Most sales managers spend the majority of their time doing activities that don’t really positively impact their salespeople’s success. Being pulled in many different directions, many tend to get mired down in the paperwork associated with a sales manager’s job rather than dealing with the “people side” of the job. The results come from the people, so focusing efforts on the sales people will pay off.
Coach: Just like every baseball player has a coach, all salespeople need to have one. The coach practices with them, runs them through drills, observes their performance, and gives them feedback on how to improve. Coach your people instead of managing them. Demonstrate how to perform in a sales call, role-play with the salespeople, and be prepared to give honest feedback, but don’t rescue your salespeople in a call—allow them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. You don’t see a baseball manager running to the plate to take over for a batter! Don’t do that to your salespeople either; use the failures as coaching opportunities. Coach them informally whenever appropriate, but also have a weekly coaching meeting. Ask them to discuss a call that didn’t go as perfectly as they would have liked and listen for what was effective as well as areas for improvement. The more you coach your salespeople with the goal of helping them improve, the more open they will be with you about how the calls actually go as their skills improve.
© Copyright Gretchen Gordon All Rights Reserved
7 Comments
I think you are on target! Too many times sales managers ride with salespeople and say nothing about a call or never even review what went on. The focus is on the sales $ potential, not the actual call
Great point!
Love the analogy: You don’t see a baseball manager running to the plate to take over for a batter!
Discussing the call is key and a great learning opportunity. Sales managers don’t know what to do when going on joint sales calls. That’s a lesson in itself.
Another approach when coaching is to spend the day with a sales representative and after each call ask what went well, what would they do differently – and not much more. The sales manager wants to see 3-5 calls to look for patterns – or the biggest gap. They will see several skills to develop but sellers can only work on one at a time. Also if you bombard a person with a list of gaps – you’ll lose them and they also won’t want you to ride with them again!
Select the most critical gap observed, that if fixed now would make a difference. The final coaching discussion for the day would be around that skill and how to develop it. That may be the only skill to focus on for several weeks.
Great examples!
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