Practical Sales Management

Practical Sales Management Training Program Overview

The practical sales management training program teaches sales leaders and frontline managers to approach leading their sales teams from a different angle. This approach focuses on building three key skills:

• Managing people differently: Managers learn to assess and learn about the individuals on their team to map out a coaching approach that connects to each individual, maximizes individual results, and drives higher team engagement.
• Increasing salesperson accountability: Managers learn to hold reps accountable by focusing on dissecting sales realities, determining key metrics, designing accountability changes, and drilling down to drive change at the individual performance level.
• Strengthening the sales culture: Leaders work to clearly define the realities of their current sales culture and be visionary about what they would like that culture to be in 12 months. As part of this focus, participants create detailed one-page plans that outline the action required to achieve the desired culture.

Practical Sales Management Program Learning Goals

Each module of the practical sales management training program seeks to build different skills that collectively work to drive improved performance, we outline these skills in the sections below.

Managing People Differently

The managing people differently module changes the way sales leaders approach coaching conversations and developing performance improvement paths.

In this module, sales managers learn how to:

• Assess their leadership style
• Broaden their thinking around the many facets that make up an individual team member
• Deepen their understanding of each direct report and what motivates them
• Developing an individualized management approach for each member of the team
• Validate the effectiveness of each individual's plan to ensure ongoing coaching success

The graphic below describes this process.

Increasing Sales Person Accountability

The increasing sales person accountability module teaches sales managers to take a critical look into the realities of their sales team's performance at the organizational and individual level, determine key metrics, and build a plan to hold the team accountable for making those changes.

Specifically, sales managers learn how to:

• Build awareness of sales realities through the use of assessment tools
• Define key metrics
• Reflect on their current accountability system and the changes needed based on identified gaps
• Define a clear focus and propose action plans for each individual on the team

Strengthening the Sales Culture

This module helps sales leadership define the desired future state of their sales organization and visualize where they want their sales culture to be 12 months on. A key part of this exercise is creating a one-page outline of the actions required to achieve the desired results.

The outline follows the format in the image below:

This process for developing this one-page outline includes:

• Developing a heightened awareness of the current sales culture, and the role sales leaders play in achieving the desired culture
• Defining the focus, activities, and pipeline required to achieve business results
• Identifying techniques to deal with resistance to change

With a solid sales management foundation in place, sales managers can hone where they spend time and how they approach their teams. By tailoring their focus to each individual salesperson, managers will make a bigger impact, quicker. Click here to schedule a meeting with our sales experts to learn more about this program.