Committed leaders invest in themselves by taking part in sales management training to become better managers and coaches so they can help their people see greater success. 

Two questions I ask you today:

1. As a leader, are you truly committed?
2. Are your people truly committed to you, and your organization?

Being a leader is not an easy job, is it? No doubt, you have lots of responsibilities with lots to get done throughout your day, week, month, and year. With that said, are you:

• Leading by example and casting a large shadow so your people know you are there for them?
• Holding your people accountable for their daily and weekly activities that they agreed to?
• Gaining insights into what their choke points are and helping them overcome obstacles?
• Intentionally coaching your people on the little things (behaviors) to get the big things done (results)?
• Roleplaying and practicing to make your people better?

If you are committed to doing the above, you are on the right path to success. Your #1 job is to make your people wildly successful, to change circumstances so that they will be more successful than they would have been had they been left alone and not coached by you! How do you do that? By setting standards, holding them accountable, not allowing excuses, motivating, and coaching. But also, investing in yourself by taking part in sales management training to become a better manager and coach. Committed leaders do these things consistently.

What is the evidence that you are a committed leader? Try this exercise:

1. Your team says that you are totally committed to being successful in your role as a Sales Leader, CEO, President, etc. Write down what they would tell me to convince me that this is true.
2. Your team says that you are not totally committed to being successful in your role. Write down what they would tell me to convince me that this is true.

Are your people truly committed to you, and your organization? How do you know if they’re committed to success? To determine if they are truly committed, we like to use the following three categories as benchmarks:

1. Coast to Coasters – these people coast into work and then coast home at night. These people are retired…they just don’t know it yet.
2. WITALAIITU – Whatever It Takes, As Long As It Isn’t Too Uncomfortable. These people will do whatever it takes until it becomes outside of their comfort zone. Then they shut down.
3. WIT – Whatever It Takes. These people are high achievers. These are the people you want on your team to help build a strong culture within your organization.

When is the best time to find out if your people are committed? Yesterday. If not yesterday, then today.

I believe commitment starts and ends with YOU. Your commitment to yourself, your people, and your fine organization is contingent on you having that “whatever it takes” attitude. That attitude is contagious and you will find your people following your shadow because they know you are committed to them and their best interest.

Cast your shadow wide!

Goal setting and effectively motivating salespeople by identifying what's important to them is one of the primary focuses in our Sales Management training.

In this blog, we discuss the several steps a sales manager can take to establish a motivating, inspiring environment for their people.

Goal Setting & Motivation in Sales

When asked, most sales managers say that one of their greatest challenges is their ability to motivate and set goals for their salespeople. If a sales manager can figure out what makes his people “tick”, he can better help them hit their goal numbers. Sales motivation seems like hard work because salespeople often value different things. There are, however, several steps a sales manager can take to establish a motivating environment. 

How to Keep Your Sales Team Motivated

The first step to keeping your sales team motivated is to recognize that motivation is an “inside-out’ job. When the topic of motivation is discussed, we typically think about incentive compensation, sales contests, and recognition programs. All of these certainly encourage sales teams to focus on generating new business because these are rewards. However, you will gain true engagement and enthusiasm if you create an everyday environment that encourages each individual to identify and visualize his own internal motivation.

Salespeople do not care about corporate shareholder value unless they are shareholders themselves. What they care about is food, shelter, clothing, recognition, paying for college education or wedding, buying a vacation home, etc. These are personal desires and make up the vast majority of things that are important to people. So the solution is to create an environment where this internal motivation can take place. See The Dream Manager book by Michael Kelly.

How to Set Goals for Sales People

The next step to goal setting and motivation is to help your salespeople identify what is important to them. Make the effort to set up time off-site that is dedicated to planning and spend time developing each individual’s dreams and goals. This is time that you and they will spend ON your business instead of in it.

How to Create a Process for Your Salespeople

Create a process where people can establish personal goals because this is where true motivation, passion, and desire are born. Hence, it is from this process that each salesperson’s business plan must evolve.

You might position this process as though you are the coach and the salespeople are players on a competitive baseball team. Each of you has a part to play so that the whole team wins. When someone objects to the dream building exercises by saying something like “You are just going to provide a goal for me anyway so why do I have to do this?”, tell him that, as with a baseball team, each player must excel at his job so that the team can win and go to play-offs.

Salespeople will understand this. If someone does not get this, he or she may not be suited for selling. Selling requires desire, commitment, and a need to win. Selling is a competition.

Create an environment where people get a chance to unplug, sit down and outline their goals and dreams; a time when both of you can establish timeframes and attach financial values to these items. Once you have attached financial values, you will know what level of prospecting and selling activity is necessary for each salesperson.

Reward yourself and your people when they have a success. At our company, we hung a big bell in the hallway that we ring every time we bring in a new relationship. It is LOUD and that is just the way we want it! As your people go through this process and identify their goals; as you sit down and establish your own personal goals, be sure to specify how you will reward and recognize your people as each of them achieve these goals.

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.

Achieving the work-life balance sales professionals all hear and dream about starts with having a personal vision and a set of non-negotiable goals.

In this article, we will discuss the 4 must-do sales activities and the characteristics that all successful salespeople share when striving for the freedom of success. 

Today, I'd like to commemorate the victory and personal freedoms that comes from success in sales.

There are two freedoms that successful people enjoy: the freedom of time and the freedom of choice. You see, when you are always playing from behind, you never feel like you can take time off or treat yourself to that vacation you've been wanting to take.

Successful people aren’t successful by chance or luck. They all have (at least) four things in common.

1. They all have a vision of where they want to go, starting with the end in mind.
2. They have a mission. Or, the “how you will achieve your vision” 
3. Goals become the mile markers that let you know when you’ve “left the road”.
4. And they have a “WHY”

So, decide what freedoms you want. Determine what those freedoms require. Build your plan to get there.

• It all starts with your success formula, the behaviors you must execute day in and day out to accomplish your goals.
• Track your behaviors weekly and be accountable to someone other than yourself (we’re too good at explaining to ourselves why we didn’t do something).
• Know your SMART numbers- what are the key metrics that really drive your business and learn from them!
• Build your Unique Sales Approach (USA) that is compelling to the people in your sandbox, or those that fit your profile.

Finally, don’t do all of this and stick it in the drawer. You should review your vision, mission and goals annually and your Successful Formula and SMART numbers quarterly.

Now go out and sell something and celebrate the freedom of success.

In this blog, we discuss the best habits of highly successful salespeople and sales managers.  Being an extraordinary sales manager is grueling and time-consuming. 

It requires attention to detail, the ability to have tough conversations with those who are not meeting their numbers, the desire and commitment to grow yourself and your salespeople, consistent activity and patience. 

The sales management activities that you perform today create the results that you achieve today.

What activities are you doing now that are creating your current unsatisfactory results?  It is up to us as sales leaders to set higher standards for sales behaviors and hold people accountable so that we get better results.

It is a given that successful sales management requires contributions on many levels:  skill, time, effort, effective execution, and systems and processes to support coaching, performance management and recruiting.

To help understand what makes a successful sales manager, it is helpful to review the Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople. 

I recently asked the participants of a workshop to identify and share those habits that they believed contributed to the success of their best salespeople.  Below are some of the common habits identified:

• Develops great relationships
• Networks regularly
• Good time management skills
• Gets to decision makers
• Selective in prospecting
• Provides exceptional customer-service

Then I asked them to talk about the flip side of the list – those habits that inhibited or hurt a salesperson’s ability to close more business.  Below are some of the habits they identified:

• Sells on price
• Inconsistent prospecting
• Procrastinates
• Presents to the wrong people
• Sells to anyone that "fogs a mirror"
• Poor prioritization skills 
• Is too comfortable

How about you and your habits?  What are those habits that you can point to that you KNOW have a positive impact on your team’s sales behaviors and results?  Here are some that I observe and hear about:

• Coaches in-the-moment to get a deal closed
• Reports sales results
• Makes joint calls
• Sets goals
• Conducts regular sales meetings
• Reviews and reports pipeline

This is a good list and with some additions, it can become a great list when we identify the skills of a great Coach, one of the most critical roles of an effective sales leader.  To examine what else you might want to consider, take a look at the following list of elements necessary for successful coaching:

• Debriefs sales calls effectively
• Asks quality questions
• Controls emotions
• Allows salespeople to fail
• Implements and manages the execution of a consistent sales process
• Motivates when coaching based on individual/personal goals
• Coaches to improve skill and change behavior
• Gets sales people to follow through on commitments

It’s not enough to just have the skill.  In order for managers to be successful at having a sales team built for growth, the manager must be in the habit of using those skills.

Being an extraordinary sales manager is grueling and time-consuming.  It requires attention to detail, the ability to have tough conversations with those who are not meeting their numbers, the desire and commitment to grow yourself and your salespeople, consistent activity and patience. 

Like the coach of a winning team or conductor of an extraordinary symphony, you have the ability to positively affect the success and the lives of your salespeople and company.