Mike Weinberg’s Sales Management Simplified: A Comprehensive Course for High-Performing Sales Leaders

Module 1: Meet the Panelists & A Look in the Mirror

Kick off your learning journey with Mike Weinberg’s Sales Management Simplified course. In Module 1, you’ll meet our exceptional panel of high-performing sales executives and managers. Get acquainted with their sales leadership struggles and victories, and challenge yourself to take a hard look in the mirror to assess any factors that might be hindering your sales team’s achievement of breakthrough results.

Module 1.1: Compensation & Complacency

It’s challenging to “out-manage” a poor compensation plan that doesn’t drive the desired behaviors and results. This mini-module focuses on three common sales compensation plan issues and helps you examine whether complacency on your team is partially caused by your compensation plan.

Module 1.2: You Can’t Lead a Sales Team When You Are Buried in Crap

Too many sales managers cannot execute their primary job due to being buried in non-revenue-driving tasks and meetings. This mini-module reveals the painful reality and challenges you to eliminate or delegate non-essential activities, enabling managers to focus on higher-payoff activities that drive results.

Module 1.3: The Fallacy of the “Selling” Sales Manager & Player-Coach Model

The selling manager responsible for their own quota and leading the team faces significant challenges. This mini-module highlights the issues with the player-coach model, addressing whether the selling manager’s primary concern should be their personal sales goals or ensuring their team achieves theirs.

Module 1.4: The Perils from Having a Visionary, Charismatic, Gifted Senior Executive Who Can Really Sell

Entrepreneurial senior leaders often live in perpetual frustration with their sales teams, typically because they forget that their people are not as naturally capable. This mini-module highlights the challenges that arise when highly gifted executives don’t provide enough support and direction to their salespeople.

Module 1.5: An Anti-Sales Culture Will Destroy Results and Run-Off the Best Salespeople

Sales is as much about the heart as it is about the head. This last mini-module delivers strong words and a painful example to executives and sales leaders who may have forgotten this. Be warned: you’ll never retain top producers if your company perpetuates an anti-sales culture!

Module 2: The 1:1 Manager-Salesperson Accountability Meeting

The 1:1 accountability meeting is the single highest-value, highest-payoff sales management activity that can transform a sales culture when mastered. This extensive module demonstrates a foolproof “accountability progression” and models how to increase accountability without demotivating sellers or coming across as a micromanager.

Module 3: Working with Your People – Fieldwork & Coaching

The best managers are also “coaches.” This module covers fieldwork best practices for managers, providing guidance for planning, preparing, assisting, observing, providing feedback, and strategizing before, during, and after sales calls and customer meetings. Additionally, it challenges leaders with a revealing exercise to determine if they are playing the “hero” on their team or making heroes of their people.

Module 4: Sales Team Meetings

The objective of sales team meetings is to align, energize, and equip the sales force. Unfortunately, most sales meetings fail to accomplish this goal. This module examines common reasons most sales meetings fall short and offers best practices and specific agenda topics to upgrade your team meetings so people leave with more energy and better equipped to do their jobs!

Module 5: Right People in the Right Roles

It’s challenging to win when you don’t have the right people in the right roles. This module contrasts “hunters” and “zookeepers” to help sales leaders understand their perpetual frustration in trying to get farmer/zookeeper-wired sellers to secure new business and the opportunity cost incurred from having their best hunters burdened with account management tasks. You’ll be challenged to rethink the traditional hybrid, one-size-fits-all sales role.

Module 6: Retaining & Maximizing the Production of Top Producers

Nothing hurts a sales leader more than losing an A-Player. This module pushes you to reallocate more time for top producers, examining best practices for retaining high performers. The data is very clear that the highest-performing managers overinvest in their best people.

Module 7: Remediate or Replace Underperformers (Quickly!)

Too many sales leaders ignore or avoid dealing with underperformance, living as “prisoners of hope” hoping it will correct itself. That is management malpractice that significantly damages both sales culture and results, sending an awful message to the team. This module provides best practices for quickly identifying underperformance and offers coaching-up or coaching-out strategies for salespeople.

Module 8: Recruiting

This module unpacks the two iron laws of recruiting and offers the panelists’ best resources and methods for finding and attracting new hire candidates. It makes the case for why it’s essential to continually recruit “ahead of the need” and provides a tip about job descriptions and two killer interview questions to ask every candidate.

Module 9: The Manager’s Role to “Point the Team”

Selecting “Target Accounts” is the first step in drawing up a successful sales attack and one of the few chances sales have to be strategic. This module argues that managers must be involved in “Pointing the Team” in the right direction, challenging you to help sellers create finite target lists and identify growable existing accounts and ideal profile prospects.

Module 10: The Manager’s Role to “Arm the Team”

The “sales story” (message) is a salesperson’s most critical weapon because it is used constantly and pieces of the “story” end up in other key weapons (phone calls, voicemails, emails, sales calls, presentations, proposals, etc.). This module provides comprehensive advice and an exercise to help draft a compelling, customer issue/outcome-focused, differentiating story.

Module 11: Random Rapid Fire Roundtable

Take advantage of having some of the most talented, effective, and high-performing sales leaders all in the same room by asking a series of rapid-fire random questions covering various topics like time management hacks, managing administrative assistants, handling obscene volumes of emails, and even what they’re reading these days. Enjoy their diverse responses!