Management

The new year is right around the corner and it’s filled with new opportunities and challenges. As we head into 2018, make sure that you’re as prepared as possible to lead your team to success. To be an effective manager, it’s important to fully understand your team dynamic. Below are five keys to doing just that.

All high-performing salespeople understand and consistently execute the top 10 behaviors necessary for success, which we outlined in our new Sandler book, The Sales Coach’s Playbook. Here are the top ten questions I utilize when helping salespeople benchmark and raise their performance:

Companies have a systematic approach to complete almost every task; from the production line to accounting and payroll. Companies rely on ........

There is no one-size-fits-all model for developing salespeople! Every member of the sales team has an individual “success code” imbedded in them, and the effective manager must dial into it in order to unlock their true potential. Once selling skills and sales process have been taught and behavior expectations are established, the manager’s focus must be on raising the performance bar with an effective sales coaching methodology.

Understanding when to take a coaching approach over a managing mentality can make a huge difference in your effectiveness as a leader. To be an effective leader you need to master both leadership styles; the key is to know when to wear which hat.

When you’re managing, you’re often organising a project, providing instructions, outlining the end goal for your business, and you may find yourself being more directive and task-oriented.

Many seasoned sales managers today are facing a common challenge: how to lead, motivate, and inspire young Millennials on their sales teams. This generation, which will make up roughly 50 percent of the U.S. workforce in 2020 and 75 percent of the workforce in 2030, has already garnered a reputation for being difficult to manage by traditional standards.

You and your team worked hard to land a new account and the prospect went with someone else. What now? If you’re at a loss for what to do next, below are five actionable items that you can implement with your team.

Here’s a mystery. We have a common language and a common process for every single department in the organization, except Sales.

Like a coach in pro sports, your primary function as a manager is to improve the performance of your team.

Unfortunately, traditional approaches to performance management may have initial success, but are difficult to sustain.

When distilled out of their packaging traditional performance management looks like:

According to a survey by Bain & Company, of 365 companies in Europe, Asia and North America, 81 percent believe that brands without a high-performing culture will never get beyond mediocrity. In other words, it is the culture of an organization that helps to drive it forward towards success.

Here are the 21 most important reasons why sales training programs fail to change a salesperson, from the point of view of all the ‘players’ involved: the sales manager, the trainer and the salesperson. The number one reason why sales training fails: No provision was made for follow-up BEFORE the training program was launched.

Knowing how to inspire, motivate, coach and hold sales people accountable for their behaviours is the foundation for improving sales. Skill sets for success as a sales manager are not always the same as skill sets for successful sales people.

Gather a hundred sales managers into a room. Ask all the members of the group whether they provide coaching to the members of their sales team. The odds are good that all one hundred of them will say “Yes.”

A mistake too many salespeople make is not keeping in touch with former clients. It’s not uncommon for past clients to come to a point where they need your product or service again but don’t remember how to get in touch with you. They are more likely to have your competitors’ information handy.

(Your competitors are still calling on your client even though you are not).

As a sales trainer with Sandler Training, I spend a lot of time talking to my clients and I get paid to work with them in four areas of their business: Strategy, Structure, Staff and Skills. Because I spend hours talking to them, I learn quite a bit. And despite that fact, they still manage to surprise me with the questions they ask me.

Small business owners tend to stay small because they do not install systems and processes into their business. Most owners want to hire “experienced” sales people. The mentality is to hire someone, teach them about their products and services, then expect the person to “go sell”. What’s the problem? If we hire experienced sales people, once they learn the product or service, they should be good to go, right?