Sales Management, Principles of

A new section of each course starts monthly. 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.

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 lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
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.

Lesson 2
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.

Lesson 3
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.

Lesson 4
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.

Lesson 5
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.

Lesson 6
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.

Lesson 7
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.

Lesson 8
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.

Lesson 9
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.

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.

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.

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.