This blog is an excerpt from Objective Management Group’s recent webinar on The Data Behind Sales Managers of Elite Teams. The first chapter of this guide emphasizes the critical role of trust between a manager and their sales team to ensure coachability. We reveal data that demonstrates how salespeople who trust and have a strong relationship with their managers exhibit higher coachability and overall performance.

Want To Make Your Salespeople More Coachable? First Gain Their Trust

Coaching is necessary, but alone it’s not enough. Sales Managers need to make sure their teams are receptive to the coaching that they receive. How can managers do that?

To answer this, we analyzed OMG Sales Evaluations of over 11,000 salespeople and their managers. The data clearly shows that how salespeople view the quality of their relationship with their manager has a profound effect on their performance. The heart of the impact, unsurprisingly, lies in how open they are to the coaching efforts of their manager.

What does it mean to be Coachable? And why does it matter?

OMG’s Coachable finding explains to what degree a sales leader should be able to coach a frontline salesperson. Salespeople who score low on Coachability are less likely to make the changes necessary to improve their performance. And being coachable does lead to better performance – our data shows that the most coachable salespeople have +13% higher OMG Sales Percentile than the least coachable salespeople.

OMG’s Coachable finding explains to what degree a sales leader should be able to coach a frontline salesperson. Salespeople who score low on Coachability are less likely to make the changes necessary to improve their performance. So, how can managers make sure their salespeople are coachable?

Salespeople are significantly more Coachable when they trust, respect, and have a relationship with their manager.

Each component of trust, respect, and relationship-building matters. Salespeople who trust their sales manager’s intentions score +26% higher on Coachability compared to salespeople who do not trust their managers. Similarly, salespeople who respect their manager are +20% more Coachable. Salespeople who have a relationship that is strong enough to withstand constructive criticism are also +20% more Coachable.

Trust, respect, and a strong relationship between a salesperson and their manager also improves the salesperson’s Outlook and Responsibility:

• +19%: Salespeople who have a relationship with their manager score +19% better on Responsibility than salespeople who do not have a relationship with their manager.
• +13%: Similarly, salespeople who respect their managers score +13% better on Outlook than salespeople who do not respect their managers.

What does this mean in practice? Salespeople who score well on Responsibility are more likely to hold themselves accountable for their results, rather than blame external factors like competition or the economy. Salespeople who score well on Outlook believe that they can be successful in sales. Combined, the two create a virtuous cycle for performance improvement - the salesperson acknowledges that their own shortcomings are impacting their results and believes that they can perform better. This opens the door for a trusted manager to begin a targeted, frequent training plan.

Find out how your team rates on Coaching HERE!

 

 

When you are in an airplane, you may or may not pay much attention to what is going on in the cockpit. You may happen to glance at the massive control panel with all the switches, gauges, nobs and buttons, but it’s just a glance… before you hustle on to your seat to get settled in for the flight.  But the pilot does, thankfully.

When you are getting ready to start your day, you may not pay a lot of attention to what is happening in the cockpit of your sales aircraft or to “the dashboard” that provides critical information about the state of your business. Normally, you jump in the pilot’s chair and fly off into your day. You have a pretty good idea of where you are going THAT day… so you probably don’t give much attention to the “preflight plans” for the rest of the week, month or quarter. If this doesn't apply to you, it may apply to some of your salespeople. 

But, if you stop to think about your flight/business in longer terms, you know that, over the year, you will probably hit a lot of turbulence. And if used properly, your business dashboard, like the control panel of a 757, could provide you with the critical information that you will need to make the vital decisions required at those critical moments. In other words, it would be nice to have a system of alerts to give you warning BEFORE you are on the verge of crashing.

Have you looked at YOUR dashboard lately? Have your salespeople been checking theirs? What does it tell you? What alerts or warning systems do you have in place to let you know when you are losing altitude and attitude? How do you know if all systems are working properly and that your sales aircraft will get you safely to your destination – on time and on target? What should you be monitoring and doing every day (priorities) in your “preflight inspection” to make sure that you improve the probability of “getting there”? Think about these questions in regards to you and your salespeople.

Here’s my suggested short list of selling priorities:  Prospecting, talking to people, scheduling appointments, conducting qualifying (and disqualifying) appointments, presenting and getting decisions. Just like for each engine of the aircraft, each of your priorities should have a gauge (a standard of performance) and a RPMS, or required ground speed (a set time frame), necessary for safely lifting-off and landing your aircraft at the proper destination.

Having a thoroughly monitored dashboard of sales priorities to help you execute a safe landing (your goal) is a MUST! Share this blog with your team to start the conversation about their own "dashboards."

How should you coach your salespeople on how to respond to rate reduction requests from clients? Share this article or the information you've learned from it with them. These three immutable truths will help guide them to the best response. 

There are three immutable truths about rate reduction requests.

#1: It doesn’t cost a client anything to ask for a better deal. The worst thing that can happen to the prospect is that somebody will tell them no. It doesn’t cost anything to ask. In fact, you’ve probably been trained as a consumer to ask.

#2: Your attitude and your response to the request that your prospects and clients are making will have everything to do with setting the tone for future negotiations.

#3: Probably the most important of the three immutable truths; If you don’t move the conversation away from rate towards value, you will always be negotiating on rate for the rest of your relationship with that client.

Here’s the truth: What you win them with, is what you win them to. If you've used a very aggressive pricing model to win the business, then you have won them to that. And you have also created the expectation that is what the relationship is going to look like. You have created the reality for yourself that you’ll have them for a customer up until the point that somebody comes behind you that is just a little bit more aggressive. And they cut the rate. I mean, stop and think about that. The reality is what you win them with, how you win the business, is exactly what you’re winning them to.

So you have a decision to make on the front end, and you have a decision to make on the back end when they come and ask about these different requests. If you want to be good at responding, you need to be assertive. Why not use the word aggressive? It’s a fight to grow business. Don’t we need to be aggressive?

No, I want you to be assertive. The difference between an assertive and aggressive is emotion. Assertive people are under emotional control. Aggressive people are not, their emotions are in control of them. We want you to be assertive, standing up for what you believe is right. Asking all of the right questions, but with your emotions under control.

Number two is no surprise. You need to be skilled at asking questions and listening. We believe at Anthony Cole Training Group that the two most important attributes for a salesperson is that they are:

• Great at asking questions
• Great listeners

Let’s talk about listening for just a moment. Here’s the problem today. Most people (and particularly sales people) do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intention or desire to interrupt.

Great sales people are great listeners.

Number three, you have to be able to sell value.  You must believe that your offering has value, that you have value, that your institution has value. You must believe it. You have to be willing to walk away if the prospect doesn’t believe it.

 

There is no greater benefit than hearing from a client how they are implementing a sales development program in their bank and their culture. We recently had the benefit of 45 minutes of input from one of our valued banking clients and learned how they are building their team of successful, relationship building bankers.

Certainly, we are helping this leader with our Sales Managed Environment and Effective Selling System sales tactics, but the program is also flourishing due to their strong leadership.

Here are some of their key areas of focus.

• Sales development is for everyone, even the senior bankers. It might be important to treat them differently, provide options and flexibility but greatness is achieved by always learning so top performers must actively participate in sales training.
• Why be good, when you can be great? That is an underlying and consistent theme that drives the development efforts and generates engagement of the bankers. Who does not want to be part of a great team?
• Sales training must be bank-wide, all lines of business are in for a successful bank sales team. The same language must be spoken and an easy-to-follow sales process must be used consistently for bankers to leverage opportunities and bring in partners.
• Sales development is a capital investment and should be positioned and reported as such. This bank reports quarterly on the number and dollars of deals in the pipeline vs year prior as well as improved “pull through rate” which is number of sales compared to deals entering the pipeline.
• Use Big Math for coaching. The data does not lie and it takes the personal out of the conversation. Of course, banks must collect the right data in order to do that including outreaches, appointments, opportunities, presentations, approvals and deals closed. This data will tell a seasoned coach in which areas their bankers need to improve.
• Leverage small group training even though it may be more time intensive or costly, it is worth it. Small group training allows bankers to be more comfortable in front of others in role play. This leader said they practice until the banker no longer feels like “throwing up on their shoes.” That is what gets them to greatness as well as having senior leadership actively present.
• Clear out the BS in the pipeline with regular 30 and 60 day reviews and personal coaching. Do not let the pipeline carry dead weight. This will help the pipeline be more predictive of future success as well as flush out the potential need for more prospecting activity on the part of the banker.
• One way to make the pipeline more real is to require Opportunity Memos on those deals that are in middle to end stages of the pipeline. This memo clarifies the prospect qualifies on the many scorecard attributes identified by the bank.

These days, banking is in the news and the positive side of that is many bank clients are reaching out to their banks to ask questions, explore options, get better rates and feel more secure. This may take banking out of its commodity state of years past and allow for bankers to differentiate and engage their clients and prospects in a new way.

Every organization has sales coaching and a sales method. What many companies either don’t know or unsure of is this: What direct impact does our sales coaching and sales method have on improving sales?

 I can’t answer that question, but I can with 100% certainty make this statement: Your current coaching and methods are perfectly designed for the results you got last week, last quarter, and last year. Furthermore, they perfectly designed to get you your future results.

This is also what I know to be 100% true: If there is something about your sales outcomes that do not meet expectations, then something has to change. As the saying goes, you can’t keep doing the same things and expect different outcomes.

Often companies turn to sales training and management coaching to help with sales outcome problems. The positive impact you might be planning for as a result of any sales training will only happen if...

• You have the right people on the team today.
• You replace under-performers with those “that are highly likely to succeed’ (click this link for free download of Sales Candidate Assessment with 92% predictability)
• Your analysis of your sales systems and processes point you in a direction to implement and or fix required supporting sales systems and processes.
• You have the sales management DNA required to be successful at coaching, performance management, recruiting, motivation and upgrading.

Finally, do your sales managers have the sales management competency skills required to change outcomes?

The approach to improving sales skills (using SMART Goals and SMARTER Data) and coaching must help your people adjust several skills:

• Getting to Decision makers
• Using storytelling, metaphors, and analogies to make a point about how a solution might help a prospect.
• Outbound lead nurturing practices
• Finally, no excuses for lack of EFFORT

Having what we call a Sales Managed Environment® helps companies understand what needs to be changed and how to change and adjust to the moving landscape of pricing, availability, and competitors looking to buy market share. It’s tough to be successful at overcoming challenges and obstacles if you don’t have a built-in process that includes Performance Management, Skills Coaching, Hiring, and 1 on 1 deliberate coaching specifically to improve skills and change behavior.

Bottom line, you cannot possibly control all that is going on around you and your people. But you can control the habitus they live in, the quality of coaching support they get, and the availability of improving skills.