Skills for Sales Management

Business acumen training for managers, employees and sales professionals

Business acumen is a critical competency for those charged with generating revenue. To drive sales — and develop ongoing business relationships — sales representatives and their managers must know how to position products and services within the financial and strategic context of their customers' businesses.

The fast-paced, highly interactive Zodiak game is well-suited to the competitive, high-energy world of sales professionals, sales managers, and marketing and sales support personnel. It is a realistic business simulation that places learners in the role of new owners of a struggling company, They must quickly handle chance events and make critical strategic decisions that positively impact the bottom line.

Learners develop insights about how the numbers work as well as the consequences of their decisions and actions. Armed with enhanced financial literacy and business acumen, sales professionals can analyze their customers' financial and strategic issues and credibly showcase products and services as solutions to real customer needs...

Transforming your managers into accountable change leaders

Sales leaders are more critical than ever. They must be effective at managing the actions, behaviors and motivations of their sales teams; they must be laser-focused on customers and changing marketplace needs; they must be quick and flexible enough to make the right decisions around revenue generation and profitability; and they must act within a broader leadership team to influence the future success of the business.

The bottom line? How sales leaders focus their time and attention and how they use critical thinking approaches to make decisions - every day - will significantly impact the success of their organizations, their departments, and their sales teams.

Impact5 is a high-energy business simulation designed to develop the strong sense of accountability sales leaders need to drive results. During a challenging slice-of-reality simulation, learners deal with complex organizational issues, work with other leaders, make difficult personnel and customer decisions and more. Impact5 vividly demonstrates how a leader's decisions, actions and behaviors impact financial results, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the organization's success with people, processes and productivity.

Following the simulation, leaders take a critical look at their organization's leadership challenges and then delve into an analysis of their own sales management focus and decision-making approach. Critical thinking guides help them work through challenging issues back on the job to make better, more informed sales leadership decisions.

In addition to being a powerful addition to a sales leadership curriculum, Impact5 can be a high-impact way to develop candidates who have been identified for possible sales management roles.

Strategic communication + employee engagement = organizational alignment

Are you expanding to reach new customers or markets? Changing your product or service offerings? Re-engineering your internal processes? If so, your sales professionals need to understand the what, why and how of these changes in order to remain credible, confident customer representatives. With so much at stake, traditional communication methods—memos, workshops and meetings—can disappoint. Paradigm Learning offers a significantly more effective alternative.

Discovery Maps are fully customized table-sized maps that ensure the alignment of sales personnel around corporate vision, strategies and change initiatives. They combine the power of imagery and illustration with the strength of a discovery learning experience. Colorfully illustrated maps are the foundation for one- to three-hour learning sessions that transfer knowledge with unrivaled clarity and speed while building high levels of understanding and commitment.

In a classroom setting, teams work together to explore your map's content, discuss issues, draw conclusions and develop new insights. Competitive games, challenge scenarios, realistic simulations, videos and online activities can be added to enhance the overall experience, reinforcing application back on the job and enhancing knowledge retention.

Your critical business issues, our unique learning designs

Maybe your "sales game" is different. So let us work with you to build a game, simulation or other high-impact learning experience for sales professionals, sales managers or sales support personnel. Whatever your audience, we'll make it fun, fast, relevant and motivating.

We'll start from scratch. We'll listen to your issues and content. Then we'll blend your objectives with our unique discovery learning methodology to produce classroom, online or blended learning solutions. And we'll work with you to ensure learning retention and application on the job.

In close partnership, we'll create powerful discovery learning programs to educate and energize your sales personnel – giving them the information and skills they need to be successful.