• Documenting and analyzing the changing account situation, influencers' priorities and account history,
• Identifying opportunities for business, and for 'added-value' projects and reasons for being there,
• Defining a good strategy and plan to optimize business results, customer satisfaction and your resources,
• Customizing the Account Plan to suite your strategic account planning requirements.

Conducting Effective Sales Reviews
In our role as sales manager, we typically spend a lot of time with our clients and our salespeople in activities related to managing accounts and winning business. We probably don't spend enough time with them managing their performance.

In this workshop, you will learn the advantages and disadvantages of conducting regular sales review meetings. You will also build an effective structure for monthly review meetings with your salespeople, including:

• Forecast Business Funnel
• Activity Reporting
• Account Plan Review
• Major Opportunities Review
• Meeting Plan Review
• Performance Improvement Plans
• 'Win-Win' Discussion Plan

Conducting Effective Sales Meetings
One of the most important aspects of managing sales resources is to be a leader in the eyes and minds of your people. While leading by example in your day-to-day interactions is critical in building personal leadership, one area - conducting effective sales meetings, is often neglected by sales managers.

In this workshop, you will be reminded of the motivations for having sales meetings, as well as some of the important considerations when building an agenda. In addition, you will also learn how to focus on building the morale of your team through recognition, rewards and other means. Finally, you will learn to plan for the meeting using a proven tool called the Sales Meeting Plan.

The benefit of this workshop to you is:

• Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of sales meetings
• Understanding the key differences between sales reviews and sales meetings
• How to effectively involve clients in your sales meetings
• Increasing morale
• Planning for success

Consultative Relationships
The key to consultative selling is the ability to learn and deeply understanding the clients 'story' (issues, problems, future, wants, concerns, fears), in other words their NEEDS, before telling your 'story'. The better you are able to see the world through the eyes of your client, the better positioned you will be to help your client with their many needs.

Clients appreciate consultative selling. It helps differentiate you. You learn more non-obvious client needs. You get to provide more added value to the client. It is more fun and fulfilling and you are more successful. To do this requires an in-depth understanding of the challenges, issues, changes and priorities in your clients industry, their enterprise, their department / workgroup, and their personal life. In other words, what their 'real-to-do-list' looks like.

In this module, you will acquire an understanding for 'Total Needs', 'The 3 Kinds of Needs', and participate in a clinic focusing on the clients' 'Personal Crank' and 'Real-To-Do List'.

Dealing with Senior Executives
Every 'seller' or influencer recognizes the need to deal with and have access to the key senior decision-makers in an organization. Senior executives typically have high-pressure responsibilities and personal characteristics that are different than middle and lower level management.

As a result, there are inherent risks and rewards in dealing with senior executives. Based on these differences, this workshop focuses on:

• Preparation,
• Getting the Meeting,
• Doing the Meeting,
• Following-up after the Meeting.

Diagnosing Client Needs
One of the most important skills to master is the ability to identify, understand and document client needs or requirements. The success of most sales and consulting engagements, is heavily influenced by your ability to properly diagnose client needs.

This workshop is designed to help you understand, develop, and practice asking 'Open-Mind', and 'Open-Fact', questions in order to better understand your clients challenges, problems, issues, concerns, priorities, etc. This workshop also focuses on the listening and note-taking skills required to help you assimilate what the client is saying once you've asked a 'good' question. These skills help to minimize the dangerous, but common, tendencies of selective listening and wishful thinking.

Finally, you will learn and practice a tool to help you clarify the meaning, reason, and significance of what the client has said, to better understand what the client's real need is.

Getting Commitment and Closing
Whether it be agreeing to meet with you, accepting a proposal from you, or agreeing to move ahead with a large project, getting client commitment is a skill that's critical to your success. There's a fine line between being 'consultative' in getting clients to commit versus being viewed as being pushy or too 'salesy'.

In this workshop, you will learn how to identify the right time to 'trial commit' the client in a consultative, professional and simple manner. You will also learn a process to help you overcome the three most common client 'reasons' to delay making a commitment.

The advantage of this approach is that clients actually like it, it saves both you and the client time, it increases your confidence, and it can help to eliminate the risk of the environment within the opportunity changing against you.

Making Effective Team Calls
In today's complex solution selling environment, the need to utilize multiple resources with specific skills is critical to successful selling and business development. As a result, you are probably initiating or participating in a number of team calls - meetings with multiple clients and multiple people from your firm or company.

Team calls are different than typical one-on-one calls with clients. While they can present an excellent opportunity for you to accelerate your sales initiatives, they are also more costly and can negatively impact your progress through miscommunication or lack of coordination.

In this workshop, you will learn the right reasons for and the objectives in making team calls, as well as identifying the risks, hazards and exposures associated with poorly planned team meetings. The benefit of this module is to familiarize you with the 'Team Calls - Check List', a team meeting planner that allows you to plan for the effective execution of the meeting.

Handling Objections
Whether you're trying to obtain a commitment from a client for a next meeting, to conduct a survey, submit a proposal, or get approval to start a project, you will probably encounter objections of some form or another.

When you get an objection, do you sometimes: become nervous? defensive? address the symptom instead of the problem? answer the wrong objection? And does the client like the process by which you attempt to handle their objection?

Interestingly, clients respond more positively and tend to remember over a longer term, the process by which you handled the objection, as opposed to your actual answer to an objection.

In this workshop, you will learn and practice a process for handling objections through the use of the 'CAT ACT' tool. This tool will help you uncover the real issue or objection, help you get a good answer to it, confirm resolution of it, and sometimes convert the objection into a benefit - with the client actually enjoying the process!

Opportunity Management
For most of us, managing opportunities is one of the most complex and time-consuming activities we perform each day. Ensuring that our 'sales funnels' are full of qualified opportunities is also critical to our success and the survival of most businesses.

Opportunity management has two components: (1) The documenting and analyzing of the many and changing variables in a single complex decision opportunity; (2) Using this analysis, the process by which we see and determine what we must focus on next (and what we shouldn't focus on at all), as we plan and implement the strategy and tactics necessary to win.

In this one-day workshop, you will learn a proven, practical process for opportunity management as well as hands-on familiarity with our one-page, visual / analog Opportunity MAP tool.

The benefits of participating in this workshop include:

• Saving time by seeing where to focus your energies and where not to,
• Realizing what you don't know, and therefore must learn about the opportunity,
• Quickly show others (team members, management, partners, etc.) the situation in order to up-date and / or strategize with them,
• Predict the competitors' strategy and tactics,
• Ultimately winning more often.

People Behaviour Styles
Effectively interacting with people is one of the most critical skills you need to master in today's highly competitive environment. Whether you're dealing with external clients or internal associates, the ability to communicate effectively is critical to your success. In this module, you will learn the many differences between people and understand the four categories of people behaviour styles (Analytics, Drivers, Expressives and Amiables).

Through the use of interactive clinics, you will learn:

• The characteristics of each behaviour style,
• How to determine which style best represents you, your clients, your peers, and others,
• The best way for you (based on your behaviour style), to sell or influence someone with the same or a different behaviour style, by modifying your behaviour.

Performance Improvement Programs
No one likes to have under-performing sales resources, especially if this performance leads to termination of one of your sales people. An often-neglected aspect of effectively managing sales resources therefore is the proactive recognition that one of your salespeople needs help. In most cases, an under-performing salesperson is left to struggle, decreasing their confidence, their commitment to your organization, and ultimately to your results. In these situations, had more proactive corrective action been taken, a salesperson's performance can be improved.

In this workshop, you will learn to use the sales review process to quickly identify areas where your salespeople need help. You will also learn to use the 'Win-Win' Discussion Plan tool to discuss issues and develop corrective actions for under-performing salespeople.

The benefit of this workshop to you is to increase the effectiveness of your salespeople with a proven process and tool that helps to identify and address weaknesses in your salespeople. Because this process is based on identified business metrics and not emotions, the interpersonal dimension of addressing a salesperson's weaknesses is significantly reduced. A final benefit is the ability, if necessary, to terminate a salesperson if continued progress is not made as a result of implementing a Performance Improvement Plan.

Presenting the Benefits of Your Solution
Once you've qualified an opportunity and clearly understand the clients needs and requirements, it's critical that you're able to demonstrate the benefits of your solution to the client. Your benefits must 'inspire the client with desire' before they will consider your solution or service.

In this workshop, you will learn how to present the benefits of your solution or service such that the client knows which of their needs you are addressing. The client also understands the feature and the advantage of your solution or service, sees the benefit of it in terms of 'what it means to me' (the client), and agrees with the benefits.

In this workshop you will also learn how to leverage the benefits of your solution. Most of our solutions have intangible benefits associated with them - that is, benefits that you can't measure and present to the client. The key to leverage is the ability to convert these intangible benefits to hard numbers and dollars that will have a greater impact on your client.

Qualifying Opportunities
Your time is a valuable asset, and you can't afford to waste your time chasing opportunities you cannot or will not win. Qualifying is a skill that enables you to determine, as early as possible in the sales cycle, whether there is a reasonable chance the client will proceed with the opportunity, and whether you will win!

In this workshop, you will learn the self-discipline to counter natural wishful thinking (putting a positive 'spin' on what the client says) and / or selective listening (hearing only what you want to hear) when considering opportunities. You will also learn to how to ask the right questions early in the sales cycle to help you to determine whether or not to proceed with an opportunity.

You will do this through the use and practice of the 'ADD UP' tool for qualifying opportunities. The benefits of using this tool are savings in your time, energy and resources, as well as identifying the opportunities you should win.

Client Call Structure and Planning
We live in a very structured society and as a result, most of us are very comfortable with structure. There are many benefits to structure in our lives and yet, in one important aspect of our business lives - meeting with people, very few of us use any formal structure for these meetings.

In this workshop, we talk about the benefits to both you and the client of having structure in your meetings. You will also help to develop a structure for meetings that is truly consultative. While this structure is critical for all client meetings, it can also be used to structure presentations, proposals and even entire sales initiatives.

In this workshop, you will also develop a structured Meeting Plan, a tool that will force you to be consultative in all your client meetings (both face-to-face, and by telephone). The Meeting Plan is the foundation of the Consultative Client Relationship Skills Workshop, and the most critical tool you will learn to use in the three-day program. The Meeting Plan will also be used as the basis for the three main role-plays you will participate in during the workshop.

Sales Managers' Role and Activities
The majority of sales managers have become sales managers as a result of their success as quota-carrying salespeople. Unfortunately, the skills required to be an effective sales manager are very different than those required to be a successful 'seller'. This often leads to a feeling of being unprepared or being ineffective in the sales management role.

Most companies focus on training and supporting the sales force, not the sales manager(s). Yet the payback of having an effective sales manager can be significant, in terms of increased business, morale and support. In this workshop, you will explore the differences between the roles played by the sales manager and those of the salespeople. You will also participate in an interactive workshop that will:

• Define the role and objectives of a Sales Manager
• Define the activities performed by the Sales Manager

'Warm' Prospecting Campaigns
For the majority of 'sellers', proactive prospecting, whether it is for new accounts or new business within an existing account, is not fun. As a result, it can be easily avoided if there are other activity options and distractions available. The reason it is not fun is because the challenge in prospecting is to achieve the Attention, Interest and Need of a potential client who isn't asking for help. This leads to a high rate of non-interest and the rejection most of us dislike.

Two key elements are required for effective prospecting. The first is a shift in your attitude to 'maintain a positive attitude by assuming a negative result'. The second is to have proven process skills, methodologies and tools such that you can:

• Find 'warm' prospects and avoid 'cold' prospecting,
• Conduct prospect and person research before making contact,
• Define the product or service to be promoted, get attention and design the approach letter,
• Make telephone contact following the letter,
• Deal with the client 'screen',
• Conduct first call research and preparation,
• Keep track of the success of the campaign.

WIN - WIN Sales Management
You've probably heard of the 'Win Win' concept as it pertains to your company and your clients, where your selling objective is to obtain a 'Win' for your client and a 'Win' for you and your company. This 'Win Win' concept however can also be easily and effectively applied to sales management.

In this workshop, you will work to determine what the 'Wins' are for both the sales person and the sales manager. You will also learn some of the special challenges of understanding and managing the different personality types of your sales people. The final element of this module is to develop a 'Win Win' Discussion Plan document for you to discuss with each of your sales people.

The benefits of this workshop include:

• Understanding what is a 'Win' for each of your salespeople
• Understanding how to effectively manage the different personality 'types' of your salespeople
• Developing a 'Win-Win' Discussion Plan document for each of your salespeople