About SalesGPS

Every organization can connect with & close more clients!

In fact, we’ll prove it with our Sales Growth Process, Skills & Strategies program. Even though the results will exceed your expectations, the program is remarkably simple.

• Identify and define the optimal sales profile
• Assess the sales force for performance gaps
• Create a customized sales training program
• Deliver the program online and real-time
• Hold sales people accountable for self-growth
• Help build a long-term focus on mastery through coaching
• Start bringing closing more new business

Save time and money with sales training and coaching processes that truly work!

The SalesGPS program gets to the root of what’s keeping the members of your sales team from reaching their full potential. It gets you the new customers you need to survive and thrive in any economic or competitive landscape.

With 200+ tested training and coaching modules available to you, it’s easy to customize a development plan to meet the specific needs of each individual without wasting time creating and testing new content.

Get customized sales training and sales coaching expertise. Get more and better sales. Get anytime, online sales training and coaching – get ahead and stay ahead, no matter what the economy or your competitors throw at you. Isn’t it time to start closing more new clients?

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Is sales training really that important?

The world of sales success has changed tremendously in the last five years

Once upon a time, sales people could easily succeed by simply being highly creative and a right brain thinker. In today’s world, they need a much more balanced brain approach. Has your sales force kept up with these demands?

• What if your prospect knows more about your company than your sales reps do?
• What if your top five accounts stopped doing business with you tomorrow?
• What if your core product or service became obsolete over night?
• What if your sales reps can’t identify tomorrow’s new clients?

The way people buy today is not the way they bought 10 years ago

Conversely, the way the buy today will not be the same as they buy 10 years from now. True north changes year-to-year in the information age.

In today’s sales world, you need to be smarter than the competition while working with increasingly savvy buyers. Sales training has become business-critical to companies that need to protect margins, fend off the competition, and grow, grow, grow.

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Is your sales training program delivering better results year-over-year?

If your sales training process doesn’t deliver better results year-over-year, it’s broken

The fact is most sales training efforts deliver fantastic right-brain sales concepts that are fresh and valuable. But the question is: do you have a left-brain management process in place that converts these great sales ideas to changed sales behavior? This is why you need to consider adding left brain training to create a whole-brain sales culture.

Ask yourself these questions:

• How predictable are your monthly sales results?
• Can your sales people tell you how many cold calls are needed to land a new client?
• Do your sales people all handle objections the same way? Are some better than others?
• How many cold calls do your sales people need to make in a day? How many are they actually making?
• Do you know where your business is coming from next year?
• What happens if your sales teams keep making the same mistake day after day?

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Tenure doesn’t equal talent!

The top performers in every discipline in life benefit from development

Sales is no different! The elite in any discipline recognize that nothing is easy or natural, especially sustained performance. Consider Tiger Woods. He decided to re-engineer his golf swing AFTER rewriting the golf record book. Do your top-performers have the desire to stay on top through continuous development? Or, are they content playing on the Pro-Am circuit? The one thing that seperates the pros from the amateurs? Mastery. It’s the foundation of SalesGPS.

• How have your top-performers managed to stay on top?
• Are they bringing new business or are they drying out old accounts?
• Do they find new accounts by poaching other territories?
• Do they complain that there isn’t enough opportunity in their current territory?

Some people only have one year of experience, but 10 years in a row!

Does that make them a 10-year veteran? Many organizations mistake experience with competence. It’s common, but it can be a killer. Salespeople are the face of your company to the market. They have the ability to make you a lot of money. To maximize results, they need ongoing sales development just like any other professional. To remain competitive in an ever-changing market, they must acquire new skills, sharpen old ones and always focus on mastery.

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The SalesGPS Training Process

What would happen if your sales training program helped you connect with & close more clients?

You have the will to change. Now what? Often times in business, getting the right formula for success is critical – just ask Coca Cola! SGS has spent years refining the steps companies need to take in order to ensure new business sales targets are met today, tomorrow and years into the future.

Our simple formula for sales training success:

• Determine the skill profile of your ideal sales person
• Assess your current sales people to identify skill gaps
• Craft a long-term sales team and sales person-specific learning plan
• Deliver training customized for team, small groups and one-on-one needs
• Provide reinforcement via phone, web or online training modules
• Conduct skill mastery coaching weekly, biweekly or monthly via phone or live
• Send progress reports sent back to the manager on a weekly or monthly basis
• Report back to key stakeholders on a monthly and
  quarterly basis

Simple, yes. Powerful, too. Why? Because we work to find the
small degrees of change that will bring the biggest impact
and are most likely to be permanently adopted by your
sales force.

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Six Sigma for Sales

What would happen if your sales training program became predictable, repeatable, and yielded your target results?

Sales Growth Specialists, the creator of the SalesGPS program is a unique, process-oriented organization. Total quality improvement processes like Six Sigma have significantly improved manufacturing productivity, quality and innovation. We leverage the power of a good process to amplify the skills of great people. Think of us as Six Sigma for sales!

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A Left-Brain Approach

For every right-brain skill there is a left-brain process

Left-brain sales training leverages the right-brain creativity, innovation and energy of your sales teams. That’s one of the reasons SalesGPS is so unique. Where some programs focus only on behavior that’s observed on sales calls, we look at multiple aspects of your sales people using objective assessment tools and a proven delivery process.

• Can you really determine what a sales person needs by watching them only in front of clients?
• Could it be that they’re using their right-brain influence skills to avoid accountability?
• Are they great at finding loop-holes to escape using a process?
• What if they’re really good at just doing the wrong things well?

We understand that these questions can be difficult to answer. We also know that addressing them with a left-brain approach is the key to building repeatable, on-going results.

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Does left-brain, right-brain really matter?

It does when it comes to building the right team

Left brain: This is what you’ve been doing for years with your accountant – solid, repeatable process with a consistent result. The left-brain people are the ones you’ve been hiring because they’re dependable and consistent.

Right brain: This is what you’ve been doing for years on your sales teams; building relationships; asking good questions. The right-brain people are the ones you’ve been hiring because they’re likable and outgoing.

A quick assessment: is your sales team more consistent or more likable? Do you need to fire people to bring balance? Or, can you enhance?

Are your customers left-brain thinkers?

The world you were selling in yesterday is not the world you will be selling to tomorrow

The biggest change is how fast our customers are changing. They have rapid access to more product and competitive data then anyone would have imagined 10 years ago. If you do not have a left-brain process to anticipate your clients’ purchasing needs you will become a commodity or worse – lose market share.

A Sales Training Paradox: Sales success requires creative, people orientated, right-brain thinkers but they will under-perform without left-brain process.

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Right-brain, left-brain, and whole-brain selling

Right-Brain Selling

It’s hard to imagine a sales team that does not have highly competitive, creative and people focused skills. They have the ability to resolve conflicts, identify solutions, bond with difficult clients and close deals under competitive pressure. Knowing how to bond with a client, what questions to ask, how to pace, how to respond to objections and how to deal with conflict are all trainable right-brain skills.

Left-Brain Selling

The longer SGS has been in sales consulting the clearer it becomes that struggling sales teams lack left-brain thinking. They lack process to set activity standards, measure success, effectively recruit the right people, motivate their staff, manage a pipeline and consistently drive results. These are all trainable left-brain skills.

Whole-Brain Selling

Most great sales people would say their success is part hard work and part right-brained natural skills. If you take a closer look you will find that all great sales people do work hard but more importantly they follow a sales process. Whether it’s trained or natural, it’s a process and that, combined with their natural right brain skill, produces a whole-brained sales pro.

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How is SalesGPS Different?

SalesGPS is one piece in a very simple puzzle

In our experience, there are five common reasons traditional sales training doesn’t yield the desired results:

• The wrong person has been selected for the role
• The critical learning gaps aren’t addressed
• On-going reinforcement and coaching is lacking
• The focus is on memorization, not mastery
• Management expects massive change in less than eight hours

The good news is that there are very simple ways to address each item to ensure your training investment has a high return.

SGS believes in a truly integrated approach to sales force development

To learn more about our unique integrated approach to sales
training, click more.

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How high is your sales organization’s Accountability IQ?

Accountability can be a sensitive subject

Why? Because most people like to think of themselves as responsible employees or managers. However, excuse-making and “waiting for things to get better” generally don’t improve a business situation.

Have your sales people ever said these things to you?

• When will the market turn around?
• When is someone going to train me?
• When is someone going to put together a decent marketing program?
• When are we going to have better products?

If you’re nodding your head “yes,” our focus on raising your sales organization’s Accountability IQ will help! You’ll be given the information you need to manage your people up through the reinforcement stage or, if required, manage your people out of the organization.

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Can a focus on skill mastery help?

Most sales training program focus on two things: memorization and comprehension

And that’s a shame. Research shows that the most effective learning involves far more interactive activities like role-playing, active planning and skill integration. The results? A very repeatable path to success:

• Remember
• Understand
• Apply
• Analyze
• Activate

With the SalesGPS focus on continuos coaching, we move beyond the traditional steps of memory and comprehension into a world where skills become profitable. Especially when it comes to connecting with and closing more clients.

Small Changes, Big Results

Most people have a hard enough time remembering simple things like new computer passwords

Will complex restructuring really help? We leverage the prevailing belief among performance psychologists that everyone can be successful if they have motivation, direction, and accountability through coaching.

Data-driven curriculum

Many sales training organizations often lack a thorough understanding of a sales person’s learning gaps. The result? They seem to cram as much content as possible into a four-hour session to cover all the bases. Not only is this a waste of time, it’s ineffective. Because we understand the gaps we can address them effectively.

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Long-Term Vision

One-day training programs will never, ever yield long-term, repeatable results

Motivational sales speakers might be motivational, but will they still motivate 12 months from now? Traditional training will produce a small spike in sales results BUT it seldom changes long-term behaviors. SalesGPS focuses on changing behavior to get sales results.

Our program is developed to emphasize continuous improvement and long-term results. This means that we engage in a partnership in the best sense of the word, working collaboratively to grow your business year-over-year, not just month-over-month.

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Levels of Mastery

Continued improvement requires continuous development

Long-term success requires mastery of skills. Brick by brick, the foundation needs to be established permanently. Try to do too much too soon and the entire structure could collapse. We focus on establishing a solid baseline of skills, supporting them long-term and then building up.

The results of this approach are consistent performance that will deliver targeted results year over year.

Raising the Bar

There are three levels of mastery for each component. This ensures that your mid-performers are given the opportunity to grow and your top performers are continuously challenged.

Skill Builder | Core skill development

Targeted at sales reps have basic skills, but need foundational work. Skill Builder will help these sales reps to learn (or re-learn!) and use the basic, critical skills for sales success.

Performance Plus | Advanced skills for high-performers

Designed for sales reps that continuously over-achieve and want to take their performance to the next level. Performance Plus will challenge and grow your high performers, helping them accelerate their already strong performance.

Velocity | Exclusive program for top performers

Velocity is designed for the highest of achievers that are driven to maximize their performance and is invitation-only. Selected sales reps will join small groups of other Twin Cities top performers for a quarterly facilitated skill development session over the noon hour with Danita Bye at a top Twin Cities restaurant.

Can a different sales training program deliver different results?

In our experience, you can effectively improve specific skills needed for your sales team and improve your bottom line results with a well-designed sales training combined with a systematic left-brain coaching process.

I’ve hired experienced sales people why should I invest in skill improvement?

To answer this question, start by looking at your sales data. Compare your staff’s key metrics like closing percentage, new leads generated, average sale size, gross margin, monthly sales and percent of goal. Most likely you will see a huge variance between team members.

Now ask yourself what would happen to your bottom line if you could improve your key sales metrics by 5%, 10% or even 30%.

In typical business-to-business sales roles, conservative estimates indicate that the companies lose over $100K per year lost because sales people are not as effective as they could be.

We’ve never had a formal sales training program before.  Where do we start?

Companies with little or no sales training experience aren’t necessarily at a disadvantage when it comes to SalesGPS.  Because of our focus on assessment and mastery of core skills, you’ll get the right training at the right time.

One important modification we recommend is a heavier emphasis on weekly and monthly coaching sessions for both sales managers and sales reps during the first three to six months.  This will help ensure that all members of the team are on the same page and striving for the same goals.  In the end, it will accelerate performance.

Does my 10-year veteran really need a coach?

Good question. Maybe ask Tiger Woods. After all, as arguably the most skilled golfer ever to the play the game, it would be worth knowing if he thinks coaches are worth it, right? Some salespeople are born and some are made–both can benefit from a process-oriented, left brain approach

How does SGS determine the skill development needs of my sales people?

We begin with establishing baseline performance with your teams. What are they good at? What are they not-so-good at. Once we have this information, we can plan a course of action and measure their progress.

Does reinforcement and accountability coaching make that much difference?

If your goal is to have repeatable results, you need continuous development. That’s why we encourage our clients to think about long-term goals, not just one-and-done training sessions. A left-brain approach provides the process to get predictable, repeatable results

How do I measure ROI for sales training?

As a basic rule, every dollar you spend on sales training should return twenty dollars.

We want to do more sales training, but just don’t have the time. What are our options?

When business encounters a cash crunch, they have two options: spend less or take out a loan. When you encounter a time crunch you have the same options: spend less time with less-productive skills or make more time in the evenings and weekends. With our 24×7 availability, you’ll find that you have more time than you thought.

Does left-brain training work?

If your sales training process doesn’t deliver better results year-over-year, it’s broken. The fact is most sales training efforts deliver fantastic right-brain sales concepts that are fresh and valuable. But the question is: do you have a left-brain management process in place that converts these great sales ideas to changed sales behavior? That is why you need to consider adding left brain training to create a whole-brain sales culture.

Can a different sales training program deliver different results?

In our experience, you can effectively improve specific skills needed for your sales team and improve your bottom line results with well-designed sales training combined with a systematic left-brain coaching process.

How do you determine the skill development needs of your teams?

We begin with establishing baseline performance with your teams. What are they good at? What are they not-so-good at. Once we have this information, we can plan a course of action and measure our progress.

Does reinforcement and accountability coaching make that much difference?

If your goal is to have repeatable results, you need continuous development. That’s why we encourage our clients to think about long-term goals, not just one-and-done training sessions. A left-brain approach provides the process to get predictable, repeatable results

I’ve hired experienced sales people why should I invest in skill improvement?

To answer this question, start by looking at your sales data. Compare your staffs key metrics like closing percentage, new leads generated, average sale size, gross margin, monthly sales and percent of goal most likely you will see a huge variance between team members. Then ask yourself what would happen to your bottom line if you could improve your key sales metrics by 5%, 10% or even 30%. In typical business-to-business sales roles – conservative estimates are the company loses over $100K per year lost because sales people are not as effective as they could be.

Is there a place for science in the art of sales?

A left-brain, process-driven approach that will improve the process and improve the people. By focusing on the process, we create a reliable, consistent system for improving the skills of your sales reps.

How do you manage to customize training so quickly?

Fifty years ago, our combination of analytics and speed-of-execution wouldn’t have been possible without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. With the technology tools of today, we’re able to accomplish high-impact, customized learning anytime, anywhere.

SalesGPS Leadership

Industry-leading expertise is at your fingertips

Sales training is a critical skill for any organization. That’s why SGS has welcomed Craig Ruhland to the company as a strategic adviser and Director of Sales Training.

About Craig

Craig joins us after thirteen years of sales experience at Xerox, The Bureau, and IKON Office Solutions, a Ricoh corporation. While at IKON Office Solutions, Craig was the leading sales trainer nationally, boasting company-leading new hire productivity numbers while providing rich learning opportunities for sales veterans.

Walking the Walk

Does being a good sales rep mean they’ll be a good sales trainer?

Craig was trained as a professional educator at St. Cloud State University. Because of this experience, he has one of the strongest classical education foundations in the Twin Cities. Not only does he know sales, he knows how to effectively teach it to your people.

Are you having a hard time supporting all the generations in your sales force?

If so, you need Craig! Let’s face it – a room filled with Gen-Ys isn’t going to respond the same way as a room full of Baby Boomers. That’s a good thing! Research shows that the newest generation to the workforce wants to make big contributions to the organization and fast. Harness that energy and you’ll be on the fast track to sales success.

Craig’s vast experience with Gen Y, Gen X and the Boomers will help you leverage the power of a multi-generational sales force.

Did you last sales training program deliver a 25% improvement in year-over-year results?

SalesGPS is a core component of the Sales Growth Specialists organizations. Our commitment is a balanced approach to sales results. We focus on goal setting, assessments, recruiting, coaching, training and sales-centric content.

The clients that take our recommendations and implement our suggested changes see an average of 25% improvement in results. We’re confident that you will as well.

Monthly Programs

Online + Phone

• Sales skill assessment
• Customized learning plan
• Weekly e-learning lesson
• Bi-weekly phone coaching session
• Monthly progress reports for the manager
• Investment: $575.00/month per sales rep

A minimum commitment of 12 months is required . For organizations with four or more sales reps enrolled, take a 15% discount.

Online, Phone + Face-to-Face

• All Online + Phone components
• Plus monthly 90 to 120 minute face-to-face training session
• Investment: $675.00/month per sales rep

A minimum commitment of 12 months is required . For organizations with four or more sales reps enrolled, take a 15% discount.

Seminar Programs

Half-day seminar

• Sales skill assessment
• 3 1/2-hour session
• Training on desired topic
• Can be held onsite or offsite
• Maximum of 15 people
• Investment: $3,750.00/ session
• Additional people: $210.00/ person

Full-day seminar

• Sales skill assessment
• 7-hour session + lunch break
• Training on desired topic
• Can be held onsite or offsite
• Maximum of 15 people
• Investment: $5,500.00/ session
• Additional people: $295.00/ person

Two-day seminar

• Sales skill assessment
• 7-hour session + lunch break
• Training on desired topic
• Can be held onsite or offsite
• Maximum of 15 people
• Investment: $5,500.00/ session
• Additional people: $295.00/ person

SalesGPS Online

What if you could develop your sales team and sales management skills without cutting into selling time?

SalesGPS Online is simple to use in the field, in the office or at home. With over 200 online modules, sales people will have a content-rich monthly sales training cadence that will be support by both Sales Growth Specialists and their manager.

Here’s how it works:

• Salespeople login at their convenience and answer questions carefully designed to pinpoint their strengths, weaknesses, and true potential.
• The SGS team then analyzes the responses and shares them with you and your managers.
• Based on the findings, the SGS team creates customized training and coaching content that focuses on how to improve sales.
• Participants work through the engaging and interactive curriculum, completing workbook and field exercises for critical reinforcement along the way.
• SGS analyzes the results of workbook and field exercises and reports them to management, along with recommendations for further improvement.

To learn more, contact SGS today

Phone 612.246.4806 or email.