Posted By Chris on May 3, 2011

Key skills to make sales managers better developers of salespeople

From the Inside Flap

You outsold your colleagues and put your company ahead of the competition, so you’ve just been rewarded with a big promotion to sales manager. Congratulations! Now for the rub: You’ve gone from being an expert salesperson to an incompetent manager—and on top of that, you may be stuck doing your old sales job while you transition to your role as sales manager. Your team (you outsold them all, remember?) can’t put out their own fires, and you’re the last one to leave every night. Your superiors grunted something about management classes at the local college, which don’t start until next semester. In other words, you’re a rookie again, and you’re on your own, kid.

The Accidental Sales Manager explains the “sales management trap,” where you spend your days exhausting yourself with middling tasks, losing out on sales, and suffering under a team of people who lack accountability and leadership. Drawing from the experiences of scores of sales managers, this book delivers immediately applicable ideas for coaching and developing a team of accomplished salespeople who manage themselves. Understand how to communicate up and down the chain of command, so that you know what’s expected of you and your subordinates become better salespeople who raise company profits. You’ll learn:

• The seven roadblocks that keep B players from becoming A players
• How to find out what is actually happening with your employees, and then manage the gap to lead salespeople from lagging sales to hitting their targets
• How to recruit the best people by asking the right questions and hiring for traits rather than skill sets
• How to lead for commitment instead of managing for compliance
• How to conduct sales meetings that elicit desired changes in behavior and measurable gains in revenue

Once you escape the sales management trap, you’ll find the same level of achievement as a manager that you enjoyed as a salesperson. You drove yourself to success—now lead your sales team to record profits.

PRE-ORDER NOW AT THE FOLLOWING E-TAILERS BY CLICKING THEIR LOGO:

Category: Sales Improvement, Sales Training, Time Management | No Comments »
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Posted By Chris on August 12, 2009

If it’s Thursday, this must be Omaha.

Thanks to the Nebraska Broadcasters Association, I’m in Omaha speaking at their Annual Convention. Congratulations to the NBA on their 75th anniversary!

In the past, I conducted 130 or so seminars each year. “I have the best job in the world, with the worst commute,” was what I used to say. I also told anyone within hear shot, “I hate to fly, but I love getting upgraded to first class.” (Rimshot).

I wanted to do stand-up comedy, but I didn’t want to work nights. So I got into the seminar business and worked long days. The speaking part was easy. Getting to the next speech took real endurance.

It ain't the years, honey. It's the mileage."

I’ve woken up in the morning and had to look at the phone book in the hotel nightstand to determine what city I was in. As a very frequent flyer,  Harrison Ford’s line from Raiders of the Lost Ark resonates. I was  a real “fly-by-night” trainer. I would start my seminars at 9 AM and go until 4 PM.  Then, I would head for the airport and fly to the next city. If the sun were still up when I landed, I considered it a bonus.

This month, I am making only two live presentations. Neither of them is more than 2-1/2  hours long.  Both of them will be finished by noon and I will able to enjoy the sunset on my deck in Chicago.

While I still love speaking to live audiences, I am increasingly delivering my message online. I have taken the content from my live presentations, articles and The Accidental Salesperson and created more than 30 hours of “knowledge bites.”  Sales managers use the knowledge bites to build an “honors class in selling” sales meeting. Salespeople can access these “knowledge bites” to help them solve a specific sales problem.

That’s good for 7 reasons.  Count them with me:

1. Short “knowledge bites” are easier to digest than long form seminars.
2. No matter how long the training session is, most salespeople come to it hoping to get one good idea. Why not give them that one good  idea and let them go back to making money for themselves and the company? Besides, most of us can’t implement the 23 new strategies that we picked up in the last training session.
3. Sales training is like an exercise program, you can’t train once a year and hope to get results. Our system lets you make continual improvement–automatic. Each week we create a new “knowledge bite” and e-mail you about it.
4. “The 90-20-8 Rule” determines how much people learn in a classroom setting. Adults pay attention for 90-minutes, but they only learn for 20-minutes out of the 90. So you have to involve them every 8-minutes in discussion and planning to keep the learning relevant.
5. An audience member approached me after a speech. He said, ” I learn more at the bar after these speeches than I do from the speakers. That’s when my partner and I compare notes and discuss what we learned and what we’re going to do about it.”  Discussion is a key component of learing. Each week we foster discussion using our content to spark your conversation.
6. Speakers joke that they would do the speaking for free. They charge the customer huge amounts of money for having to fly to the speech and stay in a hotel instead of their own beds. The speech is free. Everything else is $10 grand.
7. The Internet has changed the way we move and consume information. Learning has become imbedded in the workflow instead of a stand-alone event.

What we really do at Sparque these days is fix boring sales meetings.

Last week we polled salespeople with this question: If your sales meetings were optional, would you attend. 55% said “No. Our sales meetings are boring and don’t help me make more sales.” . 18% weren’t sure if their sales meetings helped them sell more or not. Only 27% answered “Yes.”  We fix boring sales meetings. We show sales managers how to create sales meetings their salespeople would attend even if they were optional. Real Sales Managers discover How to Run Great Sales Meetings Every Time.

You can get a free sample of a knowledge bit  right here and prove to yourself that this kind of “short attention span training works.” Click the arrow below for “The Magic E-Mail knowledge bite.

It’s a digestible, easy-to-implement, immediately applicable idea.

You can download the discussion questions and slide and have an Instant Sales Meeting.

We want the sales training to sell itself. Listen to the knowledge bite. Send the “Magic E-Mail” to 10-15 customers who have dropped off the radar. Prove it to yourself.

This ongoing learning works even better when you make it part of an ogoing strategy we call “The Automatic Sales Improvement Process.” Discover what 443 sales managers and 6200 salespeople already know:  Our content, coupled with your conversation create an engaging and energetic sales discussion.

Please run the meeting and let us know how your sales team like it.

The “Magic E-Mail” knowledge bite just 39-seconds long. My audience in Omaha will get the same great idea on Thursday. For many, that idea will be the highlight of the 2-1/2 hour presentation. You can get it now and put it into practice right a few minutes later. I’ve taught this one idea to salespeople on three continents with great results. Most of them had to wait until the next day to implement. You can implement it immediately because you’re not at a seminar. You’re at your computer and you can send the Magic E-Mail three minutes after you learn about it.

We have put the rest of our knowledge bites–a continually expanding resource–on a website called Fuel. This is a subscription site that now contains 75-pre-planned sales meetings with a brand new one posted ever every week. I read the latest books, blogs and research and synthesize it for you. My job is making your job a little big easier by saving you a lot of time putting together compelling sales meetings.

These are the topics that we  cover regularly:

• prospecting
• time mangement
• pre-meeting preparation
• asking better questions
• writing and making proposals
• negotiation
• closing
• follow up strategies
• motivation and attitude
• and much more

If you have seen one of our webinars, you have already had the tour of this Fuel. You can buy single memberships on line. However, we have group plans and management oversight programs that require a 12-minute conversation.

Click here to send me an e-mail: chris.lytle@sparque.biz

Fuel your future,

Chris

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Category: Better Sales Meetings, Featured, Sales Education, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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Posted By Chris on August 6, 2009

One definition of Jolt is “to disturb the composure of, to shock.” It should come as no shock to you that some sales meetings are better than others.

We’d like to have you weigh in on our poll. This will accomplish two things: It will help us get real data from real salespeople (which we will publish in next week’s Jolt eNewsletter), and it may shock some sales managers into making their sales meetings more relevant.

You’ll find the poll on the top left of this page.

Fuel your future,

Chris

Category: Better Sales Meetings, Motivation, Sales Improvement, Sales Meetings, Sales Training, Time Management | No Comments »
Tags: Better Sales Meetings, Sales Improvement, sales manager efficiency, Sales Training, Time Management