Step 1: Interview the Players

We conduct a series of interviews with your sales people, sales management, customers who bought and prospects who didn't buy your product/service. The purpose of the interviews is to:

• Understand the current sales behavior of your top performers and your medium performers to identify critical success factors
• Identify sales issues that need to be addressed relating to sales process, behavior, knowledge, attitude, management, or hiring.
• Gain your customer's/prospect's perspective of your sales process to determine why they did or didn't buy.

Step 2: Report Results

From the interviews we will prepare a report that describes our findings including the positive aspects of your sales process and team and barriers that need addressing. From our findings we will prescribe an approach that meets your specific needs.

Step 3: Leadership Development

We know that for any initiative to be successful, the leadership team needs to have the skills to coach the sales team to success. For this reason, we start at the top training the entire sales leadership, including senior management, on the key leadership skills needed for success. This training includes additional, individual coaching sessions using everyday situations to ensure successful execution.

Step 4: Sales Training

Common Sense Sales Training is a two-day program tailored to focusing on those areas for improvement discovered in the interviews. In addition, we will align your sales process with your prospect's buying process. The goal is to equip your sales people to focus on those areas that will have the greatest impact on sales. We call it Common Sense Sales Training because there are no gimmicks or silver bullets. Just practical principals with a solid approach.

Step 5: Coach to Success

For any training program to "stick", it must be reinforced in everyday practice. We help this happen by providing follow-up coaching to the team while they are mastering the Common Sense Sales Training approach. This coaching takes two forms:

1.Sales Leadership Coaching

We work one-on-one with your sales leaders, providing the coaching expertise that they need to become expert Common Sense Sales coaches themselves.

2.Pipeline Debug

We apply the Common Sense Sales approach to real sales opportunities to reinforce the skills learned in training and begin to make behavioral changes in sales skills. The pipeline debug is designed for both sales management and sales people. We model opportunity evaluation with the sales manager and his/her sales team. Everyone becomes skilled in asking the right questions, ensuring that opportunities are real, that the prospect has a problem they recognize as one that needs fixing, and a decision-maker in the organization is willing to invest money to meet the need.

There are several benefits to this coaching:

• One-the-job training for sales management on coaching their sales team
• Sales people applying Common Sense skills to actual opportunities
• Correct poor behavior and reinforce good behavior
• Qualify out of poor opportunities early in the sales cycle so efforts can be focused on good opportunities
• Reinforce a culture of best practices sales skills to ensure long-term sales success

The Pipeline Debug is a critical step in the long-term success of the Common Sense Sales approach. Three Pipeline Debugs are recommended with increasing empowerment of the sales manager during each session.