Your company has a real dilemma on its hands. Your company is depending you for revenue but they are losing this revenue now that they are moving you into management.
They are betting on you. They are betting that you can translate some of your skills to the salespeople you now will be managing. Often times, I’ve found that people in your position are very good at what they do but are unable to articulate how they do it.
So the first thing is really to understand what the role of a sales manager is. And there are four major areas of responsibility for a sales manager.
Click Here to read Part 1, Recruiting
Click Here to read Part 2, Training
3. Coaching
Coaching is where you’re either role playing with your salespeople, you’re going on site visits with your salespeople, or you are in some way, shape or form, observing how your salespeople actually go to market and speak to the product, engage customers, and discover whether you’re bringing them value and how we’re asking them to buy. So coaching is the whole process of guiding the salesperson after their initial training.
This is the part of your new role that you are probably the most well prepared for because you are simply leveraging what you already know.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
Your company has a real dilemma on its hands. Your company is depending you for revenue but they are losing this revenue now that they are moving you into management.
They are betting on you. They are betting that you can translate some of your skills to the salespeople you now will be managing. Often times, I’ve found that people in your position are very good at what they do but are unable to articulate how they do it.
So the first thing is really to understand what the role of a sales manager is. And there are four major areas of responsibility for a sales manager.
Click Here to read Part 1, Recruiting
2. Training
When you transition into being a sales manager, you actually have to look at your salespeople as your customers.
In addition, your company is your customer, but your salespeople are now your customers. And it’s an odd sort of thing, but your job is to support them doing their job. And your sales job with them is selling themselves being able to do what it takes, or selling them on doing the activities and behaviors you need from them to get them to be successful. So your sales skills come in handy, but it’s a different job. You’re now focused on what’s important for your salespeople and their customers base.
Training is everything your salespeople need to know before they ever hit the ground calling on customers or looking for customers. And it’s important there to get product knowledge, it’s important there to understand the systems you’re operating under…how do I use the database, how do I use the computer, if I get an order what am I supposed to do, if the order doesn’t go smoothly within the company — how do I fix it or followup with the customers, are there advocates for the customers I have to work with, how do I get stuff done?
Those are the major pieces and that’s part of training, and product knowledge is an important part. Then there’s sales skills training and that’s an important part of the original training. It’s a culturalization process for a salesperson to come from what was in many cases a wildly different sales environment and sales culture to start operating effectively in this one.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
Your company has a real dilemma on its hands. Your company is depending you for revenue but they are losing this revenue now that they are moving you into management.
They are betting on you. They are betting that you can translate some of your skills to the salespeople you now will be managing. Often times, I’ve found that people in your position are very good at what they do but are unable to articulate how they do it.
So the first thing is really to understand what the role of a sales manager is. And there are four major areas of responsibility for a sales manager.
1. Recruiting
The first one is recruiting the right people. If you recruit the right people then you have done 90% of your work.
If you hire a stellar sales team, then they’ll do the work and you don’t have to worry about them. But generally few people get that right in their first few stabs at it. It takes some significant understanding of how to hire a salesperson and most people do it on a gut instinct and one or two criteria, but rarely get it right. So that becomes a very expensive lesson both for the hiring company and the sales manager.
So one if the things you should be doing is making a concerted effort to learn how to recruit appropriately.
(Continued)
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
Your Product’s Value Proposition
By · CommentsIf you have been through a company-sponsored sales training course, chances are that it provided you with the value proposition – sometimes referred to as Unique Selling Proposition or USP – of that company’s product or service.
But what happens when you move on to a new company?
How about if you were instead taught how to determine the value proposition for any product or service in any company? That’s the SolomonRK difference. It’s designed to give you everything you need to have a mid-level pipeline in 90 days no matter what you are selling. We know it works because we use it ourselves.
This process is not just for sales professionals. We like business owners and CEOs to attend SolomonRk because for most it’s the first time they’ve really thought through their product’s value proposition. When the C-suite truly understands how their customers perceive the value of their product, the entire company tends to align around the same language. SUddenly the marketing collateral, website, even the receptionist begins using the same language and that in turn helps the entire company to grow.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
SolomonRK is Not a System, It’s a Framework
By · CommentsWhen initially started thinking about creating a Sales Training course I quickly discovered that there was no curriculum. Yes, there are lots of systems and methods: Strategic Selling, Spin Selling, Solution Selling, Sander, and Hopkins, to name a few. Unfortunately, there are important topics that matter to a new sales professional that are not covered by any of these.
For example, the Tom Hopkins system teaches Qualify-Present-Close. Most of Hopkins’ qualification techniques revolve around money. What if there are other major qualification criteria? Hopkins is not much help.
The SolomonRk system uses a 9-point matrix of qualification areas and teaches you how to determine the qualification criteria for each of those points. SolomonRK doesn’t just hand you the qualification criteria for your product. It teaches you how to determine the qualification criteria for any product. Then if one of the qualification criterion happens to be money and you are schooled in the Hopkins system then you can plug Hopkins’ money-qualification language right in.
Solomon is a complete framework that allows you to plug in anything else.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
Sales Pitch
By · CommentsIf you visit the online forums and message boards dedicated to sales, you’ll quickly discover that the number one topic is:
“I just got hired selling XXXXXX. Can you guys help me come up with a good sales pitch?”
Coming up with a good pitch is not hard. Like most things, it’s easy if you know how to do it. We teach this process in our SolomonRK course. it involves stepping away from what we sell and looking at what our customers are buying.
I’m sure you’ve heard it put this way: When the guy at Home Depot sells you a 1/4-inch drill, you’re not buying a drill, your buying an unlimited supply of 1/4-inch holes.
We dig deeper than that though. You’re not making 1/4-inch holes just for fun. There’s a reason you want 1/4-inch holes. Our process teaches you the mindset for digging in the right direction and coming up with the real deep-down reasons why your customers buy from you.
Plug that information into a simple framework involving trust, credibility, and interest and you’ll have your pitch.
Better yet, you’ll have a methodology for determining the value proposition no matter where you go and what you sell.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
Sales Training is not an Event
By · CommentsI read this headline on a blog this morning:
How Corporate Sales Training Events Can Boost Your Company’s Sales
An Event? Bring in the clowns and carnival rides! Let’s bob for apples! See if we can win a stuffed animal!
I’m sorry, but sales training is not an ‘event’. It doesn’t have to be somber but it is certainly dead-serious. For the salesman, there is a lot at stake – self-esteem, achievement, groceries, mortgage payments.
A lot of middle-aged guys (and gals) in non-sales jobs with years of knowledge in their industry are being shown the door. What do they do now? Many will attempt to leverage their industry knowledge by transitioning into Sales. Most will fail. They’ll fail not because of lack of desire or hard work, but will fail because they don’t think like a salesman.
You’ll never be a good engineer unless you think like an engineer. You’ll never be a good salesman unless you think like a salesman. Sales isn’t hard, it’s easy. It’s easy when you know how to do it. The keys are the right tools and mindset.
I’ve worked hard to build a system and training that will give new sales pros not just a fighting chance – it will give them exactly what they need to build a mid-level pipeline in90 days in any industry. It’s not a cookbook or a set of rote ’say this’ techniques. It’s a process.
A process for figuring out the true value proposition of your company’s product or service. A process for determining the qualification criteria for your industry, product, and company. A process for gauging if the sale can be closed and what needs to be done to move it toward closure. A system so that you can wake up every morning knowing that you know exactly what needs to be done that day.
SolomonRk will give you a fighting chance of coming out the other side of ‘career transition’ with dignity and success – maybe even success like you’ve never known it before. How cool would that be?
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
When you started your company it was just you. You were sales, marketing, shipping, everything. In the role of sales you were terrific. You were terrific because you have the passion for your product or service. You may not have known all the latest and greatest sales techniques but your passion carried the day.
Are you getting to the point where you need to clone yourself? One of the systems you must put into place is a sales system. Every sales system in the world covers either big breadth but not much depth, or covers great depth in a segment of the process sliced/diced Solomon is a complete framework that allows you to plug in anything else.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
Sales Professionals Want to WIn
By · CommentsSalespeople want to win.
The reality though is that most employers don’t know what they need to give them so they can win. Too many times in small companies, the CEO tells the new sales guy about the company’s products or services, gives him the commission plan, and says “Go forth and sell.” The result usually does not meet the expectations of either party. Because the company did not fully equip and prepare the sales guy, he is left to operate on what he thinks he employer wants/needs. He wants to do the right thing but he doesn’t know what the right thing is.
SolomonRk tells the entrepreneur what it takes to win and how to tell the salesperson what to do to win.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
A Whole Company Solution to Revenue Generation
By · CommentsIf the CEO takes the Solomon course and adopts it as a process, and then sends his salesmen to it he now has a holistic selling system for his company.
It’s a whole company solution to revenue.
Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.
