Lead. Develop. Execute. DAY ONE LEAD DAY ONE - LEAD KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES 55 MINUTES Role of the High- Performing Sales Manager Understand the behaviors of high-performing sales managers most critical to achieving their business plan. STRATEGICALLY CUSTOMIZED 120 MINUTES 135 MINUTES Strategic Sales Management Performance Challenges Learn and apply a systematic approach to identify performance gaps and strategically manage salespeople to achieve their plans. Apply a systematic approach to identify performance gaps and strategically coach salespeople for peak performance. 80 MINUTES Coaching Characteristics and Best Practices Understand and apply coaching principles and best practices that would pay the greatest dividends if implemented. Create strategies for using coaching best practices more consistently and effectively. 40 MINUTES Strategic Coaching Plan Gain feedback on coaching strengths and areas for development. Create a plan to maximize coaching effectiveness.
DAY ONE - LEAD ACTIVITY DESCRIPTION Role of the High- Performing Sales Manager Sales managers identify people who exhibit most of the behaviors listed in the categories of Lead, Develop, and Execute and the impact these behaviors have on their company, customers, direct reports, and peers. They align corresponding actions with these behaviors and discuss the range and nature of the behaviors of high-performing managers. Teams then review these behaviors, prioritize them, and pick the six performance behaviors that are most critical to achieving their business plan. Strategic Sales Management Teams examine a performance challenge that a sales manager would have to handle to meet performance targets and collaborate to develop a plan of action to close this performance gap. They learn about six categories of Performance Drivers that help managers pinpoint the source of peak performance. Individually and then collectively, they decide on their sequence and a rationale for this logical order and discuss the value of having a common language to use when managing. Then, they explore Tool cards that can enhance a salesperson s ability to perform, aligning them with the Driver card that best fits each. They assess the time and cost implications of each group of Drivers. Performance Challenges Teams work together on three customized performance challenges. For each, they identify the performance gap and the performance drivers at the root cause. Then, they select the tools that might help them close the gap. Teams think about the salespeople they manage and list a performance gap they see across their teams. Then, they determine which of the six performance drivers they would use to diagnose the situation. Last, they identify the tools they re going to use or the actions they ll take to address this situation. They repeat this process until they are able to diagnose and address a performance gap in just a few minutes. Coaching Characteristics and Best Practices Sales managers develop their ideas of the elements of great coaching. They capture characteristics of the perfect coach and discuss their observations and how they view their role as a coach. Sales managers review Coaching Best Practices, discuss the positive benefits, and rate their organization s current state of performance for each one. Working with a best practice, teams record a set of actions they can take to improve their skill in the coming months on this best practice. They review their personal competencies at these best practices and identify steps they can take to create the biggest impact on their team s performance. Strategic Coaching Plan Sales managers receive feedback from a survey their salespeople filled out before the session. They review the feedback and record and analyze their results in the Strategic Coaching Plan. In pairs, they review their Coaching Plans and decide on their coaching priorities.
DAY TWO DEVELOP KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES DAY TWO - DEVELOP 20 MINUTES Business Impact of Coaching Understand the business impact of high levels of coaching effectiveness. STRATEGICALLY CUSTOMIZED 95 MINUTES 65 MINUTES Sales Best Practices Behavioral Styles Discover and apply the sales best practices identified by thought leaders and followed by top sales performers across a variety of industries. Create strategies for utilizing these practices more consistently and effectively. Understand their personal styles and others styles; identify barriers and find common interests on which to build stronger coaching relationships. Learn how an individual s filters lead to assumptions, judgments, and communication barriers. Learn a practical, research-based Styles model and develop communication strategies and approaches to coach salespeople with different styles. 40 MINUTES Coaching Continuum/ REAL Coaching Model Discover the differences between directed and guided feedback and coaching. Learn a non-manipulative model for coaching interactions. 30 MINUTES High-Impact Questions Learn and master the art of writing and deploying welldeveloped questions to support the coaching process around relevant and current challenges.
Business Impact of Coaching DAY TWO - DEVELOP ACTIVITY DESCRIPTION Participants explore the business impact of coaching by sales managers: they compare the performance of salespeople against their goals when coached by sales managers with a high level of coaching effectiveness with performance when they are coached by sales managers who exhibit a low level of coaching effectiveness. Calculating the difference, they discover the additional business impact that would be created if their salespeople improved by this percentage. Sales Best Practices Teams review the sales best practices that salespeople use to accelerate their success and align each best practice with its importance at the beginning, middle, or end of the sales cycle. They reflect on which best practices are most important for their company s success and rate their salesforce s current performance on each one. Sales managers dig deeper, creating a specific set of actions that they can take for each best practice. Then, they create an action plan for their team, capturing steps they can take to enhance the performance of salespeople and their sales team. Behavioral Styles Sales managers examine various communication styles, including their own. In teams, they analyze how these styles interact and the best ways to communicate with their own style as well as other styles. Then, they work individually to explore where their style and a challenging saleperson s style intersect and how they can communicate with this style more effectively. Coaching Continuum/ REAL Coaching Model Sales managers learn a model to adapt their coaching strategies to different situations, considering the main characteristics at each side of the continuum: directed and guided coaching. They identify a situation where they would coach in each. Next, they review Coaching Situation cards and place them appropriately on the continuum. They discuss both sorts of interactions and how they can apply them on the job. Sales managers use a model for coaching interactions and learn important practices to support each step of the model. They reflect on how adopting it might impact their organization s coaching results. High-Impact Questions Participants use a proven process for effectively coaching others by developing high-impact questions that they would ask if coaching a salesperson in different coaching situations. Then, they work in pairs as sales coach and salesperson to ask high-impact coaching questions and proactive follow-up questions.
DAY TWO DEVELOP KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES DAY TWO - DEVELOP 80 MINUTES Case Study Learn and apply coaching best practices and other coaching strategies through role-plays. Master the day s learnings in a skill practice based on a real-world coaching situation STRATEGICALLY CUSTOMIZED 45 MINUTES 15 MINUTES Coaching Stress/ Coaching Derailers Coaching Time Create strategies to successfully coach salespeople more effectively when under stress. Understand derailers that diminish impact and build skill in minimizing these derailers. Deepen an understanding of the time required to successfully coach salespeople.
DAY TWO - DEVELOP ACTIVITY DESCRIPTION Case Study Participants work with a three-layer customized case study to role-play coaching situations between a sales manager and salesperson. They consider the best practices and tools they would use in each situation and debrief. Coaching Stress/ Coaching Derailers Using the Styles cards, sales managers reflect on their own behaviors under stress. They consider how stress affects the challenging salesperson they worked with earlier and what they can do to make the interaction smoother. Sales managers review coaching derailers that represent actions and behaviors exhibited by coaches that are shown to diminish business impact. They choose the derailers that they are most susceptible to and create strategies for minimizing them; they also describe the anticipated business impact that eliminating these derailers will have for them, their team, and the company. Coaching Time Sales managers guess on how much time is spent coaching salespeople in percentages according to research. Then, they collaborate to determine the optimal coaching time per salesperson per month. A powerful reveal provides a deeper understanding about how much time coaches need to maximize the success of their salespeople.
Lead. Develop. Execute. DAY THREE EXECUTE KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES DAY THREE - EXECUTE 30 MINUTES Achieving Goals Coach for performance and execute effectively by aligning the team s objectives to the company s overall sales goals. STRATEGICALLY CUSTOMIZED 70 MINUTES 95 MINUTES 30 MINUTES 45 MINUTES Field Coaching Preparing to Coach Skill Practice Virtual Coaching Effectively coach in the field by focusing coaching on specific sales best practice priorities for each salesperson. Coach salespeople from their current state to the desired state for specific sales best practices by using A-B-C behavioral anchors. Enhance coaching effectiveness before, during, and after sales calls. Strengthen questioning skills for pre- and post-call coaching. Develop the ability to provide targeted feedback using specific behavioral examples. Learn and apply an effective coaching model for pre- and post-call coaching conversations. Coach to targeted sales best practices. Understand the differences between coaching virtually and coaching face-to-face. Analyze the root cause of virtual coaching breakdowns and employ a versatile coaching approach for maximum productivity in both virtual and face-to-face coaching interactions. 50 MINUTES Skill Practice Practice virtual coaching, applying tips and best practices. 100 MINUTES Performance Matrix/ What to Coach Analyze the performance of their salespeople and gain a strategic understanding of where they should spend their coaching time. Assess the activities their salespeople are spending their time on and determine how to get the highest return on their coaching investment by redirecting the salespeople to the activities that high performers concentrate on.
Achieving Goals DAY THREE - EXECUTE ACTIVITY DESCRIPTION Participants align their team s objectives to their company s sales goals by creating corresponding SMART objectives that they can communicate to their team to help them execute their sales plans. Field Coaching Sales managers assess a team s needs, comparing it to their own real-life teams. Then, they prioritize sales best practices for this team and their own teams, comparing the two. Sales managers then determine the most critical sales best practice for two salespeople and review corresponding A-B-C behavioral anchors for both this best practice and the best practice selected in the last activity. Considering this, they discuss their coaching preparation before, during, and after a sales call with each of these two salespeople. Preparing to Coach Focusing on the two sales best practices from the previous activities, sales managers create pre-call and post-call behavioral questions they would ask salespeople. Skill Practice Sales managers review the REAL Coaching model and role-play pre- and post-call coaching conversations. Virtual Coaching Sales managers compare being coached virtually to being coached face-to-face. Sales managers add and align two critical steps for virtual coaching effectiveness, transforming the coaching model they have been working with. They establish how these new tips can help them overcome virtual coaching gaps discussed in the last activity. Skill Practice Sales managers explore tips for virtual coaching and align them with the corresponding coaching best practices. Using the coaching model, they role-play virtual coaching conversations with two salespeople. Performance Matrix/ What to Coach Sales managers learn how to allocate their coaching time most effectively across their teams. Sales managers then practice coaching salespeople to adopt the behaviors of high performers.