Episode 87

Why You Need Strategic Sales Training and Enablement with Michelle Vazzana

Published on: 12th October, 2022

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Highlights

  • [01:22] - From interning for IBM to building an illustrious 34-year sales and management career.
  • [03:16] - Becoming a career salesperson.
  • [06:37] - Why it’s critical to master how to have highly effective interpersonal conversations with customers.
  • [09:56] - The ineffective sales training strategy that is hurting your organization and how to turn things around.
  • [15:35] - Setting guidelines and expectations so you never have to micromanage.
  • [20:01] - Seller motivation: Why it matters and how to decode it.
  • [22:15] - Challenges that women in sales face that their male counterparts don’t.
  • [23:09] - Teaching sales agility at all levels of an organization.
  • [26:50] - The best sales management and leadership advice ever.

In this episode of the Transformed Sales Podcast, I had a chat with Michelle Vazzana, the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for VantagePoint Performance, a global sales management training and development firm. She co-authored “Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance,” a book about developing sales strategy and generating company results. 

Michelle has personally trained and coached thousands of salespeople, sales managers, and sales leaders. She has designed and facilitated programs for effective sales management, coaching and reinforcement, face-to-face selling, major account sales strategy, and telesales.


VantagePoint is the leading global sales effectiveness firm and the only sales performance organization that offers diagnostic base training and consulting solutions. She has more than 34 years of sales and management experience and is a prolific researcher and sought-after speaker. She has conducted the most extensive research on the topic of sales coaching practices and is the author of “Crashing Quota”


Michelle will talk about the key fundamentals of sales management and sales coaching like what sales managers can do to create programs that fit their seller's circumstances and why sales agility is critical to high performance. She will also share her knowledgeable insights on sales innovation, sales management research, and evidence-based best practices of top performers. If you’re a sales associate, manager, executive, or anyone looking to up your sales management game, then don’t miss this episode.


Quotes


“Sales more than ever before just requires flexibility and agility” - Michelle Vazzana


“Management is a lot more science, sales is a lot more art” - Michelle Vazzana


“The most successful sales managers put a process in place and give their sellers predictability in the way they manage” - Michelle Vazzana


“Organizations can’t depend on their sales managers to be the primary trainers of their salespeople. And when they do that, it burns out the manager, and it underserves the seller” - Michelle Vazzana


“No matter how good your sales training is, your manager has to coach to it and reinforce it” - Michelle Vazzana


“The only time micromanagement is necessary is when you have an underperformer” - Michelle Vazzana


“When you set guidelines and expectations, you won’t have to micromanage because your sales team will be very clear on what you expect, why you expect it, and how it’s gonna help them ” - Michelle Vazzana


Resources Mentioned:


Learn More About Michelle Vazzana in the Links Below:


Connect with Wesleyne Greer:

  • Wesleyne’s Website - https://transformedsales.com/
  • Wesleyne on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesleynegreer/
  • Wesleyne on Facebook - https://web.facebook.com/wesleynegreer
  • Wesleyne on Twitter - https://twitter.com/wesleynegreer
  • Email Her at wesleyne@transformedsales.com
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About the Podcast

Transformed Sales
Transforming Sales Managers to Lead Using Behavior-Based Skills Development
As a sales manager, you are judged by the performance of your team. And you're praised when they do well. But one thing that you've not been able to figure out is how to get everyone on your team consistently hitting quota every single month. Sales leadership is difficult.

The Transformed Sales podcast equips sales leaders with the skills to develop high-performance teams. We provide coaching strategies for improving sales team performance, mentoring developing sellers, and providing ongoing support for best practices. As a result sales leaders can guide, create, and nurture long-term relationships with their teams.

You will learn how to enhance your ability to engage in productive conversations with internal team members, resulting in a collaborative, dynamic environment where sellers feel supported.

Transformed Sales assists businesses in developing and building the culture necessary to build high-performing sales teams. In this leadership coaching program, coaching strategies are offered that can be used to improve the performance of sales teams. These strategies provide ongoing support and reinforcement of best practices