This year we are celebrating our 10th year anniversary as the EcSell Institute. And in honor of this milestone, we have brought back several of the speakers that Summit attendees have found most engaging, entertaining, and most importantly, useful in their journey to becoming better sales leaders and coaches over the past 10 years.
The insight these educators share with our attendees is valuable to sales leaders. We have all sorts of anecdotal insights into how their messages will benefit the attendees. What we also have, however, is support from the empirical findings from our Through the Eyes of the Sales Rep* (TESR) survey to help demonstrate the importance of their message within the context of sales leadership, management and coaching.
It’s a statement that everyone says, but very few emotionally live. After reading this book, I’m convinced that Tim Grover is one of those rare individuals that truthfully doesn’t give a damn about what you think of him - he gets results and that’s what matters. Are you familiar with Tim Grover? I wasn’t, but now he has my full attention.
Sales conferences sound like the most boring events on the planet. There, I said it for you. But quite honestly, EcSell’s Sales Coaching Summit is far from boring. Most attendees leave saying it was the best investment they made for themselves, their team and their organization and some of those people weren't even in sales. Don't believe me? Read the testimonials at the bottom of this blog.
Here are 10 reasons why our sales coaching summit is unlike any other:
A linchpin is someone who works feverishly to become indispensable, never allows themselves to become a finished product, and embraces change as an opportunity and not a scary threat. Does this describe you? Please, be honest with your self-assessment because your future employment and livelihood depends on you being a linchpin.
Our jobs are not going away, but for the slightly above average worker, or any other worker who falls below that standard, the times ahead are going to be tough sledding. This evokes fear in today’s workforce, but not for those employees who Seth Godin calls linchpin’s. According to Godin, a linchpin “feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds”. Embracing the new landscape of our changing business environment, and revamping one’s skill-sets to fit today’s business needs, is a prerequisite for success in today’s economy.
I am a sucker for good openings. As a result, Simon Sinek had my full attention from the beginning ofStart With Why.He punches the reader in the mouth on the first page by setting them up to make a false assumption.
He does this by giving the reader detailed information about an event, and sets the reader up to be confident he is describing John F. Kennedy, but in reality, was describing Adolph Hitler.
Losing is hard, but it is especially hard when you unconsciously correlate your loss to your sense of self-worth. Admittedly, this is something I used to struggle with early and often in my business career. I wish that I had read Maxwell’s Sometimes You Win Sometimes You Learn earlier in my career, but as Maxwell’s mentor, the great John Wooden said “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts”. I guess that is my silver lining, as well as everyone else’s.
The great poet Maya Angelou famously said: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude”. This phrase is so easy to intellectually understand but can be so darn tough to live by everyday life.
In his bookA Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl articulates that the greatest power we have as human beings is our power to choose. Regardless of the environment we are living in, or the conditions we are facing, every human being has the conscious ability to choose: hope or despair, happiness or sorrow, empowerment or victim-hood. There are no legitimate reasons to complain. Frankl has earned the right to take this stance for two reasons:
Anna Schott, EcSell’s Director of Marketing, has summoned me to write about what our client and non-client community can look forward to in 2018.
This makes sense, but I found it a bit ironic because I’ve spent so much time in 2017 learning how to be present and find happiness in the moment (more on that in a later communication). Having said that, I would be remiss as a leader to not be dreaming and thinking about how we, through our work, can touch more lives.
For years at theEcSell Institutewe have relentlessly pushed a message that everything in sales is a management issue. Sales success, or lack thereof, is always a result of how well sales teams are coached by their front-line and senior-line managers. Team performance always starts and stops with the leader in charge.
The most successful leaders look themselves in the mirror and accept ultimate responsibility for success AND failure. To date, every bit of research has proved this powerful position to be right over time, especially for our clients. However, when Navy Seals Jacko Willink and Leif Babin push this message through their own words in their bookExtreme Ownership, it takes on an even more powerful meaning.
Want to hear a joke? What do Nike and top performing sales managers have in common?
They just do it.
Okay, okay. That was a terrible joke, I admit. But at the same time, the thought behind this is actually sound. Recently, I wrote up the findings from some EcSell Institute research on the ways that top performing sales managers work and coach that make them successful.
