Insights, Frameworks and Systems for Sales Leaders
Sales Leadership
the Hardest Job in Sales
With the Highest Impact
Yet
Sales Managers are Completely Underserved
Sales Managers get information from places that are not current, not accurate, that are biased or even wrong
A competent well trained sales force is one of your biggest competitive advantages, yet between 85 and 90% percent of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days. Traditional sales training and content is not contextual and/or people centric and is too often not following modern adult learning principles.
It’s easy to understand a problem and come up with a theoretical solution. Changing behaviours in the field is what matters. Too many “sales consultants” haven’t sold themselves for years ( or never) , your salespeople feel this and will not buy into this "theoretical" advice.
Sales improvement programs tend to tackle problems in isolation rather than in relation to their systems and the bigger picture. This results in fighting symptoms and solving/focusing on the immediate problems while not addressing the root cause of the problem.
The flow of information starts with the people that have the most money and/or the most attention, like software vendors. Then it flows down through their partners like analyst firms or consultancies that partner with them and make money when they sell the software. There's a ton of advice out there that just is sending you in the complete wrong direction when promoting a certain software tool.
Marketing is more important than ever. Unfortunately too often marketing is forced or talked into a "capturing demand mode", ignoring the basic principles of marketing and not getting the strategic value that marketing should provide. Bad news, because a high performing sales team, requires the right marketing support!
Sales leaders have a “figure it out mentality” , YES, can do! They will get the job done- great but “experience” is an expensive way of learning and is often not the shortest route
While Sales is Getting Harder
Things Happen Through YOU
Your team will perform to the level of leadership you provide.
You must be a jack of all trades...Instantly shift from one hat that you wear to another, depending on what is needed in the moment and who you are working with
Your ability to recruit will determine your success as a manager. The right people in the right roles make all the difference. And then onboarding...it never really stops...., specifically your best people will have a need to always be learning and growing, make sure you got them covered. They will thank you for it, perform better and stay longer.
But how do you do that?
Elite sales leaders must become leaders of selling — wherever and whenever it happens — rather than just leaders of sellers.
In this new digital paradigm, you have to make decisions on data, analytics and AI, not just on intuition and experience. You have to become ready to engage customers and prospects everywhere, facilitating ever increasing complex buying decisions. You need to stay up-to data on your digital skill set and build a future forward sales tech roadmap.
But where do you start?
Coaching is the single most impactful action sales managers can do. Research tells us that while 90% of sales managers indicate they are good at coaching, up to 90% of sales reps feel they are not getting the right coaching. Be a top 10% sales leader and know what to coach, how and when.
Do you have a plan to make every individual on your team better?
As a sales leader you have to protect your sales people from non-sales activities. Equip and allow them to maximise the time spent on sales. Create an environment where the engaged and motivated can succeed: the right sales culture with high standards and role clarity for all team members.
You are in between and have to manage up and coach down.
How many hats do you wear as a leader? The list of tasks is extremely diverse...And you will need to shift from one hat to another depending on what is needed. Agility, flexibility and self-awareness are required -
INTRODUCING THE COMPLETE SYSTEM FOR SALES LEADERS
Building blocks to build, lead, coach modern selling
Doing the right things, the right way-simple, but not easy
What is the company strategy ( management responsibility), what are the goals and how do we get the sales results that link with this strategy and goals? This module focuses on bridging the gap between the management theory and bringing the theory into practise. The right sales culture should drive the right consistent behaviour that produces the desired results
The best sales organisations are much more than a collection of parts -
they’re a coordinated system- This module helps you looking at the big picture -from finding to making and serving customers. The systematic approach is essential in order to find clarity on the high value activities we, as a team, should be focusing on.
How do you become a person your customers want to buy from? We cover both hard and soft skills: from discipline and time management to a module on active listening. From learning how to be an optimist to the latest techniques on prospecting and closing- get the best content and insights for your team. Help them getting better! This module cal also be your basis to build a competency model for your sales team, a crucial building block for hiring, developing and coaching your reps.
( in total we discuss and train on more than 20 skills, we offer insights on how to improve on these, your personal sales university is closer than you think
How you sell matters - This module covers different sales methodologies: we go back in time to understand what worked in the past-and why, but also look at the most modern sales approaches used and taught by the best in different industries. You can co-create your own methodology, it helps getting the best parts of other methods at your fingertips
A competent well trained sales team is one of your biggest competitive advantages, an incompetent one of your biggest liabilities Yet most sales training fails to deliver lasting impact. In this module you get the insights on the sales training industry that will help you making better training decisions for your team. Introduce peer to peer and tribal learning, leverage technology, together with the other modules ( skills and methodology) you can build your personal sales university
Coaching is not a nice to do; it is a must do. Coaching is the single most impactful action you can do as a sales manager, but it’s easier said than done. What does coaching even mean? In this module, you get all the different types of coaching, you will dig into different approaches, but most importantly you will be able to create (or fine tune) your own coaching system, because coaching is an essential skill for any sales leader and you can always get better at it.
There is tons of new technology, and because of new technology, you (might) have a new way of winning. And although tech is just an enabler, you can get a strategic advantage by using the right tech, the right way. Tools do more today than just optimizing processes, they might change the process itself. In this module you will get enough insights on the tech industry and world, to equip your team with the right tools without overspending ( tech today is more affordable than ever)
Average leaders have motivational quotes. Good Leaders have a plan. Elite leaders have a system.( Tim Kight ) Being the leader of a sales team is a challenging job.
Getting better is a journey, on which you can always improve. For this to happen you need to focus on the things you control, you need a system
In this module, we will suggest one, it’s simple and easy to understand, it has the critical elements of leadership present and they are acting together in an integrated way for a leader to be successful. If you don’t have a leadership system yet, this module will help you building one in record time
A high performing sales team needs a high performing marketing team. As a sales leader, you have to be the leader of selling. More than ever, marketing plays a critical role!
In this module, you revisit both the marketing fundamentals and will be updated on the modern ways of doing marketing. Set the right metrics and goals and agree on how the two teams should work together
After your customer signs the deal, they need to see the value of their investment. Make sure everybody understands why the customer decided to change. Both create and document profitable outcomes. Protect, defend and expand the relationship
Design and Co create your growth plan
Understand Sales As A System
01
The Wisdom of the Room!
There is greatness in every sales team! Sales Leaders often are the most gifted and talented people in any company!
You and your team’s knowledge and experience matters most.
- What do your people know?
- What do they believe?
- What do they feel what needs to change?
A baseline assessment helps you figuring out where your team could get better!
Build on the Sales Knowledge of the World!
Don't Waste your time looking for it
What We Believe- First Principles
In a hyper competitive and global marketplace, it will become more and more difficult to compete and differentiate via your products and/or solutions . Winning will mean that you will have to be able to create and articulate value in your customers' conversations. You can or make a difference with the way you sell It might be the last competitive battleground
Everybody in the sales improvement industry knows this- for years. Neil Rackham said in 2013, he would spend 10 dollars to improve his Sales Management for every dollar he would put improving his sales force. Yet, we keep on ignoring the Sales Manager
Sales Leadership is one of the hardest jobs in Sales. The number of tasks -all with a different scope and required skillset, is immense. In those circumstances, the sales leader has not enough time for critically looking for and assessing content on different sales and sales leadership content. The job is immense and it's not his or her job either. Result is that Sales Leaders often get (parts) of information from places that are not current, not accurate, that are biased or even wrong. It's how information flows these days. Result is a massive failure of sales improvement programs and too many "random acts of sales improvement programs" without any real results. The failure rates are massive.
Sales and Selling is complex - it's a collection of interactions between organizations, human beings, and technologies. It's a system: each component of the system impacts and is impacted by the other components. It means we can’t optimize the subsystems, we have to optimize the overall system.
We believe in the genius of people. A sales improvement program is a change program, everyone’s involvement is vital to the change. People only do what they really believe in and even more what they own: use the experience of the room and add relevant wisdom from cutting edge experts
Information without action is merely entertainment. Execution is an integral part of strategy and often neglected. A the same time, we do believe people do better, when they know more - there is too much science and knowledge out there that people do not take advantage of
There is too much ambiguity in most (sales) organizations. There are no or unclear definitions of what needs to be done and in the absence of information, people make up their own. Clarity and focus creates speed and momentum and are the basis for results
Want to Know More?
Faq.
Our programs and content is 100% focused on the (first) line Sales Manager/Director - He or she who manages a team of sellers. We believe we have interesting content for both experienced and newly appointed sales managers. Our content is layered and offers you the possibility to dig deep into most of the topics.
For instance our “prospecting” block is based upon more than 50 books, 1000’s of linkedin posts, different courses and offers more than 50 different techniques which we explain in detail. In other words, we are confident any sales manager will be able to use the content and program. In general we like to say that if a subscription to our programs doesn’t help you (anymore) growing all the members of your team with at least 10%, we are not for you (anymore)
We love books and have read more than 800 of them- on sales and any broadly related topic. The best books offer the same knowledge as of a person who spent often their entire life learning and organizing their insights. Via our programs, you will directly dig into this knowledge base. Next to this, the internet is a fantastic place, you can get information on any topic in just a few mouse clicks: yes, the amount and quality of information that is being shared on platforms like Linkedin and in different podcasts is amazing. We have been documenting and organizing this for over 10 years, using modern technology, a smart way of taking notes and different software (ebooks and readers, note taking apps, speech to text software, ….) For an overview of our ‘library click here and/or contact us
Although I bought considerably more than 800 books, I have not read them all from top to finish. Some of them however, I have read multiple times. I do believe the problem with a lot of books is that too often they could have been much shorter ( one good idea spread over too many pages). Over the years, I have learned to quickly assess the quality of new books, next to this, years ago, I started using a system documenting the different books and linking them to different topics- it consists now of thousands of pages all linked together, allowing me to read faster as I’m skimming books for new quality content. It is this knowledge that you will be unlocking and leveraging.
I have an immense respect for the experts and authors I’m learning from. Any original content will always be linked to the original author, I credit and never plagiarize.
I believe the extra value lies into the remix and consolidation of all the different sources ultimately resulting in a transformation of the original content instead of an imitation. I connected the dots
chief Curator and meta Researcher
Using my 25 plus years experience in different sales roles and industries, I have been connecting the dots between the practises used in those different industries, the information in hundreds of books, articles, courses, podcasts,... into a carefully curated set of topics (modules) , layered and chunked into logical and manageable units of information, templates, frameworks.
All with the Sales Manager in Mind.
Because the Sales Manager needs acces the best sales content in the world
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