Learn how to deliver superior sales-team results from a sales management veteran. This exciting six-week online course begins with a detailed examination of sales management's roles and responsibilities. The balance of the journey teaches you valuable tips, techniques and strategies for success and reinforces how critical planning is to successful sales management.

You will learn how to prepare and lead better sales meetings and how to resolve team conflict. You'll also learn how to develop sales plans and budgets, recruit and interview new sales professionals, and set team goals and objectives. Finally, you'll have mastered the art of sales training. At the end of this course, you will have the tools you need to effectively motivate and manage sales teams.

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Syllabus:

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

Managing diverse sales organizations, large or small, is a challenging leadership position. Sales managers, whether they lead inside, outside, or retail sales teams, have unique challenges to meet to ensure successful overall results. In our first lesson, you'll learn all about the sales managers' myriad roles and responsibilities involving both personnel and processes. We'll examine situational leadership styles and some of the other critical leadership skills, including communication, time management, and problem solving. By the time you finish this lesson, you'll be ready to take your first steps toward successfully leading a sales team.

Friday - Lesson 02

In this lesson, you'll learn the benefits of time management, and strategies to help you stay organized and on-task. You'll learn the importance of prioritizing your activities and tasks to develop more effective and efficient time plans and schedules. Then we'll examine planning sales activities and why it's important to understand your sales team's workload capacity so salespeople can accept new goals and activities. We'll discuss the links between capacity and sales coverage, and the importance of sales activity planning that focuses on priority goals.

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Communication is critically important, especially to successful sales managers with outside sales teams who are themselves located away from the home office. In this lesson, we'll examine the importance of team communication. We'll discuss strategies for both verbal and written team communication that's aimed at team development and performance to ensure that all team members clearly understand the goals and expectations. We'll also examine written communication, and focus on the elements of correct, clear, concise, and convincing writing that ensures that your target audience understands and agrees to your sales proposals.

Friday - Lesson 04

In today's lesson, we'll focus on sales managers' three critical planning responsibilities. First, we'll examine the importance of accurate sales forecasting and strategies to develop accurate revenue forecasts and projections. Next, as a means to achieve forecasts, we'll discuss approaches to developing sales activity plans that are realistic and aligned with overall goals and strategy. Finally, we'll go over the sales operating budget, which is the sales maangers' third critical planning process. We'll look at fixed and variable costs, and approaches to accurate expense budgeting to ensure efficient and profitable operations.

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

In this lesson, you'll learn what constitutes a third-party sales force and examine their different formats, as well as how they contrast to direct sales organizations. You'll see the pros and cons for each type of sales force, and you'll find out how an organization's business needs determines the right choice. We'll also review a number of performance areas and characteristics to consider before choosing the type of sales organization for your business. Finally, because the individual employees in a sales agency don't work for the manufacturer, you'll examine different approaches to achieve sales goals and objectives through third-party agencies.

Friday - Lesson 06

Sales managers have an important impact on their companies' profitability and must understand the balance and relationship between revenue and profit. In this lesson, we'll examine approaches to managing a sales team for both revenue and profitability, and look at a sales manager's impact on the cost of sales. We'll look at a basic product profit and loss statement and discuss how to analyze the product mix to develop sales plans that deliver volume and profit. We'll also examine the potential profit impact of employing a third-party sales force. Last, you'll learn how a sales manager in a third-party agency manages the profit and operating costs of a sales team that must execute sales plans for a number of different manufacturers.

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Sales managers achieve their results largely through the efforts of others—the individual sales representatives who make up the sales team. Ensuring the correct sales behavior leads to achieving overall sales goals and results. In today's lesson, we'll focus on a variety of motivational models and go over how you can apply each one of them to creating desired behaviors in your sales team. You'll learn how to effectively lead your team and not simply supervise their actions.

Friday - Lesson 08

Leaders ensure their teams understand and share common overall goals and objectives, and sales managers must clearly communicate their vision and goals to create high-performance teams. Today, we'll examine the importance of well-developed goals and objectives as the critical first step. You'll learn the essential elements of an objective that includes being aligned with strategy, and you'll find out how to write an objective that incorporates the essential criteria. We'll examine the necessary elements of support plans, and we'll discuss how to establish checkpoint and benchmark dates to keep your sales plans on track.

Week Five

Wednesday - Lesson 09

In today's lesson, we'll examine the important role that sales managers play in developing the skills of their team through training and coaching. We'll begin by defining the concept of "gap analyses," and then we'll tie together elements from earlier lessons, such as motivational models and necessary skill-sets, to identify opportunity for sales training and development. You'll learn about using the instruction cycle as an effective training tool, whether in group workshops or when conducting in-field training. Last, we'll examine how to develop an effective sales training program for your sales team.

Friday - Lesson 10

Any successful team or organization begins with quality people, and sales teams are no exception. In this lesson, we'll focus on recruiting and hiring the best people who fit with your organization's needs. We'll examine the critical skills that are common to successful salespeople. Accurate and relevant position analyses are important starting points for successful recruitment, so you'll also learn how to develop meaningful, accurate position descriptions and position specifications. Creating a pool of qualified applicants is important if you want to provide choices at the final hiring stage, so we'll also look at some different methods for recruiting sales applicants. As the final critical step, we'll look at behavioral interviewing and discuss how to effectively apply that approach when interviewing sales candidates.

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Interpersonal conflict can bog down progress and stop a sales team in its tracks. Often the sales manager must take steps to quickly and fairly resolve the conflict. In this lesson, we'll look at the situational nature of conflict in teams and the different styles that you can use to resolve situations. We'll also looks at how conflict can be the seed of ideas and innovation within a collaboration. We'll examine some of the general causes of conflict, and we'll discuss some approaches you can use to develop plans for resolution, including a six-step process model you can apply when you're faced with more complex situations.

Friday - Lesson 12

Meetings can be a chore for both the meeting leader and the participants if you don't run them properly. Identifying the need for a meeting is a critical first step, so in this lesson, we'll examine four important needs and benefits that effective meetings deliver. We'll discuss how you can address each need in different styles and types of sales meetings. And you'll learn a nine-step model to use when planning, preparing, and running sales meetings, along with specific approaches during the meeting to keep participants on track and on time. We'll finish up our final lesson by reviewing an example of a detailed meeting agenda.

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Kent Smedley.

During a twenty-five year career in sales, marketing and general management, Kent Smedley has managed a variety of different types of sales organizations and has developed and delivered many sales training programs. Currently, he teaches business, management, and leadership skill workshops to businesses and organizations across a range of industries. He also designs and writes sales and promotional literature for an international client.

Requirements:

Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).

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