We help companies build and tune their sales engine. What that means is we help every individual become both magnetic and unstoppable. The way we do that is by helping them build the knowledge, skill and discipline of exceptional performers. We are also tool builders. We build tools to codify the knowledge, skill and discipline of exceptional performers with the use of these tools. To ensure that people show up, stand out and break through in every room, in every Zoom, on every day in every way.
MasterCourses™
(our delivery options)
On-Demand
Your teams, whether they be sales, customer success or operations, choose their journey through our video-based, digital courses based on their specific needs. Our courses have now reached over 100,000 participants worldwide
In-Person
For more than 20 years, Sales Engine has delivered in-person Sales Kickoffs, Keynotes, Annual Rewards Conferences and many other events all over the world, from gatherings of thousands to intimate groups and everything in between.
Live-Virtual
Sales Engine has been called the “gold standard in virtual learning” for reaching participants all over the globe via live virtual sessions since long before the pandemic. Craig’s Virtual MasterCourses™ continue to attract thousands of participants worldwide.
GROUNDED
Sales is Progress
Sales is helping people make progress in their lives
- Understand the raw power of a growth mindset (knowledge)
- Learn to identify the distinct components of knowledge, skill and discipline and label them (skill)
- Get on – and stay on – a continuous cycle of performance improvement (discipline)
Perform 10x Better
Deliberate practice, not repetitive practice
- Understand the five things that must be true in order to get good at getting great at anything (knowledge)
- Learn to set goals every quarter that stretch your capabilities (skill)
- Give – and receive – performance feedback every week (discipline)
Learn By Doing
How the best of the best learn more and forget less
- Acknowledge that smart, sophisticated people make predictable errors in their learning process (knowledge)
- Realize the depth people go to to become experts (skill)
- Build a set of tools that will be critical to squeeze every bit of value out of anything you venture to learn (discipline)
Run Fantastic Meetings
YOUR meeting should be the best of everyone’s week
- Identify how to show up, stand out and break through in meetings in both the physical and virtual worlds (knowledge)
- Balance the competing constraints required to design meetings for impact (skill)
- Adopt the “Power 10” disciplines of running every meeting from here forward (discipline)
MAGNETIC
Ask and Listen
The two foundations of building stronger relationships
- Understand how different questions drive different outcomes and how to listen more deeply (knowledge)
- Develop the agility to shift between various levels of listening to deepen your understanding of the progress people are trying to make (skill)
- Curate a list of powerful questions that are ready at a moment’s notice (discipline)
What’s Your Story?
Right story, right time, right reason
- Apply the What’s Your Story™ methodology to curate, categorize, construct and convey your stories (knowledge)
- Understand how to design both the business and emotional arcs to tell powerful stories (skill)
- Build a personal Story Matrix™ to house your growing ‘quiver of arrows’ (discipline)
Write For Clarity
Your writing precedes you and stays behind after you leave. Make it count
- Understand how clarity, simplicity, structure and voice come together to fuel great writing (knowledge)
- Develop a keen sense of how to add humanity and energy to our writing to increase its impact (skill)
- Take risks so our writing stands apart (discipline)
Generate Positive Energy
Build your battery and learn how to charge it
- Gain perspective into the most effective actions to generate energy and become a source of power for others (knowledge)
- Move roadblocks out of the way that deplete energy (skill)
- Make one decision that will generate personal power over the next three months (discipline)
Build Brand You
Your personal brand is your insurance in an uncertain world
- Learn how to think and act like a publisher, such that you begin to put ‘edges’ around your personal brand (knowledge)
- Weave together various aspects of your brand that are truly differentiated (skill)
- Define a bucket of characteristics that make your brand easily identifiable (discipline)
Discover Their Progress
Curiosity is a superpower in a world saturated with information
- Understand the nature of curiosity and how great discovery begins with “switching on” the right mindset (knowledge)
- Learn how to translate insights into actions to design great discovery conversations (skill)
- Choose to stay in the ‘why’ (discipline)
Present With Panache
Deliver your presentations with dashing style
- Understand the depth of each of the three elements that drive great presentations – preparation, persuasion and performance (knowledge)
- Balance the three elements of great presentations to ensure you go beyond just showing up to standing out and breaking through (skill)
- Package your presentations as you would a gift to a loved one (discipline)
Team for Impact
Elite teams make each player better
- Define the two roles – Process Leader and Perspective Leader – that provide the “swim lanes” of team behavior (knowledge)
- Follow the rules of engagement that turn “colleagues” into “elite athletes” (skill)
- Choose to adopt the many disciplines that drive team performance (discipline)
Teach It Forward
Give your gifts to others
- How do adults learn, and what are the common traps they fall into? (knowledge)
- Embed stories, metaphors, analogies, hip pocket frameworks and other powerful teaching tools in your teaching (skill)
- Demonstrate your own dedication to deliberate practice and personal growth (discipline)
UNSTOPPABLE
What’s Your POV?
Be the most interesting person in any room
- Understand the framework for building a POV that fuels your conversations (knowledge)
- Surround your POV with evidence and questions that deepen your conversations (skill)
- Embrace the reality that some people will opt out of your POV (discipline)
Bounce Back Better
Build your resilience muscles to be ready for whatever life throws at you
- Understand the mental and physical aspects of resilience and how to bounce back from any challenge (knowledge)
- Learn to link the labels of negative experiences to actions that propel you forward (skill)
- Develop new routines that will make you better than you were before (discipline)
Practice Proactive Pursuit
Get up and get after it
- Understand the mindset that the most powerful prospectors adopt in order to succeed at this difficult set of expert actions (knowledge)
- Design a prospecting script that breaks through the noise and gets you meetings (skill)
- Decide where in each week you will engage in proactive pursuit (discipline)
Embrace Healthy Conflict
Not unhealthy peace
- Recognize the distinct characteristics of difficult conversations and the default behaviors that can steer us wrong (knowledge)
- Use tactical silence and questions to embrace the tension (skill)
- Turn listening into a superpower that actually builds the relationship even in the midst of conflict (discipline)
Negotiate More Ambitiously
Create more value and then claim it
- Construct a list of negotiable items to expand the range of possibilities (knowledge)
- Frame the negotiation such that you build both the size of the negotiated agreement and you deepen your relationship with your client (skill)
- Set ambitious goals for your negotiation (discipline)
COACH
Design Sales Culture
Build a strong, positive and powerful sales culture
- Define your sales culture by setting the high standards of an elite team (knowledge)
- Implement systems of coaching and practice to help sellers become 10X better than they are right now (skill)
- Show, don’t tell, by modeling the many sets of knowledge, skill and discipline (discipline)
Practice Makes Permanent
Weekly practice builds layer upon layer of greatness
- Design your week’s practice sessions to cover both the fundamentals and the higher order skills and disciplines that make sellers the best of the best (knowledge)
- Understand how to balance the “tough” and “love” components of tough love (skill)
- Fight the gravitational pull of planning, reporting and busy work that takes time away from practice (discipline)
Create An Alliance
Focus your attention on what your seller is practicing
- Ensure that the three essential elements of an alliance are present in this conversation (knowledge)
- Asking any clarifying questions about what’s being practiced and getting granular on specific knowledge, skill or discipline being worked on (skill)
- Choosing the appropriate actions that will support improved performance (discipline)
Offer Performance Feedback
Good coaches say; “Nice job.” Great coaches give feedback
- Prioritizing the most important ‘did well’ and ‘do differently’ in each coaching interaction (knowledge)
- Moving through emotions with care, managing defensiveness and unpacking why and how things could have been different (skill)
- Limiting the conversation to only one ‘did well’ and one ‘do differently’ (discipline)
Check In Weekly
Turn your weekly check ins towards future performance
- Recognizing patterns emerging over time – good and bad – that will help you shape the right actions moving forward (knowledge)
- Carefully calibrate the right actions moving forward – not too many and not too few (skill)
- Keeping your coachee focused on future performance improvement, immediate challenges and the actions needed to overcome them and
- improve (discipline)
Set Ambitious Goals
Create concrete, stretch goals that people know how to achieve
- Mastery of the SMARTTSS goal setting process in order to ensure the complete definition of a concrete goal (knowledge)
- Ensuring that the coachee is OUTSIDE of the comfort zone, but not so far as to be in the panic zone (skill)
- Pressing for concreteness, for specificity and for well-defined actions in service of the goal (discipline)
Crush Every Presentation
Focus your coaching on the three phases of fantastic presentations
- Ensuring that the seller is covering all three stages of giving GREAT presentations; preparation, execution and follow through (knowledge)
- Balancing preparation, persuasion and performance (skill)
- Choosing time for presentation practice and feedback (discipline)
Learn Better Deeper
Help everyone you coach create layers of learning
- Ensuring that all pieces of the Learn By Doing process are in place for a successful learning journey (knowledge)
- Asking questions that go deeper into the learning process for turning knowledge into action (skill)
- Focusing on PROCESS…not wishful thinking (discipline)
Turn Underperformance Around
Don’t let it linger
- Understanding how far underwater someone is, and the distance to travel to get back on track (knowledge)
- Discussing and locking down concrete, immediate actions your coachee can take to correct performance (skill)
- Signaling that this is going to be a tough conversation and framing the seriousness of the situation (discipline)
Build Stronger Resilience
Be the rock that helps people through difficult times
- Developing an awareness of the stages we all go through when facing setbacks big and small (knowledge)
- Not jumping to solution, but instead calibrating the time spent in listening, asking questions and then making recommendations to get your coachee back on the path to bouncing back better (skill)
- Moving your coachee through each step of the resilience process, adjusting in real time the amount of push needed at each step and gently
- but powerfully guiding your coachee to each successive step (discipline)
Map Your Career
Guide the career aspirations of your people
- Asking great questions, challenging the responses and guiding your coachee to set an ambitious career path (knowledge)
- Listening for functional, social and emotional needs to emerge in the context of a desired career, and using framing to help your coachee see different possibilities (skill)
- Expanding the field of possibility (discipline)
Recruit The Best
Source A players and bring them on
- Ensuring that your process has a host of different elements that go far beyond the reading of a resume and the assessment of sales ability (knowledge)
- Designing interactions – both inside and especially outside of the interviews themselves – that allow you and your team to observe this candidate’s character, habits of mind and behaviors, and how they go above and beyond…or don’t (skill)
- Executing slow yeses by digging deeper and going farther into a candidate’s background than a standard interview process (discipline)
Consulting Services
(our process)
Assessment
Is your sales engine pointed in the right direction? Is the sales team structured to maximize top-line revenue? Is each sales resource equipped with the knowledge, skill and discipline they need to succeed? These are just a few of the questions we assess with our 10-point diagnostic of your sales engine.
Recommendation
As founders and CEOs ourselves, we always appreciated directness from the consultants we hired to do work for us. So we bring this same spirit and transparency to you. We speak the truth, and we don’t pull punches. Once we have assessed your sales engine, we deliver a very tactical 30-60-90-day plan to fine-tune that engine and step on the gas.
Sales Toolkit
Throughout our work with your sales team, we are watching – closely – the interactions they have with each other, internal colleagues and customers. We are also observing the tools they use, and don’t use. Next we build tools…together. We design and build a robust toolkit and we put every salesperson in a position to reach mastery with those tools.
Case Studies
Our Results:
Top 2 Tech Company in the World
We have been tasked by this client to help design and build a sales culture as their competitive landscape has fundamentally changed. Three years ago, we helped design their Company Way of Selling in order to equip their 11,000 sellers and 1,200 sales leaders with the knowledge, skill and discipline to elevate their game. Three years and 6,000 people in, we are being asked to expand and deepen our work because this client is seeing bigger average deal sizes, better stakeholder mapping, more robust leadership of the sales team, and increasingly transformed sellers. As a result of this work, we were asked to be partners in creating the “Company Sales School” – a fully immersive onboarding experience for all new salespeople who they believe will make the entire company even more competitive.
Our Results:
Top Immigration Technology Platform
We have been engaged in a multi-year project resulting in the tripling of company revenue, even while reducing the sales force footprint. Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) has increased dramatically over the past few years as the sales force has adopted our “Sales Toolkit” approach to designing each and every ‘touch’ of the company sales process. Our frequent, intense sales boot camps with CRO and management team, the sales team, and their internal delivery partners have enabled them to show up to their clients as a finely-tuned team. And the clients feel it. Each and every interaction with clients is now designed to delight, and the results speak for themselves. Deal size is up, sales cycle is down, retention is up, and the CEO and investors are delighted.
We are incredibly proud of success stories like these, and the results we’ve driven for more than 100 clients. We would be pleased to connect you with any of them.