Hiring

• Hiring process
• Integrity assessment
• Integrity and sales performance
• Interviewing
• Legal issues
• Sales success characteristics

Selling

• Marketing plans
• Sales skills

Managing/Coaching

• Action plans
• Coaching skills
• Common coaching myths
• Common production mistakes
• Manager success characteristics
• Sales culture

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Creating an Effective Action Plan

For managers, coaching producers to excellence is critical for a company's continued success and even survival. The first step to improving performance is to help producers identify their strengths and weaknesses. Once the salesperson has listed their most important strengths and weaknesses, the individual is ready to set goals for their development.

The manager's role is to assist the salesperson in constructing an effective action plan for improvement and helping prioritize what areas to target first. An action plan should feature the following elements:

• Writing down what the goal is
• Desired outcomes
• Action steps
• Target dates
• Progress indicators
• Barriers to reaching the goal

One tool that can help facilitate a meaningful discussion of a producer's strengths, weaknesses and subsequent action plan on how to improve performance is our Professional Sales Development Survey (PSDS). The tool compares the salesperson with the best producers in the financial services industry and makes suggestions based on the analysis that is performed.