Workshop: Implementing a Competitive Fitness Model for Sales Coaching Sales Effectiveness

Would you hire an athletic coach who planned to interact with players only during games? Probably not, since you’d expect an effective coach to guide players in practice, conditioning, strategy, and other activities that prepare athletes to perform at a high level.

Yet many sales organizations — whose members also compete in a performance-based profession — consider coaching strictly an “in-game” exercise. They focus on observation and feedback, by only critiquing sales calls for example, while overlooking investments in preparation, planning, skill development, and practice important to competing successfully.

Exceptional sales forces, on the other hand, understand the importance of these pre-game activities, and focus coaching effort there in order to build and sustain high performance. They carefully consider the sales force’s fitness to compete, and work to improve sales fitness as a crucial part of their coaching role.

This workshop guides participants in establishing their own model for sales fitness. It details how the concept of competitive fitness can be integrated into sales enablement and coaching activities to focus sales learning, practice, and skills development. And, it provides practical tools to help participants implement changes that can quickly improve sales learning and development outcomes.

Selling as a Performance Profession

Selling is a performance profession — it is the business equivalent of golf, tennis, football, or any other sport you can think of. Unfortunately, few organizations fully understand and embrace this fact and so they don’t adequately prepare their people to compete as effectively as possible. They don’t adopt the fundamental principles common to other performance professions and so they fail to develop superior sales athletes.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Any organization can develop a team of superior sales athletes if they apply the tried-and-true principles of learning, coaching, and practice that are essential habits for all athletes. In this session we will help you unlock the full potential of your teams by identifying three things you can do immediately to begin transforming your salespeople into consistent sales champions.

Workshop Objective

Provide participants with practical strategies and tools they can immediately apply to improve sales effectiveness by increasing the sales fitness of their teams.

Agenda

• How are exceptional sales results really achieved?
  • The sales success formula
  • Why giving salespeople more time so often fails to produce better results
• What is “Sales Fitness” and why should it be the primary focus of sales leadership and sales enablement?
• What are the key components of sales fitness and how are they measured?
• What habits drive sales fitness?
  • Coaching
  • Learning
  • Practice
• What specific actions must be taken in order to develop these habits and embed sales fitness improvement into your culture?
  • For senior leaders
  • For enablement teams
  • For front-line sales managers
• Deep dive — from the above list, which things can be immediately applied and what tools can be used to assist in their effective application?
  • The Sales Fitness Scorecard — update the metrics your team tracks to improve focus on the activities that truly drive sales excellence. Tool: Sales Performance Metrics white paper.
  • The Sales Success Plan — develop a personal success plan for every rep that supports stronger motivation and drives higher achievement. Tool: Axiom Sales Success Plan Worksheet.
  • The Opportunity Review — transform your opportunity reviews from superficial forecast discussions or status updates to invaluable coaching and strategy sessions following this simple formula. Tool: BIOTM (Buyer Information Objectives) Worksheet, One-on-one Outline.
• Next Steps — how to implement these activities and tools in your organization and what you can do next to accelerate your sales fitness improvement and maximize sales performance.

Return to Session list