It’s this simple: If you want great barbeque ribs, brisket or chicken, the key is low temperature and slow cooking. Having said that, if you want maximum flavor and tenderness, make sure you sear or char the meat first, then go low and slow. This is an undeniable truth. Just read the Science of Cooking and discover all the neat things you can do to improve the outcome of any meal.
EXPERIENCE DOESN'T GUARANTEE FUTURE SUCCESS
20 years in sales does not guarantee future success. Just ask anyone that has lost a sale at any time in their career. Something always happens just a little bit differently. If there isn’t an adjustment, a lesson or some learning as a result, then the salesperson is prone to repeating the sames mistakes or errors over and over again.
When you effectively coach your people, they will get better. When they get better, you will close more business, more quickly at higher margins. This is undeniable as well. Just look at the information provided by The Sales Management Association. **FYI - it’s also undeniable that a lack of coaching has a negative impact on sales success and talent development!
(Bob Rotella – coach to PGA Tour Players – Author – How Champions Think)
THERE IS ALWAYS TIME TO COACH
In our Sales Management Certification Program, we discuss 5 Keys to Coaching for Success in our coaching module. These 5 keys cover what to do and how to do it when you are face-to-face with your salespeople. Many managers, before going through our certification, complain/tell me/make excuses that there isn’t enough time to effectively coach their people. I don’t buy it. There are several opportunities for coaching without adding to an already busy schedule:
- Sales meetings
- Segment on sales training
- Role-playing phone calls to get appointments
- Role-playing conversations to get appointments with internal partners
- Role-play how to position financial planning
- Overcoming objections
- Appropriately dealing with questions, and stalls.
- Pre–call strategy sessions
- Post-call debriefing sessions
- 1-on-1 intentional coaching sessions
- Ad-hoc moments when they ask you if you have a minute
- Every time they give you an excuse for lack of effort or execution
IN-THE-MOMENT COACHING VS. COACHING FOR SUCCESS
Coaching does take place today, but most of it is in the moment. Kind of like when a coach calls a time out in a game. The team is gathered around the coach and a strategy is developed to take advantage of the “in the moment” opportunity. Normally, that’s the type of coaching that takes place in sales – in the moment. That type of coaching helps close a sale, get an appointment, and/or move an opportunity through the pipeline, but it does nothing to change behavior or improve skills!
Do you find yourself or your sales managers constantly covering the same ground to close deals, improve effort or refine execution? Are opportunities getting stuck in the pipeline in the same spot for the same reasons over and over? When you look at the performance (effectiveness and productivity, not just the results), do you see actual improvement in sales ratios like average size sale, conversion ratios from opportunities to closes and average production for each quintile in the team?
Those are the types of metrics that determine if your coaching is effective! Failure to collect that data leads to failure of the effectiveness of your sales manager and your sales team. Collecting the data and then doing nothing about it leads to lackluster enthusiasm for entering data, thus limiting the integrity of your forecasting.
THE 5 KEYS FOR COACHING SUCCESS
So, let’s assume for a second that 1) you are collecting data and 2) you are creating opportunities to coach people. We can now discuss The 5 Keys for Coaching for Success.
- Gain insight from data points: Your data points have to include data (numbers representing leading and lagging indicators), observational opportunities via joint calls, and observations made during role plays in meetings.
The data points you have should not be a secret to your people. Share with them what you know and what you’ve observed. Prior to meeting with them, call them to set up the coaching meeting. Tell them that the data you have indicates there might be some problems with them hitting their established extraordinary goal. (Remember the extraordinary goal discussion?) Then tell them that you want to meet with them during your established coaching hours. Set the appointment.
- Provide feedback: Now that you both have the date, you don’t have to ask the worse possible question in your meeting, “So, Joe, what’s going on?” Instead, you acknowledge that you’ve looked at the numbers and they’ve looked at the numbers and then you ask a question about the problem that you see.
Let’s pretend that you see a choke point where his conversion of conversations isn’t leading to the assumed number of appointments. All the other assumptions look good, but - because the conversion is off - the number of appointments isn’t meeting the goal. Without this information, the only coaching you can do is to tell Joe that he needs to see more people. But, with all the data, you see that the effort is there – the dials and discussions – but that effort isn’t leading to appointments.
Instead of pointing that out, you ask Joe what he sees when he looks at the conversation ratio compared to the model in the success formula. Assuming Joe sees the same thing as you, you are now in a position to ask further questions. The key here is that both parties must agree as to what the problem is. - Demonstrate what you expect to be done: In this case, you would listen to Joe’s approach to converting conversations to appointments. You would identify areas where he might need to change or improve his approach and you demonstrate what that would look/sound like.
- Role–play: Now that you’ve demonstrated what you expect, you role-play various situations with Joe giving him several different responses.
- Action step: It is critical that every coaching session ends with an action step. An example of that would be to agree to a number of calls that Joe is going to make over a short period of time (i.e. by the end of the day or week) and then instruct him to report back to you (on a specific day and time) the outcome of his effort.
(Click here for 9 critical coaching skills)
STOP WASTING YOUR MONEY ON SALES TRAINING
Understand that this might be an ongoing process for Joe, and you may have to take a more disciplined approach to his coaching and execution of the skills he is struggling with. At the end of the day, the key is to recognize that improvement is vital for sales growth. You cannot expect to grow sales without improving effort and/or execution. If you want to improve sales, invest your money in developing your sales managers and stop wasting money on sales training until your managers can and will coach.
Additional Resources:
Demo online Sales Learning Module
Sales Managed Environment® Certification Module – Free Document
