blog-header

The Progress Coaching Blog

Tim Hagen

Tim Hagen

Tim Hagen founded Progress Coaching, a Training Reinforcement Partner Company, in 1997. His entrepreneurial career began in college leading to positions in sales, sales management, and sales training for small and large corporations, and eventually ownership of several training companies. Tim is often a keynote speaker at companies teaching the value of coaching and conversations in the workplace. He possesses a unique combination of hands-on experience, academics, and innovative insight to solve the industry’s most common challenges specific to workplace performance. Tim holds a bachelor’s degree in Adult Education and Training from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Find me on:

Retain Customers and Increase Business Opportunities

Tue,Jun 29,2010 @ 10:11 AM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

These days people are more protective of their money, and instead of spending it freely, they are saving. For sales teams, it has become increasingly important to keep a hold of current clients; since, as most studies show, it costs six times more to get a prospect to buy than it does an existing customer. So, the question becomes, “How do we maintain our relationship with our client and get them..
Read More

Fill in the Gaps

Tue,Jun 22,2010 @ 01:03 PM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

Throughout most of our blogs, we have discussed the importance of learning reinforcement. It important to know as much information about your product as you can, and it is equally as important to learn new techniques that are arising in the sales world. We have always stressed that you should constantly be learning, and it has become apparent that this old adage is necessary as more and more..

Read More

Keeping Sustainability During the Summer Months

Mon,Jun 21,2010 @ 01:32 PM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

Today is an important day for most Midwesterners because it marks the beginning of summer and the end of those cold, brutal winter months. With all the distractions of summer days, managers may begin to worry about one thing: their employee’s sustainability. Sustainability- to keep up or keep going. Everyone has those days, when work is the last place you want to be, and you’ve already..
Read More

Transform Like Kobe

Fri,Jun 18,2010 @ 03:12 PM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

In honor of the NBA playoffs, we have decided to go with basketball themed blogs, and how could we write blogs without mentioning Kobe. Kobe is one of the greatest basketball players of all time (being a Bulls fan, I won't say he's as good as Jordan), but with greatness comes controversy. Over the past few years, Kobe has been great and not necessarily fair to his teammates.

Read More

Even Ron Artest Can Teach Us a Thing or Two About Coaching

Fri,Jun 18,2010 @ 02:39 PM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

From infamous to famous, as most sports writers put it, Ron Artest has certainly made quite the comeback. It has been a long road for Artest ever since that brawl in Detroit, but it was one that he traveled well. There were many steps that the new NBA champion had to take to restore his superstar status, and many of these steps can be applied in the sales industry.

Read More

Learning to handle price objections successfully

Tue,Jun 15,2010 @ 11:17 AM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

Every sales person hates getting price objections, at one time or another, and every salesperson has heard these infamous words: "Your price is too high," or "I can get the same product a lot cheaper from someone else."
Read More

Build a High Performing Inside Sales Team

Fri,Jun 11,2010 @ 10:32 AM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

It is not always easy to build and maintain a high performance inside sales team. Team members have to know their product inside and out, they must understand need based selling, and most importantly, they must have a desire to succeed every day. However, employees do not just learn these skills; it takes practice, and behind every great team, there is a manager that gave them the tools and them..

Read More

The New Inside Selling Model

Fri,Jun 11,2010 @ 10:28 AM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

Read More

A new law to help increase employee training?

Thu,Jun 10,2010 @ 01:26 PM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

We often blog about the importance of employee development, the benefits of having coaching programs, and quite often we give away free content or share inexpensive or free employee training methods.  We offer up this information for several reasons, one it's what we do! We train people, and we have a passion for helping employees and management alike get better and help each other get better...
Read More

Why We Need To Coach

Wed,Jun 09,2010 @ 01:57 PM | Posted by: Tim Hagen

Coaching is much more effective when driving employee performance, especially  inside sales and customer service personnel. Management is about telling people what to do; whereas, coaching is about asking and understanding why performance levels are the way they are. The opportunity is for managers to learn how to coach to help drive performance and the bottom line.

Read More