• Don’t think of them as just a Lead. When someone fills out a form on your website that indicates they have an interest and have gone to the trouble of downloading a resource, so yes, that is a Lead. More importantly, they are a person that has an interest, possibly a problem or an opportunity and is looking for information that you and your company may have. It is time to do some initial research and find out what company they are with, where they are located, what they might need help with and then, a Lead becomes much more then just a prospect. Lead relationship management involves having a sincere curiosity about the lead, what they might be interested and looking for and a desire to help.
• Respond Quickly. We have helped salespeople for 30 years now and if there is one best practice that has stayed consistent, it has been how swiftly your should respond. When a Lead fills out a form and assuming they are a person who looks like your type of best prospect is, reach out immediately. If you do not, they will continue their search, find other solutions and be sidetracked by other issues that come across their desk. Now is the best time to call a Lead, while they are looking and while it is top of mind. Contact within the first 24 hours is the best approach for lead relationship management.
• Do your research. It does not take long in today’s tech world to find out some information and facts about your Lead so do that immediately. There is the website, LinkedIn, google, ZoomInfo – so many resources to help you prepare your call. But that should only take 15 minutes. Do not let that delay the callback!
• Become skillful with your questions. if you have sold your service or product for a number of years, you know why a Lead is typically coming to your website and looking for resources. Be prepared with probing, insightful questions that you can ask them about their business and their concerns. This lead management best practice will prevent you from going into a sales pitch. Your job in nurturing a Lead is to peel back the onion, ask all the great and difficult questions you need to ask in order to determine if in fact, the Lead is a Prospect.
• Don’t sell on the call, set an appointment. This is a tough best practice for many salespeople. Of course, you must establish some credibility on the call by sharing a story or two about how you have helped other people or companies address a similar problem. But salespeople, beware, this is not usually the time to go deep into your solutions, unless the buyer has made it very clear they are ready to buy. In most businesses with longer sales cycles, it helps salespeople to uncover the problem or opportunity, identify that the Lead wants to address it and agree to schedule a time to talk more deeply and for you, the salesperson, to prepare.
• Don’t send automated, non personalized emails. Most companies have lists of prospects that have over time, inquired or encountered your resources and your company will likely send them periodical emails with information. But for a Lead that is new and inquiring about your services, do not default to an automated approach. A best practice for lead relationship management is to make certain that your communications with this Lead are personal, relevant and timely. Otherwise you risk the threat of “Unsubscribe”.
• Don’t give up until… There is varying research on how many times you should contact a Lead but it is more then once and probably less than 20, if no response. Buyers are busy and while they do not need to be pestered, it will pay off if you reach out consistently with helpful information. Nurturing a lead could involve sharing some of your website assets, stories and capability statements.
• Stay in touch. Once you have determined that a Lead is not going any further, it pays off to stay in touch. We have had Leads turn into customers years after their inquiry. It is a fine line to walk but if you have marketing resources to help, stay in touch with an email here and there or connect on LinkedIn and follow their company. A best practice in lead relationship management is not being short sited in your approach. If you are a seasoned salesperson with a great service or product to offer, you are not going anywhere and can develop a relationship even if the Lead is not a prospect today.
• Continue to Give. There is a book we recommend in our sales training called Go-Givers Sell More but Bob Burg and John David Mann. Order it and read it today. Selling is about Giving and our last lead relationship management best practice is to give. There is nothing that beats a sincere desire and effort to help your Lead solve their problem and grow their company.

• Confidently and effectively operating in a more remote and digital selling environment
• Becoming more consultative in approach adapting to the state of the informed and empowered client and prospect, who has deep information at their fingertips
• Becoming an Expert in our specialties. Anything less is available online
• Understanding and utilizing many of the new tools available to compliment selling such as our CRM, AI, virtual reality and marketing automation

Success in selling in the future will involve all of these adjustments and remains a viable career if bankers also acquire the Core Sales Competencies needed to be successful.

According to Objective Management Group, the pioneer and leader in sales evaluations, there are 21 Sales Core Competencies that determine the degree of success for every salesperson. Using one of their salesperson evaluations, let's further explore just one of these sales competencies, the prospecting or hunting competency. This is an area that all bankers struggle with.

The Prospector or Hunter competency is a producer’s capabilities for prospecting.  Here are the competencies of someone with the Hunter Sales Competency:

• Will Prospect - This is the salesperson that, when held accountable to prospecting activity, will prospect, no matter what and use all business intelligence tools to do so.
• Prospects Consistently - This is the banker who, based on their own internal desire and personal commitment to success in sales, and their sense of responsibility for results, will prospect without direct supervision and will take accountability for their own prospecting activity. It is a consistent part of their calendar every week and they understand how important it is to achieving their goals.

• Prospects via Phone and/or Walk-ins - A skilled prospector knows that the phone call starts the process.  It is one thing to get an introduction, to attend a networking event or to get a response to an email invitation, but all of that effort is for naught until they pick up the phone and attempt to reach the prospect.  Regardless of tenure in selling, the phone is still very key to starting the sales cycle and the buying/selling relationship.

• Has No or Little Need for Approval - This relationship manager gets past gatekeepers and has a very powerful message to deliver to the prospect. They are not likely to be thrown off by the gatekeepers blocking techniques or the objections of the prospect.  They realize that they have a job to do - get the appointment. They build a relationship with the prospect that is mutually beneficial based on the “expert” value they bring to the table and do not take conflict personally.
• Schedules Meetings - The effort of networking, social networking, and asking for introductions turns into meetings.  A banker who puts forth the great effort of picking up the phone has one of the necessary characteristics to be a successful hunter, but unless they actually schedule the appointments, then they will continue to struggle to fill their pipelines and meet personal and business goals.
• Recovers from Rejection – The banker faces rejection on a regular basis.  The difference between this person and an average producer is that they also understand the formula of SW3N - Some Will, Some Won't, So What? - NEXT. They learn from it and move on to find the next prospect.
• Maintains a Full Pipeline - This is the metric that helps you quantify the strength and skill of hunting skills.  Do they have a full pipeline that turns into business? Strong lenders know when to take someone out of the pipeline so that it is not full of pipedreams. They are strong at qualifying if a prospect is in their niche.

• Not a Perfectionist – Super hunters do not delay that call until “the perfect time” and they understand that outreach must happen, regardless. They use the right tech stack tools to prepare, but it does not have to be perfect and the concept of an ideal situation does not distract them from activity that must be done.

• Believes They are Quickly Liked by Customers – Wanting to be liked can work against a relationship manager however, skilled bankers are excellent at building rapport and are easily likeable.

• Reaches Decision Makers – The hunter has developed the ability to get beyond gatekeepers and wastes little time in the process. They know that nothing of substance happens until they are talking to the right person.
• Gets Introductions from Customers and Network - Getting introductions doesn't sound like hunting, but it is a by-product of the hunting activity.  They do more than simply suggest their current client ‘think of them’ if they encounter someone who needs their service, they pro-actively ask for names and expect introductions.
• Uses Social Selling Tools – The successful banker uses technology to aid and assist in the traditional methods of prospecting: pre-approach mail, direct mail, social networking, and prospect facing networking opportunities.  The key here is to understand that a prospector does not rely solely on social networking and technology to build their pipeline.  They do not sit and play catch hoping for when someone responds to a connection request on LinkedIn.  They use current technology applications to supplement and enhance their current prospecting efforts.
• Attends Networking Events – A true prospector understands the importance of getting face time with many people that have an affinity of some sort related to their expertise, and also has a consistent strategy and execution plan to attend events and turn events into prospects.

How will you and your bankers survive and thrive in the future of finding and building banking relationships?

• When this is a Weakness, an individual might believe that coaching means helping salespeople with pricing and technical questions on an ad hoc basis.
• When this is a Strength, an individual might schedule multiple coaching conversations with salespeople each week to improve their skills and help them win more sales.

If your company needs to grow, it is worthy of your time to focus on the importance of sales coaching, how to improve in this area and how effective coaching can drive sales growth for you and your organization. Skilled coaching helps drive sales growth by:

1. Empowering Your Sales Team:

Coaching is about empowering your sales team by providing them with the tools, knowledge, and skills necessary to excel. It's not just about telling them what to do but leading them through a self-discovery process; a more effective way to teach them how to sell better. Effective coaching involves asking many questions of your salespeople about what happened on the sales call to uncover what happened, what was missed and what needs follow up. For example, instead of asking “who will make the final decision?” an effective coach will ask their salesperson “what did they say when you asked them about their decision-making process?” This approach initiates a broader discussion with more coaching opportunities and builds the salesperson’s confidence and competence, helping them to perform at improved levels.

2. Improved Sales Skills:

In theory, Coaching helps sales professionals hone their skills, whether it's prospecting, handling objections or closing deals. But coaching sales tactics is not always effective because it does not address the underlying problem or reason for lack of performance. For example, if a salesperson is not making the prospecting effort that was agreed upon, it may be that they do not recover well from rejection, so just coaching them to make more calls is not going to be helpful.  However, uncovering if rejection is a problem and coaching them on how to be more resilient will improve their skill levels, not just for today but in the future. Selling is fraught with rejection and unless your salesperson can bounce back and go on to the next prospect, a salesperson will forever struggle with prospecting. Given regular feedback and guidance, they can refine their techniques, resulting in more successful interactions with potential customers.

3. Customized Approach:

There are 21 Sales Core Competencies that a salesperson must master to be an “elite” salesperson. That is a long list for any coach to effectively address, however, that is the goal. Some of these competencies are inherent in the person such as desire to excel, commitment to do what is necessary to achieve success and taking responsibility for their own actions and results, not blaming others or the organization. Other competencies however, must be coached such as how to get to the decision maker, how to overcome need for approval in order to ask the tougher questions and in today’s world, how to utilize the many social selling skills to connect, build credibility and find new relationships.  One size does not fit all in sales. Coaching allows you to tailor your approach to individual salespeople's strengths and weaknesses. By understanding their unique needs, you can help them reach their full potential.

4. Feedback and Accountability:

There is a 5-step process that every Coach should follow when coaching their salespeople.

• Gaining insight is all about what is happening in the field on a sales call or what is not The Coach can gain insight firsthand by observing a call or gather it from huddle data where you review sales behaviors and results. For example, how many calls and appointments are your salespeople supposed to make, and what were their results in a certain timeframe? Then, most importantly, what behaviors did your salespeople exhibit to get those results and if not to goal, how will they change their sales behaviors
• Giving Feedback is when coaching sales behaviors gets more difficult. Here are a few tips:

1. Makes sure feedback is timely and specific
2. Review the Good, Bad & Ugly (find something good to point out)
3. Ask questions to help them self-discover
4. Gain agreement on the real problem

• Demonstration of the sales behaviors you want and expect can be hard for many Coaches because they may not have come out of a sales role but they can demonstrate the questions needed to be asked and the sales approach that should be followed. We call this the Shadow of the Leader.
• Practice - Roleplay is never anyone’s favorite activity but once the sales manager has demonstrated the sales behavior, it is important to have the salesperson role play. Don’t call it role play, just name it a practice session but make sure they do it. Muscle memory needs repetition!
• Action Plan is putting the learning into action. Is the salesperson going to call the prospect back and ask those additional questions about their current provider? Make certain to identify specific actions that will take place, set a follow-up to discuss the outcomes, inspect, then coach their sales behaviors again. And don’t forget to celebrate the success and address the failures.

Effective coaching involves regular feedback and accountability. It helps salespeople understand where they can improve and holds them responsible for their performance. This accountability can drive better results and encourage a culture of excellence.

5. Measurable Results:

The impact of coaching on sales growth is not just theoretical. It can be measured through key performance indicators such as larger account sizes, improved conversion rates, revenue per salesperson, and customer satisfaction scores. In order to ensure that coaching improves sales results, it is important to establish the metrics that will be measured and tracked in order to provide insights as to the coaching effectiveness.

We work with companies establishing Success Formulas that reflect the effort needed at each step of their sales process. For example, a company could track dials to contacts, contacts to appointments, appointments to sales opportunities, opportunities to presentations and presentations to closed sales. Many of these stages can be reflected in a company’s CRM. If these are tracked regularly, it is an ideal way for a Coach to identify at which step a salesperson is struggling. With strong coaching, many skills and the results of these steps can be improved, resulting in improved sales results.

Conclusion:

To fully harness the power of coaching, it's essential to foster a coaching culture within your organization. This involves making coaching a part of your company's DNA and encouraging all levels of management to engage in coaching activities. By implementing a coaching program within your organization, you can tap into the potential of your sales team and drive sustainable sales growth.

Much like a good sports coach, a good sales coach gets involved in all aspects of the job, including both the selling skills and the mental state of his or her salespeople. Certainly, the coach trains, develops and mentors their salespeople to become better at the role of selling. But the most important role of the sales coach is to help their salespeople achieve their personal goals. To achieve their goals, salespeople need both skill and knowledge – and someone to coach them to excellence. How good are you at coaching your salespeople to be their very best?

Here are 7 sales coaching best practices to master to improve your coaching:

 #1 Sales Coaching Best Practice: Debrief Effectively

An effective and proactive coach is in a constant state of debriefing their people. Whether their salespeople are returning from an initial appointment with a new client, presenting a solution to a new client, or renewing a current relationship, a coach must constantly have real time intel as to how the salesperson is performing. One sales coaching best practice is to have regularly scheduled debriefing times in their ideal week calendar. During the sessions, the effective sales coach will be armed with great questions to find out what happened, how things happened, and why they happened. Questions about the prospect’s compelling reason to take action, their willingness to invest, their ability to make a change from a current provider and the decision-making process are the questions that must be asked in addition to the technical aspect of the sale relative to product and service offerings. Based on the answers, the sales coach must begin to develop insight as to where the choke points are in a salesperson’s approach in order to coach them for skill improvement. 

#2 Sales Coaching Best Practice: Effective on Joint Calls

While on a joint call, there are roles for everyone. That is why doing pre-call meetings, before the meeting are so important. The sales coach has to make sure that his salesperson is prepared to conduct the perfect sales meeting and the coach’s role is to be defined as supportive in nature, not the main character. This means that when the coach is on the call and the sales professional is making mistakes, they must let them. and oddly, this is a sales coaching best practice.  An effective coach will not rescue them as they understand that is how they will learn.  Now a good coach will not let them blow the sale of a life time.  But they will not bail them out and rescue them when they forget to ask a critical question.  Once the call is over, the sales coach conducts the post call debrief with the sales person. The effective coach will first ask their sales person to tell them how they thought it went.  The coach can then compare comments made to their own observations and from that, share their insights as to how well the sales professional performed. 

#3 Sales Coaching Best Practice: Ask Quality Questions

Having a conversation with someone is much more pleasant then going through an interrogation.  This is important for the effective coach to remember if they are focused on asking questions.  After two or so questions, the sales person is going to feel like the coach is picking on them rather than coaching them to improve. Let’s say that a sales person has a tendency to miss finding out about the competition. The coach could ask them: “Did you find out about the competition?” or they could ask “When you asked them how they were going to undo the current relationship, how did they respond?” Which question is going to give better insight as to how the salesperson is executing on their sales system? Open-ended questions tend to make coaching sessions more conversational which why they are a sales coaching best practice. The open-ended questions will help the sales person identify the gaps between what is expected and what is getting done. 

#4 Sales Coaching Best Practice: Demonstrates an Effective Selling System

Great sales coaches really know their sales process and selling system. They know it so well that they own the content and process. The sales leader exhibits the sales skills expected of the sales team in everything they do. They ask open-ended questions. They help people discover the issues. They make sure that the other person wants to fix the problem. They check for the ability to invest time to fix the problem, and finally, they get commitment. An effective sales coach must demonstrate what they expect. This mastery of the system is what allows the coach to identify incorrect behavior when they observe their salespeople in a prospecting situation or role-playing session with peers. If the sales coach does not know, then you can’t possibly expect their salespeople to know.

#5 Sales Coaching Best Practice: Effective at Getting Commitments

Gaining commitment is a sales coaching best practice for the on-going development and improvement in a sales team. Even with top producers, a sales coach must gain their commitment to execute at high levels and discuss with them their personal goals, and their commitment to attain those goals, through committing to the required sales activities. Sales people commit to what is important to them. It may be important to salespeople that shareholder value increases, but as a sales coach, don’t count on that. What motivates most salespeople is their own set of personal objectives, goals and ambitions. The coach’s job is to help them discover the goals they are committed to and then help them discover their ‘current state’. And when there is a gap, (such as their current sales pipeline and closing ratio will not help them buy that new house they were hoping for), then an effective coach helps them discover the ‘pain’ of the eventual outcome of their current state and the change that must take place to achieve their goals.

#6 Sales Coaching Best Practice: Consistently Coach Skills & Behaviors

Most sales coaches do not understand the difference between performance management (discussing the sales activities, i.e.; the numbers) and coaching (how the activities are being executed). Coaching focuses on how someone did what they did. Every sales leader’s calendar should have consistent scheduled times for coaching their people. Effective coaching focuses on skills and behaviors, the how of what people do. Sales coaching should include the following:  asking questions, drilling down on those answers, getting commitments, helping salespeople overcome objections and helping salespeople with their own performance issues. Coaching is not about how to structure a deal. That is teaching. Coaching is rolling up the sleeves and getting into the art and science of the sale, rather than the mechanics of the product and service design of the offering.

#7 Sales Coaching Best Practice: Effectively On-board New Hires

On-boarding a new salesperson is critical as it will determine both the immediate and long-term success of new hires. Here are three sales coaching best practice on-boarding steps:

1. The sales coach must communicate their vision, objectives and expectations to the extent that if the salesperson was asked, they could repeat without hesitation and in great detail.
2. The sales coach must schedule weekly coaching sessions with their new hires to help them create and execute on their plan and learn, implement and inspect their effective selling process.
3. An effective coach can use their huddle data, pipeline growth and notes from pre- and post-call debriefing sessions to see if their new hire is exceeding activity and behavior expectations.  From that critical early data, they can begin to identify and teach and coach to the salesperson’s choke points.

Our coaching tip for you, the coach, is to select at least 3 of these sales coaching best practices and focus on them, improve your own skills and by doing so, you will help your salespeople improve their levels of performance. Let’s go, Coach!

But to me, it is important to back up the bus just a few stops and ask the question – who is your competition? Most training participants would say the name of another service provider that their prospect could choose at the conclusion of the sales process. Some other introspective training participants would say their greatest competition is themselves, meaning they need to stay out of their own way and deal with some head trash that interferes with them doing some of the harder things in sales. They recognize that they must become “comfortable with being uncomfortable” in order to be more assertive and ask more questions (and some of those questions need to be tough questions).

I can’t argue any of the above – they are all valid points. It is just that I believe something is missing. I have long held a deep conviction that the fiercest competition you will face in selling is what I refer to as “prospect indifference.” This is the dreaded moment at the conclusion of the sales process when they prospect says “we are just going to hold tight for the time being.”

Sometimes this is caused by fear of the unknown – with the prospect concluding maybe it is better to deal with the devil they know (the flawed incumbent provider) than to roll the dice with the devil they don’t know (you and your solution). Other times prospect indifference is the resistive inertia or the gravitational pull back to the incumbent. Regardless of why it occurs it is stiff competition.

Here are five keys to dealing with prospect indifference:

1. You better be bold in your approach and your conversations. You must be willing to rattle the windows a little bit as you probe for the impact of the problem the prospect is dealing with.
2. You better be sure that you know the difference between a problem that is just a problem and a problem that has become a priority that must be addressed.
3. You must be in front of all the decision makers – and one of those decision makers must be the person who is feeling the deepest impact of the problem.
4. You must provide “emotional transportation” to your prospect by using a story to move them to a future point where the problem has been solved to measure their reaction to that future state.
5. You can’t be afraid to lose….and you must recognize that the best time to lose is early rather than late.

So, know your competition. And deal with your competition – even if it is you!