Sales & Sales Management Brew

Consistently coaching skills and behaviors is the second most important skill that a sales manager / coach needs to have if sales success is their objective.  

The reason that 'consistently' is part of the skill description is that spaced repetition is a fundamental learning principle to help people of all ages learn, change and improve skill.  Think back to your days in elementary school when you were learning the '3rs'.  Remember flash cards?  Every day the teacher would break out the flash cards and as memory and skill improved then the frequency of using the flash card for 2 + 2 decreased, while the flash card for 11 x 12 continued until the class remembered the answer of 132.

Your commitment to consistently coach is only trumped by what your focus on long term skill development and behavior change.  Unfortunately most of the coaching that takes place is 'in the moment coaching' - coaching 'the deal'.  This takes place during pre or post call coaching sessions. Though that is critical is does little or nothing to actually improve skill.  In the moment coaching is like calling a time out - to run a specific play or to take a specific action.  It solves an immediate problem but does nothing to improve long term skill or to improve a behavior that keeps a sales person from needing to call time outs every time they get in to a jam with a sales opportunity.

If you want long term successful sales people then the development strategy has to be long term in addition to in the moment coaching.  This requires the following (click this link to listen to the 2 minute audio on consistent coaching) :

1.  Collect meaningful data around sales metrics using huddles

2.  Gain insight from the data to determine choke points a sales person has in the selling

3.  Pro-actively allocate time for one on one coaching with sales people

4.  Schedule one on one coaching weekly with sales people to work on skills and behaviors

5.  Implement a disciplined approach when a sales person is failing to execute behaviors

6.  Follow up on actionable items that you have assigned the sales person to execute

7.  Repeat as necessary

Make this part of your development strategy and you will have a team that sells more business, more quickly at higher margins.