Summary
In this three-day seminar, sales managers assess their management capabilities and learn practical skills for maximizing the performance of the salespeople who report to them. During the program, sales managers learn how to: identify the unique motivational needs of people and important techniques to motivate them; create a high-performance work environment; enhance their effectiveness in conduct formal and informal reviews; learn ways to get sales professionals to accept responsibility for their own development; and develop the ability to address critical performance issues successfully. Participants develop individual action plans for managing performance improvement and increasing the productivity of their sales organization.

Today, as in the past, a critical success factor in every competitive marketplace remains the ability of managers to lead their organization through the challenges of change and to enable their staff members to add more value, increase productivity, serve customers better and enhance competitiveness. This program focuses on the critical skills and practices managers use to lead, to build quality environments, and stimulate and sustain high performance throughout their work units. 

Course Outcomes
When sales managers set out to create a high-performance work environment, it often means helping their staff members improve on today’s performance. Yet, the specific styles and management practices needed to motivate and develop one employee may not meet the needs of the next. This course focuses on the practical management skills and practices for maximizing the performance of sales people who may have differing needs and styles of their own.

In addition to a clear assessment of their current skill set, both strengths and improvement opportunities, participants in this course will be able to:

• Apply a strategy and style suited to the motivational needs of differing individuals;
• Assess the use of different management styles and strategies with problem employees;
• Recognize the impact of a variety of factors – their own expectations, the climate of their work unit, their feedback, the information they share, and the assignments they make – on the performance of their sales teams;
• Develop and communicate positive expectations in ways that influence sales team performance more powerfully;
• Identify the motivational needs of their team members and specific tactics and strategies to meet those differing needs in order to increase performance;
• Increase their effectiveness in providing constructive feedback both informally and in formal performance reviews;
• Identify and apply techniques for helping their sales professionals take personal responsibility for their own performance improvement; and
• Develop and implement individual and unit-wide performance improvement plans. 

Individual feedback instruments (the Performance Management Questionnaire (PMQ), and a Personal Values Questionnaire (PVQ)) tie learned skills to measures of the success of managers’ own current practices in developing the performance of their direct reports.