“You’re price is too high.”

Its critical to coach everyday and inspire people to open their minds to getting better tomorrow. Invest in others and they will ultimately invest in themselves.

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..

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.

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.

So, you want to have a high performing sales team, but you don't know where to start. You could try reading hundreds of training books, you could send your employees to a seminar or you could have turned on the TV and watched the NBA playoffs.

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.

Here is another easy and inexpensive training reinforcement method that we use for our clients. Remember there are many reasons training reinforcement programs are important, including increased returns on investment, increased retention of knowledge, increased sales from better-trained teams, etc. 

I just spoke to a group about "Coaching Employees with Bad Attitudes" and it was a lot of fun. The thing that managers and leaders do not realize at times is when we do not confront or address employees with bad attitudes the "silence" is non-verbal permission to continue to behave that way. We must as leaders develop skills to confront issues and not people; therefore, we avoid the silence that..