Sales Manager Journey

The way in which teams are built is an important factor in determining a project's success. Effective team management requires strong team leadership that clearly outlines your goals and standards of behavior. In this course, you'll learn about the five stages of team development and strategies for selecting high-performing team members most suited for collaboration. You'll also learn some foundations for managing teams successfully, including how to set team goals, assign roles to individuals working on a team, and define specific guidelines for how team members should behave to minimize conflict and optimize teamwork.

Anyone who is responsible for managing teams will tell you that team dynamics make a huge difference in the working environment. Developing effective project teams is one of the primary aspects of team leadership. In this course, you'll learn how to develop a team culture early on by establishing team member competencies and working to improve team dynamics. You'll also learn about methods used to encourage team participation and motivation and increase teamwork and commitment. Finally, you'll learn about the importance of assessing and improving team performance.

Managing teams successfully involves ensuring that team members can communicate with you and with one another and that they will collaborate effectively as a team. To achieve this, clear channels of communication are required for both on-site and virtual teams. In this course, you'll learn how to demonstrate team leadership by encouraging effective communication and overcoming communication problems. You'll explore strategies for encouraging team collaboration. Finally, you'll learn about tools and technologies that are commonly used for virtual teamwork and key considerations for establishing virtual communication guidelines.

Successful teams are characterized by having a clear direction, trust among team members, effective communication, and a clear process for managing team conflict. The survival of a team depends on a leader who can quickly recognize team conflict, diagnose its cause, and implement conflict resolution strategies. In this course, you'll learn about what causes conflict on a team and the important role of healthy communication in handling conflict. You'll discover best practice approaches to dealing with conflict. You'll also explore the tenets of principled negotiation in managing conflict. Finally, you'll learn guidelines for resolving conflict that address one specific type of conflict: lack of trust.

Team cohesion, or the strength of the links between team members, determines how effective teams will be, especially in responding to outside pressures. A team has to be cohesive if its members are to function as a unit, working closely and efficiently to achieve common goals. In this course, you'll learn methods for effectively building and managing teams that focus on improvements in three areas: communication, cooperation, and trust. You'll learn specific strategies for improving communication and promoting collaboration among staff members working on a team. You'll also learn what signs suggest a lack of trust on a team, and how you can show team leadership by using the right techniques to build trust and improve teamwork.

It's vital to maintain open, effective communication when working on a team. However, it's all too easy for teams to adopt bad habits. Without realizing how badly it affects your team, you or another team member may communicate in ways that lead to misunderstandings in teamwork, cause unnecessary conflict, keep others from having their say, and prevent collaboration. In this course, you'll learn about different verbal barriers to effective team communication and strategies for overcoming them. But speaking is only one part of communication; effective team leadership is about listening too. So you'll also learn about some active listening techniques that can help you be a better listener when managing teams.

Everyone working on a team has particular strengths. To get teams to perform at their best, these strengths have to be recognized, reflected in the roles and responsibilities assigned to team members, and directed toward achieving suitable goals. In this course, you'll learn techniques for building and managing teams, including how to set effective team goals, identify roles, assess team members' competencies, and assign roles based on these competencies. You'll also learn how to give and receive feedback effectively to improve teamwork, so that it strengthens your team leadership and the collaboration between your team members.

Top performers expect a lot from themselves. Managing performance in these highly driven people is essential because top performers are such valuable assets to a company. Managers and leaders must keep them engaged and challenged or else lose them to new challenges elsewhere. In this course, you'll learn how to identify your top performers. You'll also learn how to keep engaging and challenging them by providing the right environment, leadership, and communication.

The art of sales prospecting is one of the key selling essentials for every sales professional. Even with all the sales methods available today, prospecting is the key that unlocks the door to a winning sales process. This course will help you adopt a proper prospecting mindset and be able to leverage tools that will allow you to create a high quality list of prospects. You'll also learn how to prepare a value proposition and get ready to respond appropriately to prospects when selling face-to-face.

Discovery meetings are one of the earliest times in the sales process to build credibility, momentum, and trust. When conducted effectively, they deepen your understanding of customer opportunities and enable sales methods that leave your prospect intrigued to hear about your solutions. In this course, you'll learn some selling essentials to prepare for discovery, including how to secure the meeting, and how to conduct yourself once you are at face-to-face with the customer. The selling skills you learn will help you remain confident, avoid surprises, and get the relationship with your prospective customer off on the right foot.

Effectively expressing the value your company offers is one of the selling essentials of all sales methods. Successful sales pitches require a thorough knowledge and understanding of your company's strategies, operations, and solutions. In this course, you'll learn how to identify and articulate your company's value when selling and making pitches. You'll also learn how pitching its value to best fit your prospects' needs is part of a winning sales process.

In a sales environment where customers are well informed, deeply networked, and technically savvy, sales professionals need to arrive fully prepared to deal with educated buyers and any challenges they present. To address the challenges of this new breed of customer, your sales methods need to welcome questions, objections, and resistance factors, see them for what they are - opportunities - and be prepared with the selling skills to capitalize on them. This course is designed to give you the selling essentials you need to prepare for objections that may occur during your sales calls. You'll cover using techniques for handling questions, objections, and resistance.

Effective negotiating skills are a necessary part of the sales toolkit for closing the sale and securing a satisfactory agreement. With a smooth to the process, and a win-win at the bargaining table, your customer is happier, follow-on sales are more likely, and everybody can chalk up a success. In this course, you'll learn the ins and outs of negotiation, including the steps in the negotiation process, the proper mindset to have, and how to overcome the challenges. You'll be introduced to the negotiation skills to use to bring your sale to a successful close.

Successful businesses see the development of talent as an essential activity. This course identifies how coaching helps professional growth, how to develop relationships with coachees, assess their needs, and create goals to meet them.

Productive coaching is essential to the professional development. In this course, you'll learn actions for gaining commitment from coachees, measuring their progress, and how to recognize when they're ready to move forward on their own.

Smart companies have learned that supporting continuous learning and self-development among employees reaps dividends in productivity and employee retention rates. As a manager, you're responsible for developing people, which includes developing talent in your direct reports. In this course, you'll learn about the benefits of developing employees and assessing how their development needs can be addressed through organizational learning. You'll then learn how to prepare for and conduct a development meeting that includes the necessary development plan characteristics and support for your employees.

Having a passion for learning and developing talent helps you stay engaged, motivated, and driven. New challenges require new ideas, new solutions, and new skills and knowledge. And this requires continuous learning and self-development. Being a passionate learner is crucial to staying motivated, engaged, and up to date. Therefore, organizations need to invest in developing employees. In this course, you'll learn about the characteristics of passionate learners. And you'll explore how to help develop a passion for learning in yourself and others.

Motivation drives people to take action. Without proper motivational leadership, things simply would not get done. As a leader, your capacity for motivating plays a key element in the success of your team and your organization. This course provides you with an understanding of why motivating leadership strategies are important and offers practical techniques for encouraging team motivation.

The best leaders are masters in workplace motivation and engagement. In this course, you will learn the characteristics of motivation and engagement, as well as techniques for optimizing both. You will also learn techniques for motivating and engaging yourself and others, in both onsite and remote situations.

Few tasks make managers more uncomfortable than conducting performance appraisals - especially when an employee has a performance problem. It doesn't have to be this way. Difficult conversations, and even terminations, can often be avoided with some effective planning to establish goals, competencies, and performance requirements. Appraisals assist with managing performance, as they encourage employees to perform their jobs well because they're addressing the highest priority responsibilities and operating in a way that the organization expects. Managing performance in top performers, who are particularly valuable to the company, requires challenging and engaging them so they don't terminate their contracts to go look for challenges elsewhere. In this course, you'll learn about developing an employee performance plan and monitoring ongoing performance so there are no unhappy surprises at performance review time.

Do you know if your team's goals are consistently being met or if employees are always performing at their peak? Do you dread difficult conversations when there's a performance problem that needs to be addressed? Effectively managing performance can help avoid termination of employees and boost productivity at all levels of your organization. Challenging and engaging top performers is key, as these high achievers are very valuable to the company and may terminate their contracts to seek challenges elsewhere. In this course, you'll learn about the factors involved in successful performance management. You'll explore the phases of the performance management process, critical success factors, and key performance indicators. Finally, you'll learn about identifying key job requirements when creating a role profile.

When valuable top performers choose to terminate their contracts to take up more challenging positions elsewhere, it can be a consequence of poor performance management. Identifying a performance problem early and diagnosing it accurately is key to managing performance effectively. You've got to involve employees in what might be difficult conversations to discover actual root causes and come up with the best possible solutions. In this course, you'll learn how to detect, identify, and question problems in your workplace, determine the scope, frequency, and impact when they occur, and diagnose root causes - both external and internal - to help find the best solution and avoid a contract termination of a valuable employee.

There are several defining moments, or moments of truth, that can make or break every service transaction. To successfully navigate these moments of truth in customer relationships, it's important for service organizations to add value to a customer's experience by creating and implementing strong, clearly defined client service (CS) standards. In this course, you'll learn about techniques used to shape the direction of customer service in an organization, including mapping, researching, taking action on, and evaluating moments of truth. You'll also learn how to develop and implement a customer service strategy to achieve service excellence.

Strong customer relationships are key to projecting service excellence. Building rapport is essential and requires knowing your customers, understanding their situations, and providing an empathetic ear for them to voice their concerns. In this course, you'll learn how to improve client service (CS) by building rapport with customers. It covers paying close attention to customer needs, connecting with the customer, and being positive. You'll also learn how to empathize with customers by relating your own experiences, reflecting their emotions back to them, and normalizing their difficulties.

Effectively communicating with customers increases customer satisfaction and projects service excellence. This course provides valuable advice on how to improve client service (CS) by building customer relationships with better customer conversations. It covers how to improve conversations with customers by speaking effectively, using vocal cues, listening actively, and using paraphrasing to convey your understanding of the customer's needs.

Effectively communicating with customers is essential to the success of any customer-oriented business. Adapting to the different communication styles and emotions of customers will help you build customer relationships through better customer conversations. Improving conversations with customers enables an efficient, high quality client service (CS). This course explains how to adapt to the different communication types and identify the common emotions that customers experience when contacting a support center. It also explains how to adapt your writing skills to communicate through e-mail and to document incidents.

Working at a customer support center or help desk environment can be challenging. Customers can sometimes be demanding and unreasonable, leading to conflict and stress. The customer service representative (CSR) who aims for service excellence can improve customer relationships by understanding the emotional needs of each customer and adapting to how they communicate. In this course, you'll learn how to identify and resolve conflict, negotiate with customers, and develop strategies to better manage time and stress, and you'll explore how a positive approach and attitude can benefit client service (CS).

Failing to realize the importance of customer service and effective complaint handling leads to increasingly dissatisfied customers. Organizations must be able to address the needs of customers in an effective manner to succeed. This course is intended to show the proper procedures and processes needed to provide an efficient client service (CS). It covers how to improve customer relationships to reduce conflict and enable service excellence. You'll also learn how to provide accurate documentation for incident reporting.

As a customer service representative (CSR), creating a support culture that focuses on your customers' needs is key. In this course, you'll learn how to enhance your interactions with customers to project service excellence. You'll explore how to establish effective customer relationships that involve customers in problem solving. Finally, you'll discover how to improve communication for a better client service (CS) in a cross-cultural customer support center or help desk environment.

Achieving service excellence is very challenging when dealing with angry customers. By following a few simple techniques to avoid confrontation, you can manage difficult customer relationships and project a high-quality client service (CS). In this course, you'll learn about typical trouble spots in dealing with angry customers and guidelines for avoiding conflict. You'll also learn how to handle a customer complaint by defusing the tension, investigating the problem, and coming to an agreement on a solution.

Today in the Age of the Customer, competitive advantage has been redefined. Customers are in control. They have more choices than ever before resulting in sky-high expectations. The only source of competitive advantage is the obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with and serving customers. Organizations need people who are customer obsessed. People who are so interested and committed to the people they are creating and designing for that they are willing to spend time, take risks and admit that they personally might be wrong. People who are so customer obsessed that they never settle but are continually trying to understand what else they can do for their customers.