager

• Understand the three basic communication styles
• Deliver two types of feedback
• Identify guidelines for delivering effective feedback
• Recognize the importance of positive and constructive feedback

5. Leading Your Sales Team with Momentum

•  Develop S.M.A.R.T. goals
• Determine what motivates your employees
• Analyze differences between logical and emotional benefits
• Discuss techniques that motivate
• Identify frustrations as a sales manager
• Accept responsibility for your development

Mastering the Sales Process

You have probably heard the comment: "This product sells itself!" While there are definitely fantastic products of every kind out there, we believe that in reality Products Don’t Sell, People Do!

 A quality product and product training are essential to your success but only in part. Strategic and tactical sales techniques are the vital tools that give you the edge in your market. This program is specifically geared to teach these techniques in a highly interactive and experiential environment - a methodology proven to work.

 From an instructional standpoint, our programs include presentation, practice and application methods. We provide the structure; you provide the content. We provide proven methodologies for producing sales results. We work with you to tailor the practice and application sections to your products and markets so you can easily turn classroom learning into workplace results. You determine the level of customizing necessary for your needs and expectations.

Program Objective

Our primary objective is to equip you with real and practical skills to make your career more productive and more rewarding. Our programs become your programs. We provide sales expertise; you enrich the program with your specific product and market expertise.

 Program graduates are able to:

Understand characteristics of top sales people

Know the difference between a peddler and a partner

Learn to ask questions that lead you to YES!

Write proposals that lead to close sales.

Set specific, achievable, trackable, sales goals that impact both personal and professional success.

Relate long-term goals and objectives to short-term business planning

Build strong partnerships with clients to create customers rather than just close sales

Profile client needs and match benefits specifically to meet those needs

Develop effective presentations that address client concerns rather than conduct "product dumps"

Handle objections with ease and use them as opportunities to close the sale

Service and maintain client relationships to generate repeat business and referrals

 The program is divided into seven modules, each with specific learning objectives.

 1. Partnering

• Distinguish between peddler and partnership approaches
• Define benefits for partnering
• Apply skills and tools to facilitate long-term partnerships
• Provide value over and above product.
• See the sales process from the customer’s point of view.
• Identify four personality styles and how to work best with each.
• Identify five buyer roles.
• Create rapport with customers through "mirroring" techniques

2. Value Profiling

• Understand why customers buy and what customers value.
• Develop questions for your value profile to address the needs and values of customers.
• Apply the value profile to match your own products and services to customer-defined value.
• Develop and "up-front close" to ensure that both your time and your customer’s time is well spent.
• Focus your presentation to say, "Here’s what you said you wanted."

3. Developing Benefits

• Know the difference between facts, features, benefits, and "partners benefits".
• Tailor benefits to specific customers.
• Identify benefits for your own products or services.
• Use a formula for developing and presenting benefits.
• Present a product in terms of benefits that answer the buyer question, "What’s in it for me?"

4. Presenting Solutions

• Construct partnership presentations that involve your customers.
• Identify and evaluate the elements of an effective presentation.
• Plan for the logistics of a presentation.
• Conduct a presentation with appropriate benefit statements to meet the prospect’s needs.
• Understand obtaining and using proofs and other materials to back up your presentation.
• Design and practice the presentation using literature, visual aids, and support material.
• Make a confident and persuasive presentation that will close the sale.

5. Handling Objections

• Recognizing objections by type.
• Determine which objections are productive to answer and which are not.
• Form appropriate responses to objections using a four-step procedure.
• Handle objections positively.
• Be confident in handling objections.
• Use objections to move the sale along.

6. Closing

• Understand what closing is and what it is not.
• Gauge how well you have carried out the whole process by your customer's readiness to close.
• Recognize when the customer is ready to make a decision.
• Use trial closes to define closing opportunities.
• Develop closing objectives that meet both the needs of your customer and your need to make the sale.
• Develop a variety of approaches that facilitate customer decisions.

7. Putting It All Together

• Apply the core skills that you have been learning throughout the program.
• Practice your own Action Plan for your CSO through role playing.
• Act as a key decision-maker for one of your task force member’s role-play.
• Work in a team to aid, observe, and critique

Building a Strong Foundation for Today’s Sales Professionals

 Results speak louder than words.

Consider this:

 People don't work harder and smarter because the company will benefit. People take steps in new and challenging directions because they themselves will benefit. We address this reality by creating a bridge between personal and professional goal achievement. In order for this to happen, the program must address the participant’s question, "What's in it for me?" We take great care to answer that question for all salespeople. When salespeople motivate themselves, everyone benefits. Our unique approach to integrated skills training is the result of years of research. This research isolated certain critical "core skills" as a basis of all achievement.

 Program Objective

To help sales professionals and sales managers increase productivity and improve interactions through specific goal-setting, time leveraging, communication, negotiation, teamwork, and leadership skills.

 Program graduates are able to:

Set complete and measurable goals.

Develop strategic plans for both sales and personal goals.

Leverage time in accordance with those goals.

Communicate to persuade.

Use leadership skills and team effort to bring goals to fruition.

Achieve higher quality, optimum performance, and consistent results.

Start mastering the "Core Skills"...

1. Goal-Setting and Planning

• Identify the difference between dreams and well-stated goals.
• Strategically plan and tactically execute goal processes.
• Develop a sales strategy based on where you are and where you want to be.
• Create specific goals, stating them in measurable, action-oriented terms.
• Develop a sales funnel to track goals, identify areas for improvement, determine daily activities and produce results.
• State specific goals for individual customers.
• Identify personal motivation for your own goal achievement.

2. Leveraging Time

• Identify time wasters and deal with them.
• Allocate time for your strategic goals.
• Focus time toward goal achievement.
• Plan activities based on peak productivity periods.
• Prioritize your customers using the Account Gradation System.
• Apply Account Gradation to increase productivity, using business planning and account clustering.

3. Communication

• Identify the goals of communication.
• Identify the difference between active and passive listening.
• Utilize active listening to more effectively understand buyer needs.
• Use a variety of questioning techniques to uncover, clarify, and understand buyer needs, wants, and goals.
• Control the direction of communication with questions.
• Understand others and have them understand you.

4. Negotiation

• Describe how negotiation impacts sales results.
• Describe and demonstrate the link between negotiation and communication, goal-setting, time management, teamwork, and the sales process.
• Enhance negotiation results by using core skills.
• Prepare the three-tiered goal analysis for negotiable issues.
• Develop negotiation strategies based on opportunity and buying behavior.
• Identify and apply bargaining techniques.

5. Teamwork

• Identify how teamwork relates to other sales skills.
• Integrate the core skills into effective sales team operations.
• Identify the key characteristics of successful sales teams.
• Identify which individuals and functions are potentially part of your sales teams for different selling situations.
• Identify sources of resistance and strategies ways to strengthen key relationships to improve teamwork.
• Describe the characteristics of an effective team leader.