Sales Management Training | How to Discipline Without Being a Dick

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Ralph

sales management dick No sales management professional really wants to be a dick.

But sometimes, you gotta be a dick.

And that “sometimes” occurs when your sales reps are no longer listening to you.

It usually happens when they think your sales management leadership is weak.

Don’t worry.

It’s happened to me and it has happened to every sales management professional who’s reading this post at least once (and there are a few of them) :-)

So what do you do when they start “tuning you out”?

Do you:

Crack down hard and make em all “bow to your every command”?

Just continue as if nothing is happening?

It’s a tough choice. A choice that will in fact determine your sales management leadership for months to come.

So as the Elder Knight states in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, you must not Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | How to Use Humor in Your Sales Management Speeches

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Ralph

sales management humor I once took a sales management training course on how to give speeches. The well-meaning sales trainer told us the best way to “warm up” the audience he said was to open your speech with a joke.

“A priest, a rabbi and a sales manager walk into a bar…”

Excited at the prospect of finally finding the key to great sales management speech-making, I ran out that night to my local Barnes and Noble and bought myself a joke book.

Being not a particularly good public speaker, I memorized a few jokes and then tried it out at my first sales meeting after that sales management training.

When I told the joke it was a disaster. I stumbled on the setup and flubbed the phrasing in the punch line.

I bombed big time.

Why?

First off, Continue reading →

How Mistakes Make You a Sales Management Genius

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Ralph

sales management mistakes I have a very close friend who is an incredibly successful internet entrepreneur.

Despite the fact that he toils in a highly competitive and cut-throat market, he has achieved an unprecedented level of success his peers could only dream of.

Last month, he made an enormous mistake. It was actually a catastrophic mistake. He was doing a project for one of his clients and documenting its success on his blog and he took his eye off the ball and just plain screwed up.

Instead of hiding from it, burying it, never mentioning it, he did the exact opposite of what most people would do:

He discussed it openly on his blog for his thousands of readers to see.

Curious about this decision to publicly “come clean”, I asked him why.

His answer: Continue reading →

How to “Spell” Sales Management Coaching

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Ralph

When my kids ask me how to spell a word for their homework, I don’t tell them.

When they were younger, I would just tell them, eager to show them how smart I was because I could spell the word “guarantee” without looking it up in the dictionary.

But now, I never tell them.

They used to then go to their mom and ask her, but although she used to do what I once did and just outright tell them, she now does what I do. She doesn’t answer either.

Sure, they didn’t like it at first. In fact, they never liked it and now that I think of it they still don’t like it.

But now they don’t ask me how to spell words nearly as much as they once did. They just wanted the answer, they wanted the easy way out. They didn’t want to have to go through the trouble of THINKING.

No, we don’t Continue reading →

How to Manage The Egotistical Salesperson

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Ralph

The sales person with an ego the size of Jupiter is notorious in the sales management world.

That’s because most sales managers think of them as incredibly difficult to manage…or are they?

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. Many sales management experts would agree with you.

But in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Its unfortunate that most sales management training focuses on the problems associated with these kinds of sales reps. But with the egotistical sales rep, they are really the easiest for you to manage…you just have to know how.

Not sound like a Freudian sales management training psychoanalyst, Continue reading →