Sandler Management Solutions Schedule

Classes are held every 4th Thursday of the month unless otherwise noted. All sessions are from 8:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. with coffee setup at 7:45 a.m. and a "working lunch" served at approximately Noon.

January 21, 2010 & February 25, 2010

Leadership Roles (1) & (2)

There are many ways to define leadership. For the manager of salespeople, leadership could be as basic as supervising, coaching, training, and mentoring your salespeople at the A-Player level day-in and day-out. In these two important sessions on Leadership, we will focus on those critical leadership roles. We will identify a number of basic sales manager's coaching behaviors including Pre-Call Strategizing, Continuous Performance Evaluation, Career-Pathing, Joint Sales Calls, and “Ride-With’s” as a prime coaching tool. We’ll also move into some key sales management leadership competencies such as reversing, effective communication and active listening, and up-front contracts. Then we'll get into the basics of structuring and delivering your training programs. If you are frustrated because you don't have enough time to really manage your salespeople or if you just can't seem to move them to the next level, these are must do sessions.

March 25, 2010
Motivating Your Sales Force
At any given time, for a wide array of reasons, a lack of motivation in the sales force can be a major problem for the sales manager.This session goes directly to the core causes of motivation issues and the key strategies and tactics that are available to the A-Player manager to fix those issues (that is – if they are in fact fixable). If you have “quitters” or “campers” that should be “climbers”, this is a session that shouldn’t be missed.

April 22, 2010
Negotiation Strategies and Skills for the Manager of Salespeople
This workshop is dedicated to sharpening one of the critical skills of a manager of salespeople - Negotiating. Whether it's negotiating sales targets with your salespeople, price or terms and conditions with your customers, or a raise from your boss, good negotiating skills are a core management competency. This comprehensive session addresses negotiation from a Behavior, Attitude and Technique perspective and is based on a win-win, principled negotiation model which focuses on interests, not positions. In addition to introducing some advanced negotiating techniques, this session also provides the opportunity to practice those tactics and strategies in an interactive setting.

May 27, 2010
Managing Organizational Change, Raising the Bar for Your Sales Organization
In today's environment, the only thing constant is change. The truth is that while companies change, people go through transitions. And transitions are personal and emotional. The first part of this session will focus on how to manage your sales team through organizational changes. Then we move into a problem-solving workshop where the group selects 2 or 3 critical real-world sales management problems, challenges or frustrations, and uses the tools developed in the program to lay out a clear and specific plan to fix them. There will be some pre-work before the session to identify the 2-3 specific problems to be addressed.

June 24, 2010
Maximizing Sales Resources – Strategies and Tactics
The typical salesperson is only 17-20 percent effective on average day-to-day.This session focuses on how to strategically and tactically deal with some of the biggest contributors to that costly performance level.Focus is on Account planning and management as well as how to assume that your salespeople are maximizing their time and resources most effectively to maintain alignment with company and departmental targets, goals, and initiatives.

July 22, 2010
Personal Mastery Workshop
This is a session entirely devoted to working on you. It's your professional development workshop, focused on gaining a better understanding of your goals, strengths, weaknesses, core beliefs (both self-supporting and self-limiting), behavioral style and the "scripts" or patterns that may be limiting you on your "path to mastery". Then, when you are sufficiently challenged with your "self-inventory", we'll develop a game plan to systematically take that next step upward. The desired outcome is that you will leave refreshed, renewed, recommitted, and recharged.

August 26, 2010 & September 23, 2010
Recruiting, Interviewing & Hiring Salespeople (1) & (2)
Building and upgrading a sales force to the A-Player level starts with recruiting, interviewing and hiring only the best available "topgrade" salespeople. This critical two-session module defines the process from start to finish. Using the unique tools developed for this program, you will first construct a SEARCH model defining the behaviors, attitudes, and techniques of your A-Player salesperson. We then proceed through the recruiting, interviewing, hiring and on-boarding process, step-by-step, right down to the level of writing your recruiting ad and developing your ideal interviewing strategies and techniques. Given that a bad sales hire can cost a company, on average, 15-20 times that person's base salary, you literally cannot afford to miss what these sessions provide.

October 21, 2010
Understanding Your Salespeople
A-Player sales management often comes down to a one-on-one process. The sales manager plays a key role in helping the salespeople to climb their path to mastery and achieve their professional goals. At its best, this can only happen if you, the manager, truly understand what makes your salespeople tick. This session provides you with an extensive set of tools to take inventory of those critical attitudes, skills, strengths and weaknesses that drive each and every one of your salespeople and ultimately result in their success or failure. Most salespeople never truly get to see what the ultimate A-Player looks like, and they can't be it if they can't see it. The session also includes a primer on the Extended DISC tools and a review of some basic communication skills focused on active participation and blending behavioral styles.

December 9, 2010 (Class held 2nd week in December due to Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays)
Managing Behavior Vs. Managing Sales
One of the most critical areas of sales management is often the most neglected...working with your salespeople to define and track their personal and professional goals. Motivation and commitment are rooted in well-defined personal and compelling individual goals. Part one of this session focuses on an effective tool kit for goal setting. Part two of this session will challenge you to take an in-depth look at what you are measuring (and not measuring) in your sales process. Many companies measure and track numbers only, most often with little or no impact on future performance. One of the basic tenets of the Sandler Management Solutions program is "First manage the Behaviors". That's also where the measurement should start. We'll develop a simple and effective accountability system for planning and tracking your salespeople's Behaviors and introduce a number of coaching tools to manage the process most effectively.