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Coaches know how crucial it is to continue training during the off-season and throughout the year, whether you’re in competition or not. But your athletes may not fully grasp the importance… So how do you motivate your players to continue their training? How do you instill discipline and accountability when you don’t have your normal face-to-face practice time? Each players’ level of improvement is correlated to the time you, as a coach, put in to help personalize their development plans. So it’s especially important to set specific goals with each player and track progress throughout the off-season. To best do this, you’ll need some sort of system to document and track players’ goals and plans, keeping them motivated and accountable throughout the off-season. Let’s dive into the 3 critical steps for helping athletes set and achieve goals during the off-season. Step 1: Hold a goal setting session with each athlete In order to see improvement and goal achievement from your players, it’s important that they understand where they need to improve. At the end of the season, sit down personally with each player to review what went well and what didn’t. And set realistic goals together that align to their personal motivations. Key: Athletes who set goals are more successful and productive than those who don't. Step 2: Convert goals into personalized activity plans Goals alone are not effective without the commitment, desire, and a plan to achieve them. Especially in the off-season, it’s important that athletes have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them and what they need to do each day to achieve their goals. Work with each player to develop a customized training plan. Focus on the outcomes achieved by performing the right activities with the proper intensity, so that they don’t fall into the trap of easy, routine workouts that don’t foster improvement. Key: A goals without a plan is just a dream. Step 3: Track Performance – Execute & Measure As your team trains during the off-season, seeing daily progress towards their goals will help keep them motivated, and daily activities won’t just seem like busy work. Taking a results-oriented approach and providing visibility of personal achievements to all players will keep the team connected and accountable, and motivated through friendly competition. Key: Focus on outcomes and the activities that get you there. In addition to setting and tracking goals, it’s important to keep players connected and committed. Download our whitepaper for more actionable details on each of the three steps as well as some additional tips to driving accountability, community, and motivation during the off-season.

We recently had the honor of interviewing Coach Bruce Brown, Founder of Proactive Coaching. With over 30 years of coaching, teaching, and athletic directing in public, private, and college level organizations, he shared some great tips around motivating athletes, teaching character and integrity, and inspiring confident, tough minded competitors. These tips translate to corporate teams as well, so whether you’re a leader of a group of athletes or a team of salespeople, you’ll likely find these insights valuable. Motivating Teams Because of the current pandemic, athletes are disconnected from their teams and coaches, which is typically a big source of motivation. So how can we motivate and inspire athletes throughout this “extended off-season” and going forward? Coach Brown says it all comes down to accountability, and that there are two levels of accountability that athletes must maintain: Accountable for yourself: An athlete is accountable for themselves and you can count on them to take care of what they’re responsible for. Accountable to others: An athlete feels accountable to their team or to other people. They have a collective responsibility to not let others down. According to Coach Brown, the second level of accountability is the most important. When individuals feel that obligation to others, they make great teammates, and when whole teams share that collective responsibility, everything becomes magnified and reliable, and success is all but guaranteed. Building Character & Integrity In his coaching, Brown similarly gives weight to the building of character and integrity in athletes. But how do you teach a value or a virtue? “All coaches know the rules of motor learning, or how to teach a physical skill: You start with defining the skill, modeling the skill, shaping the skill, and then reinforcing the skill. You can teach values like courage and integrity in the same way.” Let’s take integrity, for example: You’d start by defining integrity: Yes means yes, no means no, your handshake seals the deal, your word is good, your signature has value, you are who you say you are. From there you want to make sure to model the value yourself, because as they say, actions speak louder than words. Finally, the fun part – reinforcement. Keep an eye out for your students or athletes demonstrating the value and give them praise! But perhaps most importantly, be intentional. The more clearly you can define the values you want to see out of your players, the better chance people have of understanding and buying into them. Starting with “why” and a clear characterization creates extraordinary team cultures. Inspiring confident, tough minded competitors When we asked Coach Brown about his tips for inspiring confident, tough minded competitors, he said that again it all comes back to accountability – but this time it’s your accountability as a coach, and the type of trust and confidence you instill within your athletes. Building trust takes time in our lives, but most coaches don’t have the luxury of time to spend with their athletes – typically seasons are 3-4 months long, and depending on the level, you’ll get maybe 4 years with them. So how do you speed up trust and empower confidence and fearlessness in athletes? It’s all about how you deal with mistakes. If an athlete makes a mistake, but it was at full effort and full of intention, then dignify it! Recognize the mistake and help the player to improve, while preserving the original intention. This builds trust, confidence and the fearlessness to try new things. Start with “Why” To wrap things up, Coach Brown shared his heartfelt “why” with us. “When our time on earth has ended, we will not be measured by our win/loss record. We will not be measured by our possessions or by what we think of ourselves. We will be measured by the impact we have on other people, and there’s no better opportunity for that than through coaching.” Whether you’re an athletic coach, a teacher, parent, or company leader, Coach Brown’s expertise can provide powerful direction for us all.

What if you were a player on a basketball team, trailing big at half time, and in the locker room the coach gathers the players together and says, "Here's our strategy for the second half, I want you to score more points than you did in the first half.” As a player I'm pretty sure you're not thinking, "Of course, it was so obvious, why didn't we think of that!" Yet, that is so often exactly what we do in sales. Go Close More Deals When evaluating the performance of your sales team our tendency is to look at the "scoreboard," or in this case, the sales pipeline. Is there enough in the pipeline to ensure that we reach our goal? And if there's not, what do we typically do? We sit down with sales reps and we tell them to go generate more pipeline – essentially saying, “Go score more points.” In order to truly coach sales teams effectively, we need to understand how that pipeline is generated. We need to examine and coach to the activities of a sales rep that lead to the generation of pipeline. Let's take a closer look at why we should manage activity and not results. The Benefits of Managing Sales Activity 1. Activities are controllable - A sales rep can't control pipeline generation, that's a result of activity. What they can control are the actions that they take that are responsible for generating the pipeline. Calls, meetings, demos, etc. 2. Managing activities gives managers the data they need to coach - Effective sales leaders inspect sales rep activity, not to micromanage, but to know where to coach for improvement. 3. You can course correct early - Realizing you have insufficient pipeline two months away from the end of the sales year when you have a 3-month sales cycle is like being 20 points behind in a basketball game with two minutes left - it's too late to do anything to change the outcome. The activities to generate pipeline need to be completed earlier. Sales reps must have a clear view and a good understanding of whether their activity levels are on track… Am I completing the right activities? Am I doing enough activities? Am I doing them well enough? Knowing the answers to these questions leads us to our next benefit. 4. You can build a plan focused on activities - By reverse engineering your sales process using inputs like average deal size, close rates, and activity conversion rates, you can construct a plan that tells you how many activities you need to do and with what level of conversion. Having a plan helps you predict success and builds confidence. Without one, it's really just guess-work. 5. You can replicate top sales rep performance - Seeing a top rep’s sales numbers is great, but what you really want to understand is how they got there. What did they do to generate the pipeline that led to all that closed business? If you can see your activity levels and conversion rates and compare those to top performers, the steps necessary to become a top-performer are revealed. 6. Build your ideal "training plan" or activity recipe - Just as elite athletes have specified training plans, sales reps need personalized daily plans to become top performers. Many reps may be doing things that simply aren't very effective and possibly ignoring other activities that are tremendously effective. Being able to see, across a sales team, the activities that are producing results lets you build a plan that works. By aligning your selling activities to your sales goals, reps will know exactly what to do every day to reach and exceed their quota. The Performulus platform can help by automating this process. Teams using Performulus transform the way they work, perform, and live by setting goals, driving positive habits, easily identifying areas for improvement, and staying motivated – driving dramatic new levels of success. Learn more about Performulus for Sales Teams.

How to increase sales productivity and revenue in newly adopted flexible/remote work environments The COVID-19 pandemic caused many companies to abruptly shift to a remote-work model. Most companies were able to adapt surprisingly successfully, and many organizations are finding that the future of work lies in these flexible remote or hybrid models. However, many still question how sales teams in particular will be able to stay motivated, connected, and ultimately drive increased revenue without the opportunity for face-to-face collaboration. With the right technologies and processes in place, these flexible, remote, work-from-anywhere models will not only work, but will actually result in a significant increase in productivity, performance, and happiness in the workplace, and ultimately, improvement of the bottom line. This article will explore the importance of adding tools to your tech stack that empower your sales leaders and teams to cultivate the habits and mindsets that drive higher levels of performance and achievement, and real business results. Driving Productivity and Purpose through Technology In the flurry of moving to remote work at the onset of the pandemic, organizations implemented technologies like Zoom, Slack, remote VPN access, and a myriad of other cloud-based operational applications to ensure the business could continue to function. Now that operations are, for the most part, running smoothly, it’s a perfect opportunity for organizations to gain a competitive edge by investing in the enhancement of employees’ productivity, performance, and happiness in the workplace. The key to driving real business results lies in incorporating a tool that will help your sales leaders and teams to cultivate the best practices and mindsets that drive higher levels of performance and achievement through: Planning: Great accomplishments must begin with a goal and a plan to get there. Company goals should flow down to team and individual goals, and be statistically aligned with a plan to achieve success. Visibility: Remote work and new applications have introduced visibility gaps that hinder productivity and alignment. With additional tools that provide visibility into which selling activities are producing real results, teams can adopt better practices and continuously improve. Motivation: Maintaining the motivation to achieve long term goals is hard, especially without the in-person camaraderie office-settings offer. With reverse-engineered daily plans that align to the overarching goals, individuals will realize meaningful progress everyday. And team leaderboards provide the friendly competition that propels sales results. Better Management: Sales transformation starts with leadership. Help your sales leaders learn and practice coaching skills that they apply to their team. Give them access to the data that spotlights the areas of potential improvement, and ultimately empower them to guide teams to their full potential. Communication: Without daily face-to-face interactions, companies should look at ways to add the human touch by incorporating elements that more deeply connect the sales leader with team members, and by asking questions that get to the heart of what is most important to the sales rep. This helps reps feel valued, heard, and connected. In turn, the team member is more engaged, has greater energy and clarity, and is ultimately more productive. The Performulus platform is a key addition to your organization’s remote-work tech stack. Let’s take a look at how it helps sales teams develop good daily work habits, drives productivity, increased revenue, and an intentional culture of trust and excellence in this short demo.

How to build the processes necessary to maintain NIL compliance and eligibility while improving your athlete experience and preparedness program. As we await the new Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) regulations, universities need to prepare now so they can empower student athletes to take advantage of NIL endorsements. Although we don’t yet know exactly what the NCAA NIL rules will be, colleges and universities will need to manage both the school’s and the student athletes’ NIL compliance. Athletic directors will need to find solutions to help: Protect student-athletes’ eligibility as they try to monetize their NIL rights Establish processes to disclose and track NIL opportunities Ensure compliance to help protect students and universities from liability Integrated NIL & Athlete Experience Programs Many university athletic departments have athlete experience programs designed to comprehensively develop student-athletes; promoting personal growth, professional development and athletic success. The NIL opportunity process will need to be integrated into these programs as well. Ideally, athletic directors will be able to re-launch an integrated digital and in-person student athlete experience program. There are holistic athlete development platforms designed to digitize and enhance these initiatives that also have built-in NIL compliance processes. Digital Athlete Experience and NIL Solutions One such platform, Performulus, launched with a mission to develop well-rounded student athletes who are prepared to succeed in their sport and in life after graduation, and now offers an NIL compliance solution as well. The Performulus platform provides players clear expectations through daily activity plans that can be personalized for each athlete. Activity plans help athletes focus on physical skills, nutrition, strength and conditioning, academics, leadership, character development, mental health, career preparedness and search, and more. Additionally, the NIL solution built into the Performulus platform will empower university athletic departments to help ensure: Student-athletes can safely earn compensation NIL opportunities are tracked, reviewed and documented Universities stay compliant and protected Athletes have an improved experience and safeguarded eligibility Prepare for NIL Now As we are all experiencing together, the NIL rules and regulations are a moving target. Finding a solution and setting up processes now that can be fine-tuned and personalized as the regulations and your university's requirements are set is a must. With the advantage of integrating NIL compliance processes with an improved student athlete experience program, athletic departments should take a close look at Performulus' holistic solution. If you’re interested in learning more about the Performulus platform, check out our on-demand webinar to see this essential tool for NIL opportunity management and compliance tracking in action, and learn how the platform can help differentiate your university by delivering the entire athlete development experience. Watch the webinar here: Get Ready for NIL Compliance

As we watch some of the worlds’ best athletes compete at the Olympic Games, it’s hard not to be inspired. While most of us will never be world-class athletes, there is still a lot we can learn from Olympians, especially as we strive to become top performers in our own disciplines. Whether you’re looking to excel at a sport, in sales, or in another discipline, here are some tips from Olympians to help you achieve peak performance. Practice Makes Perfect Though many Olympians are born with extraordinary talent, they don’t reach top performing levels without thousands of hours of practice. Simone Biles and Michael Phelps began competing seriously in their sports at the ages of 6 and 7 years old, respectively. There’s no achieving excellence overnight. Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book, Outliers, about the 10,000 hour rule. He suggests that 10,000 hours of practice is “the magic number of greatness,” regardless of a person’s natural talents. “Achievement is talent plus preparation... The closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play." - Malcolm Gladwell Discipline & Consistency Sydney McLaughlin, the youngest U.S. Olympian to compete in track and field since 1972, put off going pro to run for University of Kentucky and have a college experience… but she’s not your typical undergrad. Rising every morning at 6am to repeat a grueling schedule of weight training, practices, and study halls, she stays disciplined with these daily activities in order to achieve her goals. She attributes her success to her work ethic, attitude and ambition. Discipline is a key ingredient in helping all of us achieve greatness. If you start with a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), break it down into sub-goals, and further into the steps necessary to reach those goals, you're reverse engineering your objectives into daily activities. This will help you stay disciplined every day, consistently working to achieve greater things. And according to the fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt, consistency is key. “If you really want it, it’s possible. It’s all about consistency.” - Usain Bolt Find a good coach / mentor Great champions don’t get there alone. Behind every Olympian is a great coach. On top of helping hone athletes’ physical skills, coaches provide important feedback, guidance, and motivation. Bob Bowman, longtime coach of the most decorated Olympian, Michael Phelps, coaches using three phases of personal development: imagination, challenge and high performance. “Imagination is where you use your noggin and heart to come up with something that drives you.” - Bob Bowman The challenge phase is about the process, putting in the hard work and being disciplined every day to reach that high performance that you are aiming for. Whether it’s life coaching, sales coaching, or athletic coaching, successful people in every walk of life have coaches to help them reach their goals. And on top of everything else, a great coach is also your biggest fan. Find out how Performulus helps you emulate these practices employed by Olympians to achieve peak performance. With Performulus, you can reverse engineer daily activity plans (we call these ‘Performance Formulas’) so that you know exactly what to do every day to make progress towards achieving your goals. Daily point targets help keep you on track and motivated, and with in-depth reporting, coaches and managers gain visibility to the data necessary to coach effectively.

For years I used to think that sales productivity was simply the intersection of efficiency (how much activity) and effectiveness (how well the activity is executed). But after 25+ years managing high tech sales organizations I’ve learned it's not that simple... The Elements of Productivity Let's take a look at ALL the elements that I think about when I think about sales productivity (and there are undoubtedly more). Effective Plan Success in sales begins with a plan - what am I committing to doing. This requires strategic thinking, an examination of what works and what doesn't and causes the sales rep to take ownership of their business. Goal Setting Sales reps who set goals for themselves are more successful than those who don't, it's really that simple. Setting goals provides feedback on performance, motivation for attainment, confidence, and autonomy. A key to staying motivated with a big, longer term goal (like closing a deal) is to break it into smaller chunks to see meaningful progress every day. Selling Skills While the right plan is no doubt important possessing the necessary skills is equally, if not more, important. Sales people must be constantly honing their selling skills. Great Manager/Coach A great 1st line manager is one of the most critical roles in any sales organization. They hire, direct, inspire, motivate, and coach everyday. A manager who is truly a coach is invaluable. Performance Evaluation Having a plan is great but if you never compare your actual performance against your plan you're missing the opportunity zero in on areas for improvement and course correct before it's too late. Best Practice Sharing I like to think of this as learning from the best - "I wanna be like Mike" (if you remember basketball great Michael Jordan). Knowing who those selling skill and activity leaders are and having them share their secrets helps others emulate their selling behaviors and activities. Attitude It's invaluable. Ensuring you're in the right frame of mind for the variety of sales activities required of a sales person (prospecting, presenting, negotiating) is critical. Health & Wellness I learned this one the hard way, thinking more time at my desk would surely deliver better results. I was wrong! A clear head and a healthy body, I found, were absolutely a necessary part of my productivity equation.

The coronavirus is causing many companies to move swiftly to enable their employees to work from home at unprecedented scale. What does this mean for inside sales teams accustomed to drawing a big part of their motivation from the collaboration, communication, and community that comes with working in close proximity to one another? Can a transition to working from home (WFH) be effective for an inside sales team? Studies show that with the right processes in place, WFH will not only work, but will actually result in a significant increase in productivity. So while a short commute, comfortable clothes, and easy access to the refrigerator are some of perks of working from home, I'd like to discuss the real keys to realizing maximum productivity from a WFH inside sales team. Develop a Plan With Clear Goals Each salesperson must develop a plan for their business that includes clear goals. Those goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, motivating, and most of all, personal. When I work with sales people in setting goals I focus on two things; 1) the sales number they want to achieve (hopefully above their quota :) 2) what achieving that goal would mean for them personally (e.g. financial reward: family vacation, kids college fund, recognition/sense of accomplishment: admiration of their co-workers). While it’s important to the company that they achieve their quota, the salesperson’s personal motivation is what drives them everyday. Key: Sales people who set goals are more successful and productive than those who don't. Convert Your Sales Goal Into a Daily List of The Right Activities Without the community of teammates and a manager in an office environment, it's more critical than ever to have a clear understanding of the activities you need to perform everyday - in what quantity and with what quality. “Do I need to make 3 prospecting calls a day or 10?” Among other factors, the answer depends on the conversion rate of a prospecting call to a sales opportunity and ultimately a sale. Starting with a sales goal, and other inputs such as average deal size, close rate, and conversion rates of pipeline development activities, a sales person can reverse engineer their sales goal back to the activities they need to complete every day, week, and month to ensure they hit their number. It is imperative that the focus be on outcomes (opportunity creation and closed deals!), achieved by selecting the right activities, and completing them with a level of quality that results in the required conversion. Otherwise the activities become the focus and it becomes busy work. Key: Don't Confuse Activities with Results (But Measure Performance of Aligned Activities Daily) Develop the List of the Right Activities How is a sales person to know what activities will produce the outcomes they are looking for? Drawing on past experience, trial and error? An inside sales person in an office can observe their successful teammates. WFH teams don't have this luxury. While they can see data in the CRM system for other team members, that data tends to be limited to results (open and closed opportunities) rather than showing HOW they got there. When I bring my field-based sales people together for in person meetings, they always want the same item on the agenda - "can you have Bill present on what he's doing, he's clearly got it figured it out". In a WFH environment, sales people need to retain this visibility to what top performing team members are doing - they want to replicate what works! Make it easy for them. Key: Replicate the Behavior of Top Performing Sales Reps Across the Team Stay Connected Technology can help sales reps maintain a level of connectedness with their teammates and their manager. Messaging technology can be used to share news, insights, learnings, obstacles and facilitate communication between team members. Sales leaderboards are great, but daily sales rep activity summaries are even more effective. They provide peer motivation to complement the coaching and motivation provided by a sales manager. And now that each sales rep has a personalized plan with goaled activities, 1:1 meetings can be more focused on coaching skills and activities to complement pipeline and opportunity review. Key: We All Need Sources of Inspiration and Motivation Track Results - Not Hours Worked Measuring productivity by looking at hours worked isn't likely to be very effective. Rather, consider a results-oriented performance management approach based on daily/weekly/monthly activity-based goals with measurement to those goals. For example, providing a Team Summary Performance Report that is emailed at the end of the day to all team members and managers will help sales reps feel connected and provide that extra motivation of friendly competition. Key: Focus on outcomes and the activities that get you there Maintain Work Life Balance When working from home, it can be easy to ignore some of the other elements essential to productivity without peers or a manager to nudge you. Things like; eating well, regular breaks, exercise, planning time, and skills development. A sales rep’s plan should not be limited exclusively to sales generating activities (e.g. calls, meetings) but should also include personal and professional development goals that are also important in maximizing productivity. Key: Maximizing Productivity Isn't Just About Working Hard Working from Home can create new levels of productivity but it requires thoughtful planning, a commitment to deliberate communication, the use of planning and accountability tools, and performance management. Done right, expect new levels of engagement, accountability, and trust through transparency.

New Year, New Goals As we enter the new year, we tend to set personal goals, like lose weight or save money, and we map out a plan of how we’ll achieve those goals – go to the gym more often, direct deposit $100 a week into your savings account. Similarly, a new year also means a new quota for sales people. And similarly, we need to map out a plan of how to achieve those quotas. Activity Plans For some goals there can be a statistical correlation between the activities performed and the desired outcome. If we take our weight loss goal for example, eating fewer calories and exercising daily should result in weight loss. You might arbitrarily set a goal of consuming 1500 calories per day and running 5 miles a week – but is that really the right combination of activity to reach your goals? We need to find the right formula over the right time horizon - and then track it. Finding the Formula You might make it through January with your 1500 daily calories and 5 miles a week on the treadmill, but then you look in the mirror or stand on the scale, and you don’t see the results you’re looking for. Now what? You start eating even better and exercising even harder? Or do you do the opposite and just give up? It’s so hard to know exactly how much or what to do. This isn’t dissimilar from the process sales people go through at the beginning of a sales year – most sales reps try to do the right activities, but aren’t really sure how much to do and over what time period. Then when they look at their sales and pipeline and see that they’re not where they need to be… then what? But there's an answer - you can create your own personal formula! You can build a plan that gets you results above and beyond your goals and you’ll know EXACTLY what you need to do – no guessing, looking at lagging indicators, or just randomly doing more stuff. Of course, people are successful without the formula – many sales reps exceed their quota without a mathematically created plan, much like many people are in good shape because they just generally do the right things. And, after enough experience you kind of know what to do to reach your goals. But even those “top performers” could always do better by following a plan of the activities that produce resultsl. The point is, with the right formula, you’ll be able to reach and exceed your goals more consistently. Reverse Engineering Your Sales Goal To be more effective and efficient, you can reverse engineer your daily activity formula starting with your historical performance stats – like average deal size, win-rate, and activity conversion rates. Put it in a spreadsheet along with your new sales goals, apply conversion rates, and work back to determine what you need to do on a daily basis to hit your goals. Performulus' unique reverse engineering process also helps reps build personalized plans that produce predictable results. It's as easy as 1-2-3: Start with your desired sales goal Enter historical data, like average deal size, win-rate, and conversion rates Select the optimal mix of pipeline development activities Performulus then generates a personalized activity plan, and with seamless Salesforce integration, automatically tracks plan performance. “With Performulus we can create a roadmap to success for our staff members” – Ryan Kyes, President, Alliance Financial & Insurance By focusing energy and effort on the right activities, Performulus customers are reaching and exceeding their goals. But don’t just take our word for it, watch this video to hear from the customers themselves. “If we check these boxes in Performulus, I know what our outcome is going to be. I’m seeing consistent effort, leading to consistent results.” – Dave Taylor, CEO, FirstMark Insurance Group

As we enter the new year, we tend to set personal goals, like lose weight or save money, and we map out a plan of how we’ll achieve those goals – go to the gym more often, direct deposit $100 a week into your savings account. As a coach, we should also treat this new year as an opportunity to review our team performance and reset new goals. We all want our teams to be the best they can be both as athletes and in life, but what goals do we set? And how do we drive the motivation and prescribe specific activities to achieve them? We know that it’s important to provide individuals with ongoing training and development plans, and it’s especially essential to motivate and inspire confident, tough-minded, fearless competitors who strive for excellence. With the minimal face-time you get with your athletes, how can you achieve all this plus build trust and motivation within your team? The key is start small – focus on what players can do each day to become better athletes and better people. Instilling Positive Habits B.J. Fogg, a Stanford University researcher and author of the book “Tiny Habits,” notes that big behavior changes require a high level of motivation that often can’t be sustained. He suggests starting with tiny habits to make the new habit as easy as possible in the beginning. We all know that habits take a long time to create – I’ve heard 21 days, or 30, or 60. No matter the number of days or weeks, the lesson is that habits solidify faster when we perform them more often. So assigning personalized daily activities for each of your athletes will make it easier to instill these activities as habits. With Performulus, coaches can prescribe daily health & wellness, strength & conditioning, and skills and position work, but also activities geared towards building successful team cultures and character such as work habits, confidence, leadership, and trust “These are the habits that make you a great teammate. You’re on top of your physical development, you’re on top of your mental development, you’re on top of you emotional and relational development.” – Brant McAdams, Head Football Coach, Pacific Lutheran University Staying Motivated & Connected Goal setting is easy, goal pursuit is hard – that’s why so many people join the gym in January and have disappeared by mid-February. Our athletes likely need a little nudge in the motivation department every so often as well. With the Performulus platform, teams can stay connected and see who is achieving their daily/weekly/monthly goals, spurring accountability and motivation through friendly competition. And with a built in team chat feature, players and coaches can cheer each other on even when they’re not at practice. “For a busy guy like me, Performulus puts it all in one place where I can check on my players and give them a really clear plan.” – Jim Shapiro, Head Football Coach, King’s High School By spending a little time every day checking off boxes in an easy-to-use app, Performulus teams are staying fit, accountable, and motivated, and are reaching dramatic new levels of success. But don’t just take our word for it, watch this video to hear it from the coaches using Performulus with their teams.

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with two great coaches who are using Performulus for Sports with their teams: Jim Shapiro Brandon Shaw Head Football Coach Coach & Dir. Player Development King's High School Alberni Valley Bulldogs Hockey With over 35 years combined coaching experience, these two coaches provided valuable insights on how they’re using Performulus, not just for athletic training, but also for leadership development in mentoring the next generation of athletes and leaders. Q: What’s your approach for developing athletes in both their tactical skills and in building character on and off the field? A: Coach Shapiro told us that the core mission of the King’s Football program is to Build Champions while Pursuing Championships. They put the development of the student athlete first, and focus on what that young person can become. As a team, they are using several different programs, but the one thing that was missing was a platform to connect the players and coaches on a daily basis and create accountability. Shapiro explains that Performulus fulfills that missing link, and allows coaches to develop the full athlete by prescribing activities focused on academics & community, skills development, strength & conditioning, health & nutrition, and more. Q: How do you stay connected with your team during the off-season and during this time of social distancing? A: Coach Shaw says that for the Alberni Valley Bulldogs, Performulus is an integral part of staying connected as a team – they use it every day, paired with their Player Development Guide. Performulus provides Shaw’s players with accountability to themselves and towards the wider team, and helps athletes solidify the beneficial habits they need to excel at the sport and move up to the next level. Q: What’s your strategy for inspiring athletes and creating a character-based team culture? A: Coach Shapiro said it all goes back to his rules of life, which he tries to instill in his athletes every day: Be with the right people, at the right place, at the right time, and doing the right things. Shapiro uses Performulus to reinforce this principle by encouraging intentional actions. Whether it’s on or off the field, King’s High School football players use Performulus to make a little investment in themselves every day. And Shapiro explains that it also creates a two-way exchange: a mirror for the athlete to see how they’re doing, and a window for them to see what their teammates are achieving. The reporting function also acts as a window for the coaching staff. Coach Shapiro explains that it provides a quick view into the discipline of each player: “That daily discipline to do the work and spend 5 minutes in a system are signs as to whether a player is going to be committed, and mentally and physically tough enough on the field. Q: With your sports being particularly physical, how do you use Performulus to build confidence and inspire tough minded, fearless competitors? A: Coach Shaw explains that with the hockey team, they take a day-by-day approach. Performulus helps keep the team on track and drives the accountability and discipline for players to put the work in and get a little bit better every day. “Daily discipline creates confidence and that tough-mindedness to become a fearless competitor. If you’re practicing these habits each and every day, you’re going to be confident in your abilities and you know that guy is not going to beat you in the corner, he’s not going to beat you to the net, you’ve got that extra stride on the back check, you’re playing between the dots.” Shaw also uses Performulus to foster friendly competition internally. All of the hockey players in the league are vying for positions on college and professional teams, and because players can see what teammates are up to in Performulus, they’re inspired to achieve that much more every day. For more insights from the coaches, you can find the full interview in our recent webinar (the coaches begin their interview at 39:00). Performulus for Sports Teams If you’re interested in using Performulus for your team, check out our demo to learn how you can create daily activity plans for your athletes, keep teams in community with each other, and inspire accountability. We’ll cover the quick setup process in four simple steps: Set up your team – Add your players and coaching staff Set up a baseline activity plan, then personalize a program for each athlete Assign the plan to your players Organize your team into sub-groups You’ll also get a view of the player’s perspective and will see how setting daily goals in Performulus employs the FitBit concept of earning points by completing activities to achieve that feeling of winning every day.