SalesGym Membership Overview
Overview of what you'll experience and learn
in this unique, dynamic membership
Welcome to SalesGym!
Congratulations on taking advantage of our 30-day no cost membership to the SalesGym created specifically for Sales Trainers, Leaders and Managers. The objective of this membership is to enable you to experience and learn to facilitate a unique, radically different training and coaching approach based on how elite sales coaches prepare their athletes to perform at their peak when pressure is high. SalesGym has developed a comprehensive series of practice drills that dramatically improve sellers’ ability to execute difficult influence challenges under pressure. This membership will train you on how to run these high impact drills.
Influence dynamics are the verbal selling skills sellers need to overcome the challenges and resistance that naturally occur in most selling situations. Building an understanding of what to say and do when meeting with resistant decisions makers and how to do it is what most training focuses on in terms of different aspects of the sales process. SalesGym takes it one big step further which is how to do it skillfully with confidence. Knowing that you need to ask disruptive, insight driven questions to break through status quo thinking is easy to understand from a strategic perspective. Being able to do it skillfully, under pressure, with a decision maker that’s somewhat resistant is a much bigger challenge. To be able to do it skillfully takes practice with incremental coaching much the way it takes repetition and practice to hit a golf ball consistently solid and straight or execute a complex dance routine in front of a large audience.
These six steps in this no cost trial membership will enable you to become certified to deliver this unique facilitation methodology on your first maximum impact practice drill.
- First, connect with your SalesGym Master Coach that sent you the welcome email
- Schedule a 60-minute practice drill exercise with 3-4 sellers at your company
- Help identify critical differentiating factors to be used in the practice drill exercise
- Schedule TTT preparation sessions with your SalesGym Coach to learn the practice drill facilitation methodology
- Deliver a practice drill with your SalesGym Coach observing and giving you feedback
- Achieve your first (level 1) SalesGym Certification!
This video will walk you through what to expect in your trial membership and how to get started in learning this radically different approach to training, practice and facilitation.
Often training is mostly discussion, analysis and identifying best practices to use when facing different selling challenges along with various exercises to reinforce the learning experience.
SalesGym is more similar to how athletes practice with high intensity short drills to build muscle memory and confidence.
Step 1 - Connect With Your SalesGym Coach
The first step of this dynamic membership is to set a time to connect with your SalesGym Coach for about 30-minutes. The purpose of that meeting is:
- To better understand your goals and objectives and how we can help you get certified to facilitate your first SalesGym practice drill
- To help you understand the critical role influence dynamics play in whether or not salespeople succeed and how training, practice and coaching can impact them.
- To better understand the sales team you support so that we can tailor the learning materials that are critical to the learning process for the team members you’ll practice with
- To put together a timeline for all 6 steps of the certification process.
- To arrange for us to send you a free copy of our most recent book on influence dynamics, titled “How to Influence”.
SalesGym is not a do it yourself online learning experience. What we do is create breakthrough results through high intensity coaching with sellers, coaches and trainers. Your SalesGym Coach will be in contact with you with several scheduling options for that first discussion.
After that meeting, we’ll activate more learning materials for you to fast track your progress toward certification to facilitate your first high intensity practice drill and get you a free copy of our most recent book, “How to Influence.”
The Research That Led To SalesGym
In summary, from 2016-2019, SalesGym, completed a wide ranging research project on sales team performance which included interviews with 350 Sales Leaders, Trainers and Coaches along with testing thousands of salespeople from dozens of leading organizations. The primary goal of this research was to better understand what mistakes sellers make on live interactions with decision makers that lower their odds of success? To our knowledge, no organization has ever interviewed and tested so many selling professionals to understand, based on data, the answer to that question.
The research showed that roughly 80% of all sellers, from all industries, make the same mistakes over and over regardless of experience level and years in the business. Additionally, there is only one type of coaching that breaks the bad habits that cause these mistakes and most trainers, managers and coaches are not aware of what it is. The 4 chronic selling mistakes are:
- Talking too much, especially early in the sales cycle
- Not asking the right questions, the right way, throughout the sales cycle
- Inability to communicate compelling differentiating factors that are relevant and tailored to the decision makers the seller is interacting with
- Ineffective closing approaches that lead to too many meetings ending without clear next steps.
Although nearly all sales training addresses these issues, often with great information, ideas and best practices, most salespeople, after attending these training programs, continue to make these same results lowering mistakes, week after week. As such, it’s not the information that is presented in sales training that is failing to impact selling behavior, it’s the facilitation methodology that is not having the ideal impact.
The research included a study of different organizations that are highly effective at coaching and training to determine what they do that is different from how sales organizations coach and train sales teams. The groups that were identified as the absolute best are elite sports coaches, military special ops trainers and performing arts directors. What is nearly always missing in corporate sales training is the practice, repetition and incremental coaching that these organizations excel at. Specifically, what they do differently is:
- Constant live demonstrations of extreme excellence by the trainer or coach
- Practice and coaching with lots of repetition and incremental feedback
- Practice organized into short, high intensity drills that build lasting muscle memory
- A coaching facilitation style that is low interference and persistent
- Practice that happens over an extended length of time and not compressed into a day or two
- Realistic expectations from the coach or trainer on how much practice is needed to achieve lasting competence and confidence
This research is presented in detail in our latest book, “How to Influence”, which you can get at no cost. Speak to your SalesGym coach to arrange for this.
Links You May Find Helpful
The following links you may find helpful as they can provide you with ideas around selling, training and coaching sales teams more effectively.
- The SalesGym Blog – LINK
- Articles on LinkedIn by SalesGym – LINK
- Books by Michael St Lawrence/SalesGym on Amazon – LINK
- YouTube Playlist of SalesGym Selling Tips – LINK
- YouTube Playlist of SalesGym Webinars – LINK
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Lao Tzu
