Short Learning Program for Sales & Business

In this course, author and Fortune 500 sales coach Jeff Bloomfield helps you gain insight into your customer’s business problems and use those insights to guide your sales questions. He teaches you how to create and ask effective, probing questions; validate the business impact of your solution; and dig deeper when necessary. Learn how to maintain the right tone throughout the conversation leading to a more successful sales interaction and a long-lasting relationship with the customer.

As a manager, success is predicated on your ability to achieve goals working with your team. The good news is that management is a skill that can be learned. This path is designed to provide you with the key considerations, skills and competencies to help you become and succeed as a manager.

Learn the critical skills and competencies for new managers.

Discover essential interview techniques and questions.

Create cultures of motivation and accountability.

No matter how innovative a company’s product is, marketers are a must to get the product in front of the right potential customers. Establish the knowledge you need to become a marketing specialist, and get ready to enter an exciting and fast-paced world with a solid knowledge of best practices and strategies.

Discover the most important marketing concepts.

Explore your company’s unique position.

Analyze potential customers and plan to effectively get your message in front of them.

Sales managers lead professional teams to success by utilizing a variety of skills, from directing team focus and analyzing data to mentoring and developing a sales plan. Build the solid foundation you need to hit the ground running as a new sales manager.

Learn how to recruit, train, retain, and manage a high-performing sales team.

Motivate individual salespeople and teams with compensation and quotas.

Understand how to create and manage sales territories.

Black Belts operate under Master Black Belts to apply Six Sigma methodology to specific projects. This learning path gives you the training you need to operate as a Six Sigma Black Belt.

Review foundational Six Sigma course work.

Explore and practice Six Sigma Black Belt content.

Demonstrate your mastery of Six Sigma principles, philosophies, and related tools by becoming a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt.

Six Sigma Yellow Belts understand the fundamentals of Lean Six Sigma methodology and operational excellence. Learn how to help your team navigate more complex process improvement projects with Six Sigma Yellow Belt skills.

Identify and practice essential Lean Six Sigma techniques.

Apply operational excellence to processes and services.

Develop skills including project management and statistics.

Social media has become a critical part of how most successful organizations engage with potential customers. As a result, social media advertising specialists have become an extremely vital part of a marketing department. Get the skills you need to become a specialist in this exciting field.

Discover important concepts in modern online marketing.

Identify the most appropriate platform for your strategy.

Craft and execute an advertising plan.

In this course, Bob McGannon helps you understand what business ethics is and why it is critical to the success of your business (especially in the era of social media). He also describes some of the behaviors and expectations you can put in place at your company today to promote ethical behavior from top to bottom. Bob also discusses ethics in relationship to specific business scenarios: working with suppliers and vendors, organizational decision-making, and doing business internationally. He addresses how to handle business ethics violations and provides a checklist of items for staff to evaluate if something is ethical.

ASU professor Eddie Davila covers all the basics, explaining concepts such as business goals, stakeholders, profits, and various types of businesses. He then outlines what you need to think about if you were to start your own business, such as determining what your product or service will be, making and delivering your product or service, and funding your business. He also reviews the basics of the people side of business: managing employees and developing customer relationships. Last, he covers the financial and information management aspects of business and provides a basic explanation of economics.

Discover the secrets to effective business writing and crafting messages that others want to read and act on. Judy Steiner-Williams, senior lecturer at Kelley School of Business, introduces you to the 10 Cs of strong business communication and provides you with before-and-after writing samples that give you the opportunity to apply each principle and sharpen your communication skills. Judy also points out common grammar and writing mistakes and shares special considerations for formats like emails and reports.

Experienced entrepreneur and consultant Mike Figliuolo walks through the process of defining your business, researching the market, and determining your product. Once you have figured out what your product or service will be, Mike provides guidance for thinking through your sales strategy, day-to-day operations, staffing, and financial forecasting. A sample business plan is provided, so you can follow along with the development of a real-world company.

In this course, leadership expert Mike Figliuolo explains the most common business topics and terms you need to be familiar with—business models, financials, strategy, sales and marketing, R&D, P&L, EBITDA, and other key concepts.

He leads you through a series of questions that will help you understand your business better, such as:

1. What business are you in?
2. What’s your market and who is your competition?
3. What problem does your business solve?
4. How are your products and services created?
5. What are your pricing and growth strategies?
6. How do you measure performance?

This course outlines these commonalities and distills them into 11 essential steps. Learn about how gathering information to evaluate potential clients can help you determine how your products or services can solve their problem. Once you’ve done your homework, discover how to present and sell your product, follow up with your customer, and continually hone your sales process.

Competitive advantage is not about how good you are but about whether you are faster, better, or cheaper than competitors in your market. In this course, global strategy expert Anil Gupta, a professor at the University of Maryland, provides an overview of the sources of competitive advantage. He explains how and why companies are always simultaneously competing in two arenas—onstage and backstage—and how competitive advantage is dynamic; an advantage you have today may not be an advantage tomorrow.

Having business acumen means understanding how your business operates. If you are interested in moving up in an organization, you need to understand what your organization’s competitive advantage is, what drives performance, and how you compete against other organizations. This knowledge helps you exercise good judgment when making business decisions. Leadership expert Mike Figliuolo explains the most common business topics and terms you need to be familiar with.

Learn how to generate innovative solutions in work situations. Review how to develop, design, and create new applications, ideas, relationships, systems, and products. Discover how to use creative and alternative thinking to develop new ideas for and answers to work-related problems.

Identify what creativity is and how it thrives.

Learn how to drive success through innovation.

Develop behaviors to generate creative and innovative ideas.

Digital transformation is an ongoing force in business today. But what is it exactly and how can leaders navigate it? In this learning path, business leaders can understand the larger context for this massive change and strategy effort, begin to see where their company lies along the continuum, and discover how best to navigate through the complex terrain long term. This path complements the Digital Transformation in Practice and Digital Transformation for Tech Leaders learning paths, highlighting what leaders need to know and consider as they evolve their strategy.

Understand the essentials of digital transformation.

Identify where your company is along the continuum of digital transformation.

Discover what you need to do to bring your organization up to speed.

In this course, sales coach Dean Karrel explores the challenges and rewards of working from the field. He explains the basics of managing your sales territory, including the importance of being organized and managing your time well. He also covers how to best work with your manager, as well as how to manage the challenges and opportunities you may encounter when working remotely.

New to Microsoft 365? Get up to speed fast with the core Office 365 tools—Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook—as well as newer collaboration apps like Teams and Planner. Plus, learn the basics of the Windows 10 operating system.

Learn to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and SharePoint.

Explore the new teamwork and collaboration tools in Office 365.

Familiarize yourself with the Windows 10 operating system.

New to Microsoft PowerPoint? Get up to speed fast with this popular presentation software. In this learning path, you can learn the basics of creating engaging presentations in PowerPoint.

Create, format, and organize presentations.

Enhance slides with images, audio, and video.

Learn time-saving tips.

Leadership consultant Mike Figliuolo knows how to help you turn the ideas in your head into clear and compelling proposals. His Structured Thought and Communication method is designed to help you clearly articulate the value of your big idea and align it with the needs of stakeholders. While going through the method, you’ll get to see how to build an architecture for your idea, create a story that highlights the benefits of your idea, and identify the data that helps prove the value of your idea. By the end of this course, you’ll be ready to define, test, and communicate your idea to get the support and buy-in you seek.

Learn how to improve business processes and execute your business strategy more consistently and reliably over time. In this learning path, discover how to apply operational excellence techniques to improve your organization’s processes, products, and services.

Identify and implement effective business processes.

Learn the components of quality and supply chain management.

Explore operational excellence concepts and tools.

In this course, best-selling author and global inside sales expert Josiane Feigon helps you build the trust you need to capture the interest from today’s buyer. She helps you understand what attributes you need to be successful, what your customer expects from you, what tools you should use, and how to establish your plan, set your goals, and do your pre-call research. Once you are prepared, she walks you through the specific techniques of the sale, including getting past gatekeepers, overcoming objections, and closing the sale.

Hear from Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, about the rationale for exercising compassion in leadership. Jeff shares how he turned his past experiences into valuable lessons that influence the way he approaches business today. He tells about realizations he had during his career regarding effective and ineffective management styles and how his gradual awareness, coupled with a desire for improvement, led to transformation and change. Then, he conveys ways that organizations benefit from establishing a considerate culture including reduced conflict and increased productivity.

In this course, marketing professor Drew Boyd shows you how to determine who your key customers are, and a strategy for managing your customers and your organization. Drew dives into the basics of key account management, explaining what it is, why it is important, and how to tackle the key account management process. He also shares how to select key accounts, develop a key account strategy, hire and train key account managers, and measure key account results.

Lean Six Sigma combines the principles of lean enterprise and lean manufacturing with Six Sigma to improve performance and systematically remove waste. Supply chain expert and professor Steven Brown explains the basics of using Lean Six Sigma as a structure for your improvement efforts. Steven outlines the process stages in Six Sigma (define, measure, analyze, improve, and control), along with the Lean toolkit: the 5s principles, kanban (scheduling), downtime, poka-yoke (error proofing), and kaizen (continuous improvement). He also explains how leadership works within Lean Six Sigma, the principles of project execution, and how Lean Six Sigma is applied to the service sector and supply chain management.

Logistics plays a critical role in a company’s success. In this course, Professor Steven Brown explains the role (and importance) of logistics, from factory to customer and supplier to factory. He also covers some key decisions, processes, and strategies: Do you make products or buy them? What kind of transportation do you use? Where are your warehouses? How do you manage inventory? And what information system do you use? These lessons will help you understand the importance of logistics and help your company prepare for efficient delivery, distribution, and inventory.

Deliver more successful sales presentations. In this course, sales and marketing expert Jeff Bloomfield shows you how to deliver your value proposition in the right way and bring presentations to life. Learn how to make a connection with the listeners so that they are more receptive to what you have to say and discover how to conduct yourself in a more confident and professional manner. Jeff highlights key mannerisms that affect your delivery, such as eye contact, body language, and intonation, as well as your overall appearance.

Learn to become a manager your employees admire and respect and someone your boss can rely on. Britt Andreatta, director of learning and development for lynda.com, shows you how to choose the right style of management for you and your workplace, hire and onboard employees, address performance problems, resolve conflict, and manage time, budgets, and performance goals. Plus, learn how to handle tricky situations like transitioning from a peer to a manager, managing multiple generations, and letting employees go.

Todd Dewett, PhD, shares the tips respected and motivated managers use to improve rapport, navigate tricky situations, build better relationships, and drive the business forward. Each week, we will release two tips ranging from avoiding the dreaded micromanagement to managing a multigenerational workforce, cultivating better listening skills, and developing an understanding of your organization’s politics.

In this course, PM expert Bob McGannon helps leaders plan and deliver complex international projects with teams and products based in multiple countries. He helps leaders understand how culture, language, and time zone differences can hamper successful collaboration and how to adapt your communication style to bridge these gaps. Bob also shows how to find and nurture managers who will champion international projects, and shares tips to ensure the ongoing success of projects.

In this course, Bob McGannon outlines the critical elements for successfully managing a technical team. Since you are dealing with highly skilled workers, it is important for you to focus on WHAT needs to be accomplished, rather than HOW to accomplish goals. Other critical skills include knowing your role and what decisions to make, balancing the needs of your stakeholders and customers while allowing for creativity within your team, supporting and rewarding differing creative styles, and much more. You’ll also learn a model for dividing, tracking, and sharing the accomplishments of your team.

Group dynamics impact productivity and employee satisfaction, so it is important for managers to cultivate positive relationships among coworkers. Join Todd Dewett as he explains how to effectively manage teams. This course covers motivating your team, managing team performance, establishing your identity and authority within a group, addressing conflict, and making work fun. Full of practical tips and useful strategies, this course is a great reference for first-time managers and for more experienced managers who may need to address a specific issue with their team.

In this course, author, keynote speaker, and coach Dr. Todd Dewett shows how to manage your reputation and one of your most important work relationships: your rapport with your boss. Discover how to understand your manager’s world, preferences, and lingo; support your boss’s goals; be a help rather than a hindrance; and lead by offering solutions. Plus, learn how to manage particularly difficult types of bosses, such as the boss who is never available, the mean boss, or the boss who acts better than everyone else.

CEO and author Jeff Bloomfield helps you create a sales process that is easy to follow, keeps you on track, and helps consistently close sales. He also helps you identify what processes lie within your overall sales process already. What is your process for prospecting? For client education? For implementation and follow-up? Learn how to create your own winning formula to turn prospects into customers—one step at a time.

Territory management helps salespeople ensure they are spending their time wisely: doing the right activities with the best customers. But as time goes on, even the most exciting territories can seem small or stale. This course focuses on how to get the most out of your territory to achieve maximum prospecting results and maintain proper coverage. Jeff Bloomfield helps you organize your territory by company size or geography, identify the right areas to prospect, and grow your territory via networking. Last, he addresses the importance of ongoing records management: keeping an updated record of who has moved into your territory, who has left, and more. These sales tips will help you keep a positive attitude, stay organized, and breathe new life into well-trod territories.

As data strategies become pervasive in all business and institutional sectors, Excel will become even more popular as a bridge tool for non-data scientists doing more work, more often, with data. This learning path is the perfect entry point to the world of data-centric projects and skills.

Master statistics functions in Excel.

Learn the data analytics and modeling capabilities of Excel.

Explore how to work with R, a tool for advanced data work.

Drew Boyd helps you define the sales task, which guides all decisions such as who you hire, how you deploy your team, and how you manage them day-to-day. He then helps you identify and evaluate all of the components that make for a successful sales strategy: customer base, product/service mix, sales activities, sales support, and sales process. Lastly, he helps you determine the impact you are having on your customer, conduct a win/loss analysis, and evaluate sales deployment.

In this course, instructor Eddie Davila explains why it is important to measure performance and highlights some of the most common errors in measuring your own company’s performance. He explains what makes a good metric, how to evaluate your current measurement system to see if it aligns with your organization’s goals, and how you can develop and test a system of measurement from scratch. Along the way, he also covers the importance of data visualization tools such as dashboards and infographics.

n this course, Brian Ahearn draws on the work of social psychologists and behavioral economists to provide concrete, actionable items and transferrable ideas to each stage of the sales process. To begin, learn the eight psychological concepts that you can employ throughout the sales workflow: reciprocity, liking, social proof, authority, consistency, scarcity, compare/contrast, and because. Next, learn how these concepts play a role in the early stages of the sales cycle, as well as how they can help you realize the qualities of your ideal client, deliver presentations, handle objections, negotiate, close, and ask for  referrals. Lastly, learn how to grow from each sale and continuously refine your approach.

In this course, sales coach Dean Karrel provides career advice for anyone who wants to become a sales professional. Learn tips for keeping things simple, focusing on the positive, recognizing the accomplishments of other members of your team, and keeping your ego in check. When it comes to developing relationships with others, learn the basics of a proper greeting, such as eye contact, a handshake, and even a smile. Dean also emphasizes the importance of knowing how to listen, remembering people’s names, and following through on a commitment.

Bonnie Biafore has always been fascinated by how things work and how to make things work better. In this course, she explains the fundamentals of project management, from defining the problem, establishing project goals and objectives, and building a project plan to managing team resources, meeting deadlines, and closing the project. Along the way, she provides tips for reporting on project performance, keeping a project on track, and gaining customer acceptance.

Purchasing departments add value and maximize savings for their organizations. In this course, supply chain expert and professor Steven Brown outlines the purchasing process and provides guidance for evaluating, selecting managing suppliers. He also addresses the roles of cost management and strategic sourcing, and the legal and ethical considerations involved. Plus, learn about special topics such as indirect spend on services (including transportation and utilities), e-sourcing, and supply chain performance management.

In this course, sales coach Dean Karrel explains how to effectively manage your sales channels. He discusses the sales channel landscape and the variables that impact success and shows how to map out a profitable and effective plan. Dean covers everything from surveying the marketplace to handling channel conflict. He also covers weighing costs versus revenue, forecasting sales, and conducting reviews of key accounts and channels. To wrap up, Dean walks through creating a channel marketing structure and uncovering opportunities to expand products or services.

In this course, sales coach and trainer Lisa Earle McLeod outlines the three elements of sales coaching—observation, customer impact analysis, and feedback—and explains what you need to do at each stage to achieve the results you want. To demonstrate these concepts, she highlights the difference between a coaching call, a demonstration call, and a joint call, and explains what circumstances necessitate each type. She outlines the distinct role a coach plays in developing skills and shares how to decide who to coach and who not to coach, and how coaching might require losing a sale. Lisa also highlights critical coaching moments—such as difficult sales calls or after a loss or a big win—and role-plays some typical coaching situations to illustrate common hurdles and challenges.

Explore how to effectively use Salesforce Leads to qualify and track potential customers. Because lead forms can be difficult records to manage, this course provides best practices you can apply to design the layout of and types of fields in your forms to set up your conversion workflow for success. In this course, review the purpose of the lead, discover what leads are and how the Leads feature works so you can configure the definition of a lead for your organization. See how to create and manage leads and maintain quality data by keeping your data clean.

In this course, sales and marketing professor Drew Boyd shares a step-by-step process for creating and managing effective sales forecasts. He takes you through how to define your market category, create the right processes, select the right forecasting technique, and collect data. In addition, he reveals how to use both qualitative and quantitative forecasting methods.

In this course, former Genentech senior leader and Brain trust founder Jeff Bloomfield explains why and how the best salespeople learn how to see through the eyes of their customers. He outlines strategies to help you connect with and understand your customers’ needs and position your product or service as the solution to their problem. He also provides a step-by-step how-to guide to creating your own sales process or identifying gaps in your existing one.

Bestselling author and sales coach Lisa Earle McLeod has helped companies like Google and Roche build passionate, purpose-driven sales organizations. In this course, sales professionals will learn how to negotiate with the best interests of their organization and their customers at heart, by uncovering their own noble purpose. She also identifies common negotiation traps and ways to negotiate that don’t just close the sale today but build longer-term relationships for tomorrow.

Fortune 500 sales coach Jeff Bloomfield helps you cultivate the right mindset for prospecting: showing how to shut off distractions so you can focus on your prospects and their objectives/concerns and how your service or product can help them in a unique way. He also provides insight on setting up your schedule for success and rewarding yourself to stay motivated.

Mike Figliuolo, managing director of thought LEADERS and former McKinsey consultant, helps you set employee goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Using the SMART framework, he shows you how to develop goals that are achievable and appropriate to your employees’ roles. Along with providing guidance on how to link individual employee goals to organizational strategy, Mike walks you through the different types of goals, including bottom-up, zero-based, commit, and stretch goals.

Professional organizer and productivity trainer Suzanna Kaye teaches you how to streamline and automate even the most tedious tasks to help make your business more productive. Learn how to simplify communication with auto responders and response templates, and manage event and project communications, customer service, social media, and email marketing endeavors. Expect to learn about ou­tsourcing and delegation including criteria for determining what can and should be outsourced, and discover the top applications for simplifying and automating aspects of a business, including transcription and paper management.

Dr. Richard Chua explains the fundamentals of Six Sigma a customer-focused, data-driven approach to improvement. He will go over the basic concepts, including critical-to-quality (CTQ) requirements, variation, defects per million opportunities (DPMO), the roles and belts of Six Sigma professionals, and the criteria for identifying Six Sigma projects successfully. The rest of the course walks through the five phases of Six Sigma DMAIC Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control and the steps, data, and key deliverables involved in each phase.

Mike Figliuolo has a simple five-step process for solving problems and leading your business through everyday uncertainty and larger change initiatives. Learn to pin the problem down and define it, generate possible solutions, determine the best solution, and create a clear recommendation to solve your particular challenge.

In this course, Professor Eddie Davila provides a detailed overview of all of the links in the typical supply chain. He explains what is involved in purchasing inventory and setting up supplier relationships, what you need to consider when deciding how to manufacture and design your product, and, lastly, how to address the logistics of distribution and delivery. Plus, get a glimpse into the world of the supply chain manager by discussing some of the hottest issues in SCM today: how to go global, the role of ethics and sustainability, and how SCM can help with disaster relief.

Explore today’s best tools, technologies, and tactics for simplifying business processes. Professional organizer and productivity trainer Suzanna Kaye helps you work faster and more efficiently by automating tedious tasks to help make your business more productive. Learn how to simplify communication using autoresponders and response templates, manage event and project communications, customer service, social media, and email marketing tasks.

In this course, sales trainer and coach Lisa Earle McLeod explains why many salespeople find this transition difficult and shows how to overcome the challenges that come with tackling this new role. She outlines the basics of sales management, focusing specifically on issues where new sales managers can get stuck, such as sales pipeline management, sales skills coaching, helping direct reports with their accounts, and attracting and retaining talent. Lisa provides guidance on how to hold effective sales meetings and work with other departments—such as marketing, accounting, and product—who are critical to your success. She also shares how to deal with failure and grapple with a challenging market.

In this course, intellectual property lawyer Dana Robinson answers these questions and more. Find out how trade secrets can protect your idea from being stolen or disclosed and what is and is not covered in a confidentiality or nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Learn what it means to misappropriate a trade secret and what employers can do to avoid liability.

Coach Todd Dewett reveals how you can create a productive work environment at home by structuring your day correctly, dedicating a space to work, and avoiding distractions. Once your workspace is established, he shares best practices for staying in touch with your collocated team. Last, he addresses the most common challenges encountered by remote workers: feeling isolated, navigating office politics from afar, and communicating virtually.