Frontline managers have some of the most difficult jobs in sales.

You manage anywhere from four to eight sales reps on a day-to-day basis, helping them win deals and grow their careers. Meanwhile, you’re handling exceptions, monitoring the pipeline, reporting sales forecasts up to executives, and bringing new initiatives back to the team.

Exceptional frontline managers do all of that and more, all while hitting their numbers. But we know from experience that it’s not easy.

To help sales management get ahead, we talked with customers and our own frontline leaders about their challenges. Then, we brainstormed some tactics you can use to:

You dedicated your 2020 sales kickoff to rolling out MEDDIC. Everything went off without a hitch. Your sales team hit the ground humming about the new sales methodology. Then, one month out . . . crickets.

Or perhaps you spent over $30,000 bringing in a sales trainer to get your team up to speed on MEDDIC. The trainer was a big hit with your sales reps and managers. Yet, three weeks later, only a handful of your reps are filling out MEDDIC fields, and managers are back to their old ways. Sound familiar?

It doesn’t matter how you roll out MEDDIC to your sales team. If you ignore these oft-overlooked challenges (and how to sidestep them), your MEDDIC initiative will inevitably fail.

*Note: While this article focuses on implementing MEDDIC, the challenges and recommendations we bring up also apply to many other sales methodologies.

In the past few years, Zendesk brought its sales forecasts from 25% accuracy to beat the 5% industry standard and achieve an astonishing 1%. How?

The company owed the improvement in large part to implementing MEDDPICC, a variation of the MEDDIC sales methodology. Along with a second variation, MEDDPIC, each methodology provides a powerful foundation and common language for qualifying sales opportunities.

All three methods help sales teams home in on the best deals and make sure they close, but in slightly different ways.

Outside sales reps deal with challenges on the road that most office-bound reps rarely think about — what to wear, where to go, how to get there, and when to report back add multiple layers of complexity to sales.

The challenges don’t stop there, however. Many reps struggle to get quality sales information into their CRM during the day (and the last thing anyone wants to do is spend the evening in Salesforce). What’s more, they work apart from the rest of the sales team and miss out on the same progress reports and motivators their peers get in the office.

It’s also difficult for sales managers who are trying to give them guidance from afar.

When it comes to sales forecasting, people usually talk about the big five forecast data points: forecast category, stage, amount, next step, and close date. Problem is, while these data points are enough to create a sales forecast, they’re not enough to ensure the forecast is realistic.

Companies spend a lot of money on sales kickoff meetings. They often drop $1,000-$2,000 a sales rep on the event alone. Add in travel and entertainment and that cost increases by at least $1,500-$2,000 per rep.

It’s no surprise then that companies seek a return on this investment. They want their SKOs to rally the troops around a new product, new pricing, new packaging, or a new sales process that’s going to make 2020 a massive success.

The problem is while SKOs are great for building excitement and initial momentum, they’re not so good at teaching and reinforcing new, long-lasting behaviors.

Imagine going to college for two days and expecting to learn everything you need to know for your degree. Then add bright lights, emotional speakers, a whirlwind of new information, and an array of food and drink. It’s a miracle you get out with the knowledge you need to immediately start executing on a big, new initiative.

Now consider the abysmal statistics for retaining what you were able to pick up. A whopping 85%-90% of training just floats away after only 120 days, sometimes sooner. Where does it go? Who knows.

So, you’re about to announce a major initiative at your SKO, and you 100% need your sales team to execute on it when it’s over. How do you make that happen?

You reinforce it.

Reinforcement ensures your sales team takes the things they learned at SKO and executes on them even after the event becomes a distant memory. Here’s how you can use Troops to create sales reinforcement that helps your team adopt the very behaviors they need to make your 2020 sales initiative a success.