Are you, as a sales leader, spending at least 50% of your time coaching your salespeople, helping them to develop their skills and become more productive?

It’s time to inspect your own behaviors as a coach and mentor. How do you measure up? Set time on your calendar right now for specific, sales skills coaching with your salespeople.

Please allow me to be very direct (it’s the only way I know how) when I ask you this question: “Are you really coaching your people”? I mean, really digging in and coaching them? Are you spending at least 50% of your time holding your people accountable, and coaching? Isn’t your job as a sales leader to make your people wildly successful? More successful than they ever would have been had they not been coached by you? If your answers to those questions are “yes” … great, keep doing what you’re doing! If it took you a while to answer or your answers were “no”, it’s time to get to work with some specific sales management training around coaching.

Many sales leaders manage the activity of their people by looking at spreadsheets, activity reports, and pipelines. Does that make them a coach? I’m not diminishing the importance of managing activity but what I’m talking about is coaching the behaviors that will make your people better. These are the weekly standards (activity metrics) that need to be inspected; the little things that make the big things happen. Weekly metrics include:

• Outreaches – phone calls and emails to prospects
• Contacts – live conversations with decision-makers
• Meetings Set – day and time set

There are two questions you must be able to answer when your boss asks:

1. Why is one or more of your people failing?
2. What are you doing about it?

Your answers cannot be, “I don’t know”, or “let me go check”. You must know the answers. How can you answer those questions if you’re not holding your people accountable?

2 other questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Did we hire them that way?
2. Or, has my lack of coaching made them that way?

I’m not talking about getting all over your people…or embarrassing your people. I’m talking about helping your people!

Your job as a sales leader is to help your people get better, challenge their thinking, and help them grow and practice with them to develop their skills so they are more productive for your organization and they are able to reach their personal goals. Many sales leaders do not see the need for sales management training. It’s time to inspect your own behaviors as a coach and mentor. How do you measure up? Set time on your calendar right now for specific, sales skills coaching with your salespeople.

No doubt, you have a very challenging job. You have a lot on your plate with lots of responsibilities. But, always remember that your #1 job is to coach and make your people wildly successful.

One of the most frequently asked questions we receive is “how do I/we increase sales” or “how do I become more successful in sales?” It starts with recognizing when your pursuit of a prospect is over.

In this blog, the two fundamental truths of more effective selling.

If you are a consistent reader of this blog (and why wouldn’t you be), you know by now that I have an affinity for music. You also know that my favorite decade of my life was the 80’s. And when those two things intersect, watch out!

Considered by some to be a one-hit-wonder, the Australian band Crowded House got to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 when they released “Don’t Dream It’s Over” in 1986.  

“Hey now, hey now
Don’t dream it’s over.”

So, let’s apply that majestic ballad to salespeople and the one thing above all things that they struggle with the most. That’s right, recognizing that their pursuit of a prospect is over (even when the prospect hasn’t told them in those exact words). Many salespeople can’t even begin to think that it’s over. Most don’t want to entertain the possibility. 

So, the question before us today is simple – why? I mean, it’s not like it has not happened to them before.

One of the most frequently asked questions we receive is “how do I/we increase sales” or we are asked, “how do I become more successful in sales?” And the best answer I have is that you get better when you recognize two fundamental truths:

1. You are going to lose more often than you win.
2. When you are going to lose, you want to lose early.

Have you ever stopped to consider what your “pull-through rate” looks like? We use that term to explain a simple algebra equation:

Number of new clients / Number of initial sales conversations = pull-through rate 

If you have 100 initial sales conversations (or go on 100 prospect calls) in a year, and you wind up with 15 new clients, then your pull-through percentage is 15/100 or 15%. So, if that is your pull-through rate, don’t you think you should go on your calls with a bias for disqualification? Statistically, there is a far greater chance of you not doing business with a prospect than there is a chance that you will do business with them.

Stop dreaming and start asking questions. Ask questions that allow you to confirm that your prospect has a problem they have to fix and that now is the time to fix it. Operate with a bias for disqualification so you are not so surprised when the conclusion is that now is the time for you to move on. No is ok provided you hear it at the right time in your sales process.

Sweet dreams.

Finding and putting the best people in the right seats is the biggest problem identified by most business owners, especially as it applies to critical sales roles.

Here are the 5 most common reasons most companies struggle with hiring quality salespeople.

#1 Companies outsource their recruiting and the responsibility. Recruiting is something that a company has to own. They can no longer outsource the work and the responsibility. That makes it too easy for people internally to throw up their hands and transfer failures associated with the hiring process to the outsourced firm. If companies are going to improve the quality of their hires, they have to own the process.

#2 There is a lack of a consistent process for constantly searching. Most, if not all, companies make the mistake of looking for candidates only when they have an opening. This leads to many problems:

• Being held hostage by salespeople with “large books”. Companies feel they cannot do anything about them for fear of losing the “books” since there aren’t any replacements.
• Feeling desperate to fill a chair with a warm bottom when there is a vacancy. A body,
  anybody is better than no one sitting in the chair (branch).
• Not replacing underperformers because there isn’t a pipeline of candidates to choose from. The underperformers stay around too long; others know it and realize that they don’t have to perform to keep their job, so overall team production continues to decline.

#3 Companies are not getting quality candidates entering the process. The traditional model of recruiting today is one where the placement firm tries to convince its client why a candidate should be hired. Companies should, on the other hand, work extremely hard to disqualify candidates because there are specific skills that apply for that sales job and many/most candidates do not have those skills. Bottom line, the company has to assess at least two things: 1) Do they have enough of the right strengths to be successful? 2) Will they sell versus can they sell?

#4 There is poor communication about the specific role and expectations of this new hire. Too often, everyone is so excited about putting the deal together (getting the seat filled) that no one takes the time to get into the details of the day-to-day requirements of the job. This leads to early misunderstandings about the role and eventually, failure on the part of the new hire to meet the expectations of the company. Failure to “negotiate on the 1^st tee” leads to misunderstanding and failure to execute on the sales goals.

#5 The onboarding process is inadequate. Most companies are ill-equipped to effectively onboard new salespeople. They spend time introducing them to the “culture” of the operation, the mechanics of the job, and how to get things done. They introduce them to HR, their support team, marketing, and their partners. And, yes, there is a discussion about goals, sales activities, and how to enter data into CRM. And then… the new hires are on their own.

Companies think that they have hired their next sales superstar and then, 12 months later, they cannot figure out what went wrong. They look at the numbers and discover that the new hires are producing “just like everyone else in the middle of the pack.” The process most companies have in place currently to recruit and hire salespeople perpetuates this problem.

When executives think about their sales teams, they often ask themselves if they have the right people in the seat and how they can become more effective.

In this blog, we will discuss the leading questions sales executives face when considering their current producer team and how to get the answers they need.

If you are a Jimmy Buffett fan (that would make you a Parrot Head), you recognize the title of his 1973 release by the same name. Buffett wrote the song about a one-armed veteran of the Spanish Civil War that he met during a show in Chicago.

So, what does any of this have to do with sales leadership? Here are just a few lines from the song:

He went to Paris
Looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so

Now that makes me think of the executives we speak with all over the country who “have questions that bother them so.” But their questions don’t have anything to do with travel, relationships, fishing, and drinking (not saying executives don’t think about those things). When executives think about their sales teams, here are the sales questions that “bother them so”:

• Do I have the right people, on the right bus, and sitting in the right seats?
• How much more effective can my sales teams become?
• What will be required to make them more effective?
• Why do we consistently have a hit-and-miss approach to hiring salespeople?
• For my salespeople who disappoint me, did we hire them that way or did we make them that way?
• Why do my salespeople so quickly cave on price instead of selling our value?
• What are the common traits in my top performers that separate them from my bottom performers?

So here is my question for you: do these questions bother you? Do you need to get answers to these questions? If so, you don’t need to go to Paris. You just need to click on the link below to land on my calendar for a fifteen-minute phone call. I can get you the answers and you don’t even have to pay to get the answers. You just need to be bothered.

See you In Paris!

A goal without a plan is only a wish. An effective sales action plan starts with collecting, measuring, and inspecting key success metrics that directly impact the end goal.

Have you ever noticed that some of the sayings you heard the most when you were growing up have turned out to be incredibly accurate? In this blog article, I want to focus on one that I absolutely grew sick and tired of hearing, and that was “People don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan.” I might not have liked hearing it over and over, but there is no arguing the accuracy of the statement.

And you really can’t argue the veracity of this axiom when it comes to sales action plans that are built from solid sales metrics. I am stunned (and perhaps I should not be) at the number of salespeople and sales organizations that do not operate with sales action plans. They simply come up with a number for a sales goal, and then they hope the team gets to that number. But as Rick Page wrote in his fabulous book by the same title, hope is not a strategy.

A strategy would be a sales plan that is built on sales behaviors that the sales team is expected to execute on a weekly basis. A strategy would be having a sales action plan that allows the sales leaders to hold their teams accountable with agreed-upon, reported sales metrics. A strategy would be knowing the critical conversion ratios in the sales process – meaning the number of first appointments that result in opportunities, the number of opportunities that reach the proposal stage, and the number of proposals that result in wins.

Every single step in the sales process can be measured, and the data you need is easy to collect. At Anthony Cole Training Group, we know that salespeople fail for one of two reasons:

1. Lack of effort
2. Lack of skill

Why not engineer out #1 by having a sales plan tied to weekly sales metrics? And if you don’t grab that data, how do you even begin to know which parts of your sales process need more coaching?

That sounds like a plan.