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Teneo Results, a North America-based sales performance training company, is excited to announce that they have elevated their 10+ year relationship with the Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) to an accredited partnership, emphasizing their common focus on raising the bar for sales professionalism and making sales a respected career of choice. Teneo now offers the CPSA-accredited sales training program “Purposeful Sales Strategies” (PSS), an engaging and robust training program delivered through a two-day in-person session featuring customizable micro-learning tools and scenario-based role play, six months of group coaching calls, a practicum with selling scenarios, and sales playbook. Graduates of the PSS program are prepared to complete the CSA Professional Designation exam from the CPSA.
Teneo is also developing a new advanced-level sales training program to meet the requirements for CSP Designation, which will be ready to launch later this year.
Lisa Leitch, Teneo President andChief Sales Officer, says, “We are very excited about this new level of partnership. The CPSA’s new sales professional competency framework with designation pathways for every level of a salesperson’s career, provide more opportunities for sales professionals and their leaders to excel at sales performance, and to create a stronger sales profession that is respected by customers. Many of the corporate sales teams we work with have already embraced the standards of sales designations and excellence, as they see the direct correlation between attainment of the professional designation and higher performing sales teams who are increasing their sales results.” These clients include Bosch, JELD-WEN Windows & Doors, Alexandria Moulding andCanWel Building Materials, who have all invested in training and a pathway to CPSA designation for their sales force.
According to Peter Irwin, President and CEO of CPSA, “We’re pleased to be strengthening our relationship with Teneo Results and their team of expert trainers and coaches. Teneo gets into the trenches with sales professionals – customizing programs to make them applicable to their specific needs. Participants walk away being able to connect the dots between the sales skills they’ve learned and their customers’ success the very next day. Our independent stamp of approval is assurance that the PSS program provides a strong pathway to essential sales skills and professional competency.”
About Teneo Results
Established in 2003, Teneo Results has trained thousands of corporate B2B sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. Teneo Results works with sales teams and their leaders from three months to 3+ years, to sell with purpose, get results, and earn professional sales designations.
Teneo is the Latin word meaning to know, to understand and to master. Teneo will train you to know the sales strategies, skills and competencies. You’ll then understand and integrate the tools and sales processes by connecting the dots of practical application to serving your customers as a high-performing professional. You’ll reach the triumphant moment when you have mastered the professional sales competencies by completing your Professional Sales Designation.
Teneo works with a wide range of industries, delivering training to all customer-facing departments across an organization. These industries include transportation, dental, financial, home building & building materials, agriculture, and manufacturing that sell through direct & distribution sales channels.
For more information on Teneo and their Purposeful Sales Strategies program visit: www.teneoresults.com
About the Canadian Professional Sales Association
For sales professionals, team leaders and organizations across the country, Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) is your partner in building knowledge and skills to improve sales performance.
As the advocate for excellence in sales, we invest resources in programming, curriculum development and professional designations to help individuals and companies become more successful through more effective sales.
Our 20,000+ members benefit from learning resources, community building events and exclusive benefits. Professional sales training and Canada’s standards-based designation program provide the development and recognition opportunities employees desire and employers demand at every career stage.
We connect employers with employees, business with academia and the private sector with government to advance the sales profession and improve Canadian competitiveness.
CPSA: Advancing Sales. Accelerating Performance.
www.cpsa.com
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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Most salespeople don’t do this – Strategy Conversation – they just don’t make the time!
I challenge you to look at your calendar – pick a date and then pick a great location other than your office or a hotel meeting room. We have done this for many years and find a quaint boutique hotel with a great suite outside of the city or near a winery to think differently about our business. Some years, we just head to our cottage to allow the lake to revitalize our strategy. We are amazed at how we think more creatively in a different setting.
This time of the year is the ideal time to have the Strategy Conversation to plan for your next sales year and more important to create your sales plan for the next three years! In speaking with many sales and business leaders, their goals are to double their sales in the next three years – that requires a work-smart strategy to accomplish that goal!
What’s your long-term sales strategy?
Without it, you’re failing to prepare –and we all know how that ends! Without a strategy, you’re stuck in a reactive mode. You’re less productive because you’re trying to cover too many bases at once. You’re working too hard because you’re not properly prioritizing your customers according to their value. And you’re less likely to hit your goals because you’re not controlling the customer conversations, you’re just responding to them.
Getting strategic lets you take control – of your calendar, your sales, and your career.
It puts you back in the driver’s seat and it makes you better at your job as a sales professional because now you’re serving your customers more proactively, anticipating their needs and solving their problems.
How can you get strategic?
First, decide where do you want to be in three years. Starting at that point, begin to reverse-engineer the goals you need to hit to get there. What must you accomplish at the end of the third year, to set you up for success in this next year?
Thinking strategically helps you bring better value to your customers.
What’s most important to them? What bottlenecks or other issues are keeping them from being as productive as they’d like? What keeps them up at night? Ask – take careful note of their answers and come up with a strategy that lets you be their problem solver.
Strategy starts with a plan. Have a plan for every day, every week, each quarter and every year; work it, tweak it, and stick with it.
Here are the key elements to map out your Strategic Sales Plan:
• Better understand your company goals to effectively align and manage your territory, and allow each customer call to be more purposeful.
• Apply the concept of ROTI – Return on Time Invested – to analyze the number of hours you spend on each customer vs. the revenue/gross margin they generate.
• Map out your three year, one year and 90 days in alignment with your company goals in the different categories of sales, professional and personal goals, and then plan how you will celebrate your goal success.
• Update your SWOT analysis for your company, your competitor and your industry to identify the opportunities to grow your business and achieve your goals.
• Identify your customer’s perspective – what’s most important when they make buying decisions?
• Understand your Ideal Profitable Clients and their personas. Don’t try to sell to everyone. Get focused on your ideal customers and how to attract more of them!
• Create a Key Account Plan for your Top growing accounts to double their sales in the next three years.
Teneo Challenge: Take the time to realize what your goal is by the end of three years and then strategize the steps you need to take to reach that goal.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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The next three months of October, November and December are the optimal time of the year to conduct Business Review Meetings with your current clients – especially your top clients, or a client that you feel is a little rocky.
A business review meeting is valuable for you and your clients, too!
In my years of sales, I found this to be a game-changer that moves relationships from vendor to a more trusting partnership. This is also a great opportunity for you to invite other decision makers and influencers to this meeting such as other divisions or department heads, their boss, other key employees, buyers and stakeholders.
Here are seven ways a business review meeting can improve your sales results:
- It’s a great opportunity to have a purposeful sales conversation with your valuable clients and find out what is working, what is not working and for you to give recommendations to strengthen the relationship.
- It helps position you as a valuable resource to review the year and begin planning for the entire next year, rather than project by project or visit by visit.
- You can better understand their goals and initiatives. This is very important – when they start talking about their future initiatives listen for opportunities on how you can help them.
- Many companies are in planning and budgeting mode right now, which makes it an ideal time to secure your services for next year.
- Your clients are challenged as to what they are going to do better or differently next year. A business review meeting is a great opportunity to brainstorm with them and provide recommendations. This positions you as a business resource, not just as someone who sells a product or service.
- Your competitors are not doing it! This is an incredibly effective way to keep your competitors from getting in the door with your top clients.
- Your client relationship might be a bit rocky. That means a pro-active approach on your part to discuss the current issues and how you can resolve them will position you more favorably.
Here’s how you position the conversation to secure this business review meeting:
“We value your business. We have been working with you during the past xxx years, we would like to schedule a Business Review Meeting in the next few weeks with you to review the past year and your plans for next year. This meeting agenda can include what is working, what could be improved upon, better understanding of your future goals and initiatives, any challenges you are facing and recommendations from both us on how we can provide more value to strengthen your business. We would like to include xxx in this meeting. You’re welcome to extend this invitation to …(great opportunity to suggest including their boss or other decision makers, buyers, stakeholders in the meeting.)
You can personally call them and/or send them an email with at least two to three date options and times.
Now, create a list of your top three to ten clients, pick up the phone, or send out the email and schedule this Business Review Meeting.
You’ll be amazed at how well this meeting is received and how you’ll secure a stronger partnership (and revenue) for 2019 and beyond or fix a rocky client situation.
Let me know how your Business Meetings go with your client. Email me at lisa@teneoresults.com
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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It’s another very full and crazy year – are you feeling the same? For the past several years, I have committed to completing a half marathon each year. It would have been easy to say, “I’m too busy to do something for me.”
Do you think the same way?
Even though I know it’s hard work and takes weekly discipline, I know I mentally and physically always feel better when I run and train for an upcoming race.
This year, to help improve my productivity and discipline, I used more technology features on my watch. I was able to set my watch to ten minutes of running and one minute of walking. Many avid runners and many of the running magazines will state that you will have a faster run with a better race time when you follow the 10:1 principle. It’s great to have my watch beep at these exact times to keep me on track, and I stuck to it.
Even during my longest training run of 20km and I was running on my own, technology became my accountability buddy! When I wasn’t using the walk/run function, it was too easy to walk when I got tired or felt like it…or walk longer than a minute.
I’ll admit when I work in sales, I rarely take breaks and eat lunch at my desk – pushing full throttle all day and even into the evening.
I wonder if I would work more productively if I applied this principle. Perhaps, working one hour then taking a five-minute break.
Technology allowed me to have a plan and work the plan.
Technology would not allow my self-talk to get in the way. It motivated me to stay the course and work the plan. I looked forward to the beeps of what to do next. Technology allowed me to enjoy the run more, as I had to think less and allow my mind to enjoy the scenery.
This year, we decided to commit to a destination run to make it more fun. We chose the Rock’ n Roll run in Montreal. There were bands and music throughout the run route to entertain and motivate us throughout the beautiful run along the river and downtown Montreal core.
It was an incredible run…the weather was perfect for running, the strong voices of the Montreal city cheered us on throughout the race, and my brother and his family were at the last corner of the race to cheer us on with their signs to cross the finish line!
The Sales Race can be long and exhausting, with lots of twists, turns, and hills – yet exhilarating when you cross the finish line of your fiscal sale year by slam dunking your sales goal. How will you use technology, accountability buddies and a different destination or route to make it more fun, gain a different perspective and add a stronger pace to your sales plan?
My next goal is to complete ten half-marathons – and I have one more to go!
I’ll have to start researching where my next sales race will take me in 2019.
What will you do for yourself? Stop making excuses and do something for you!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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How many sales days and hours do you actually have to achieve your sales goals?
Only 57% of sellers will achieve their sales target this year.
I have heard countless excuses why salespeople don’t reach their monthly, quarterly or annual targets. Aside from the standard “competitor”, “price” and “economy” reasons, I have also heard reps say things like, “I was at a tradeshow for four days this month”, “The sales meeting took me away from my territory” or other such excuses. Here’s the reality – we don’t have as much selling time as we think, and we miscalculate our sales per day or per hour.
When I first started in sales, I wanted to be a million-dollar sales producer and get my name on the Million Dollar Plaque. My boss, the VP of Sales, shared an important formula. To produce one million dollars in sales, I would have to generate on average $20,000 in weekly revenue or $500 for every hour I was working. I was very proud to realize I was worth $500/hour. Then I realized I couldn’t consistently sell $500/hour every hour with all the non-sales stuff that gets in the way.
Long-term success in sales doesn’t just happen; it takes planning and strategizing and part of that planning is calculating the actual number of selling days and selling hours you have available.
A few years ago, I worked through an exercise that helped one of my clients dramatically improve the productivity of their outside sales team.
We started by having the reps estimate how many selling days they had available for the upcoming year. If we start with 365 days minus 104 days for weekends, 15 days for vacation and 10 statutory days, that leaves us with 236 days. Then we can look at other pre-determined commitments such as tradeshows, conferences, sales meetings, training, etc. This includes travel time to and from each event (this varied from rep to rep depending on their geographical location). Then we asked them to calculate travel time to and from “out-of-town” client appointments. We got them to record their office/admin days as well.
After this was completed, the team realized that they had far fewer selling days than they originally thought. In fact, after the revised calculations, the average dropped to 150 – 200 selling days in the year.
However, this was only phase one of our exercise.
Next, was phase two. We had each rep plot out their annual sales target and identify how they could achieve that goal, either with existing clients or new prospects. This activity was an eye-opener because no one had actually taken the time to figure out HOW they were going to attain that year’s sales target.
This helped the team determine where they would get the sales revenue from rather than just think about it. Several of the reps realized that they needed to get more business from their existing clients. Others thought acquiring new clients would be a more effective approach.
But wait, we weren’t done yet!
In phase three we had the reps look at their existing clients and rate them based on sales volume and profitability. Then we had them look back and calculate how much time they spent with each client throughout the previous year. This is the ROTI factor – return on time invested.
This was a huge eye-opener!
Several of the reps noticed that they spent an inordinate amount of time with clients who generated very little revenue or profit and they realized that spending that much time with these customers was actually costing them money. They started to see that they could improve their results by investing more time with higher-value customers.
Business planning is not just an exercise for business owners, sales leaders, executives and shareholders. Successful salespeople also create business plans to outline their go-forward strategy.
Planning may not be glamorous or fun work. I love it because it improves my self-talk to strategize and have a plan to achieve my goals. It is extremely effective in helping you achieve your sales targets, exceed your sales goals and improve your overall sales productivity and ROTI.
Thought Provoking Question: How many selling days and selling hours do you actually have left this year to ensure you achieve your sales goal? How will you maximize your ROTI?
Teneo Challenge: Use this template to complete your own Profitable Client ROTI Analysis, to help you have a successful fall selling season and begin planning for an epic 2019.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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What’s the most important conversation we have in sales? It’s the one we have before we even speak with our customer – our self-talk – because the tone of our internal monologue can determine whether we make that sale or not.
Good self-talk helps us stay positive and responsive with our customers. But negative self-talk cuts into our confidence, and the pessimism it creates projects through our body language and tone. Who would you rather buy from?
How’s your self-talk? Do you keep it upbeat and constructive, or do you get bogged down in head trash? As Henry Ford famously remarked, “Think you can, think you can’t; either way you’ll be right.”
It’s just common sense; a positive attitude
will reliably produce better 
results. And a recent study out of Stanford University revealed that a positive attitude literally makes your brain work better – so attitude also impacts achievement!
While it’s easy to be upbeat when things are going well, the real test is maintaining that positive attitude when they’re not. This is where your self-talk can either save you or sink you.
What is self-talk?
Have you ever wondered if you are the only person who talks to yourself, or if it’s even “normal”? You’re not – and it is!
While most people don’t have a dialogue with themselves out loud, all of us have some sort of self-talk taking place in our minds during our waking hours. You probably assume that the content of that ongoing monologue is out of your control, but like so much else in life, the tone you set with your self-talk is a habit, and habits can be changed once we’re aware of them.
Stop right now and take a moment to listen to what you are telling yourself as you read this. Maybe you’re thinking, “This customer meeting is going to be a waste of my time – they are not going to buy anything from me today.” That one-sided conversation you’re having is the greatest determinant of whether today’s work will be a powerful learning experience or not.
Does your self-talk support you or does that voice in your head tear down your efforts and dwell on the dark side? The truth is, you get what you expect, and if your self-talk is full of can’ts, won’ts, and nevers, your predictions are likely to come true. If you think you can’t – you’re right! We may not know how it all works, but we do know that how you talk to yourself has a tremendous impact on your life and your sales performance.
Will your self-talk help you or hurt you? That’s up to you.
Realize that when you take action to improve your self-talk, you enhance your self-image, burnish your personal brand, and kick-start your sales performance and behaviours to catapult RESULTS!
Teneo Challenge: Think about how you can improve your self-talk to be more positive.
As we move into the fall selling season, what is your self-talk to ensure you will successfully achieve your sales goals for this year?
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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