Highlights[01:22] - From interning for IBM to building an illustrious 34-year sales and management career.[03:16] - Becoming a career salesperson.[06:37] - Why it’s critical to master how to have highly effective interpersonal conversations with customers.[09:56] - The ineffective sales training strategy that is hurting your organization and how to turn things around.[15:35] - Setting guidelines and expectations so you never have to micromanage.[20:01] - Seller motivation: Why it matters and how to decode it.[22:15] - Challenges that women in sales face that their male counterparts don’t.[23:09] - Teaching sales agility at all levels of an organization.[26:50] - The best sales management and leadership advice ever.In this episode of the Transformed Sales Podcast, I had a chat with Michelle Vazzana, the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for VantagePoint Performance, a global sales management training and development firm. She co-authored “Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance,” a book about developing sales strategy and generating company results. Michelle has personally trained and coached thousands of salespeople, sales managers, and sales leaders. She has designed and facilitated programs for effective sales management, coaching and reinforcement, face-to-face selling, major account sales strategy, and telesales.VantagePoint is the leading global sales effectiveness firm and the only sales performance organization that offers diagnostic base training and consulting solutions. She has more than 34 years of sales and management experience and is a prolific researcher and sought-after speaker. She has conducted the most extensive research on the topic of sales coaching practices and is the author of “Crashing Quota”Michelle will talk about the key fundamentals of sales management and sales coaching like what sales managers can do to create programs that fit their seller's circumstances and why sales agility is critical to high performance. She will also share her knowledgeable insights on sales innovation, sales management research, and evidence-based best practices of top performers. If you’re a sales associate, manager, executive, or anyone looking to up your sales management game, then don’t miss this episode.Quotes“Sales more than ever before just requires flexibility and agility” - Michelle Vazzana“Management is a lot more science, sales is a lot more art” - Michelle Vazzana“The most successful sales managers put a process in place and give their sellers predictability in the way they manage” - Michelle Vazzana“Organizations can’t depend on their sales managers to be the primary trainers of their salespeople. And when they do that, it burns out the manager, and it underserves the seller” - Michelle Vazzana“No matter how good your sales training is, your manager has to coach to it and reinforce it” - Michelle Vazzana“The only time micromanagement is necessary is when you have an underperformer” - Michelle Vazzana“When you set guidelines and expectations, you won’t have to micromanage because your sales team will be very clear on what you expect, why you expect it, and how it’s gonna help them ” - Michelle VazzanaResources Mentioned:Cracking the Sales Management Code By Michelle Vazzana and Jason Jordan -