Inside Our Head

Get in the habit of inviting team members to challenge your ideas. Encourage them to constructively (and positively) criticize your plans. Make it okay for people to disagree with you.

This lets people know you value their input, and ensures that implemented ideas will be well thought out. By giving your sales people permission to disagree encourages teamwork, which, in turn, helps motivate everyone on the team.

Do remember, however, when someone disagrees with you he/she should raise the issue with you in private, instead of blurting it out during a team meeting.

Here's a common scenario being played out in hundreds of corporate offices every day.

A salesperson suffers a bad month, so in swoops the sales manager. The necessary sales training and encouragement is given and voila! - the sales rep is sent back out to reverse their fortunes.

But is this what the top 1% of sales managers do? Nope. The top 1% don't react to the needs of their salespeople. Instead, they anticipate them. They identify Key Performance Indicators, those observable characteristics of effective sales performance. Top sales managers don't want to know a sales rep had a bad month. Instead, they want to know in advance, in time to take corrective action.

At TopLine Leadership, our coaching model actually is in the form, in the acronym, the word coach: C-O-A-C-H.

At the center of the process is Commitment. It's commitment both on the sales manager's part and also on the sales person's part as well. That's the center focus. If we don't have commitment on both ends, it falls down. Basically the model falls apart, that's why it's the central focus: C.

The O in the word stands for Observe. Observing is the starting point as it relates to the coach's process itself. All we need to do is examine both: the behaviors and the activities. So, the O in the coach acronym stands for observe, we've got observe both behaviors and activities.

The A in the model is to Assess. What are we assessing? Two things: competence and willingness. However, it's not just the competence and the willingness of the sales person, it's the competence and willingness of the sales person as it relates to each task that they are performing. We said that they might be a 5-5 at one level, five-two at another, a two-five at another level. So we're going to access the competence and willingness based on the task at hand, or the task that we're going to coach them on. Then we're going to communicate effectively.

The second C in the coach acronym is Communicate. There's actually going to be four different types of sales coaching approaches. So, before you engage in that one-on-one sales coaching process, you're going to take a step back and say: What's the level of competence and willingness? And, what coaching approach am I going to use?

The H in the model is Help. We're going to help our sales people by providing empathy, feedback, and follow-up.

So there you have it C-O-A-C-H. Commitment is where it starts, its our central point, observe , assess, communicate, and help. That's the process and that's the model.

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
Peter Drucker

As the Student you studied the changes affecting your prospects. This was during the Need stage of the Buy-Learning Process. Then, as the Doctor, also during this Need stage of customer focused selling, you diagnosed "little problems" and uncovered BIG needs.

When the customer recognizes a real need to buy, they have moved from the Need stage to the Learn stage.

Now you are ready to fulfill your role as Architect as the focus shifts to selecting the solutions that best meet your buyers' needs. The objective now is address the buyer's fear of making a mistake, and keep your competitors out.

THE ARCHITECT DESIGNS UNIQUE SOLUTIONS AND DEMONSTRATES INCOMPARABLE CAPABILITIES SO THE COMPETITION IS STYMIED.

Sometimes you don't get involved in the deal until after the Need stage has been completed by one of your competitors, and so you have to play catchup. Other times, if you are the only sales person involved up to and through the Learning stage, you still are not immune from competitive interference because soon your prospect will take time to Compare and consult your competitors. Playing the Architect role is pivotal regardless of your circumstances because it gives you the best opportunity to influence the prospect's buying criteria.

For more information, please visit our sales training section of our website.

When doing your competitive analysis, be sure to include criteria that reflect the requirements of all decision makers on the Complex Buying Team—operational requirements of interest to users; compatibility information of interest to the Integrator; purchase price and full lifecycle costs for the ROI Authority, and so on.

Sales coaching has two components: performance management and developmental coaching. Performance management is a quarterly one-on-one meeting where you review a rep's sales results, activity level, and evaluate their performance. Developmental coaching, on the other hand, is about developing the salesperson's competence and willingness to sell better going forward.

In short, performance management looks primarily to the past; developmental coaching looks to the future. "Good" sales coaching consists of both performance management and developmental coaching.

The problem is that with all the distractions sales managers face, the first thing to go out the window is developmental coaching. You fall back on a quarterly performance review that for many of us has become more of a creative writing exercise. We haven't observed the salesperson selling, or intervened at milestones during a sales process, so when a sales rep performs poorly we're not sure why.

If the only type of coaching we sales managers are doing is evaluative in nature, then salespeople don't think of it as coaching. They think of it as criticism.

In contrast, if you're helping your salespeople to think through what they need to do win a sale and at the same time striving to improve their selling skills - which is developmental coaching - then your salespeople will more readily accept all of your suggestions, both performance management and developmental coaching.

Any sales manager not actively engaged in developmental coaching would, in my opinion, fall into the "Low" coaching effectiveness category of the above research. For you to consider yourself a coach of "medium" effectiveness you must be engaged in developmental coaching on a regular basis.

To achieve a significant increase in sales you don't have to be a great sales coach - you just have to be a good sales coach. But to be a good sales coach you've got to spend more time developing salespeople's skill and abilities. Think back to how you spent your time last week - How much time did you devote to developmental coaching?

Most salespeople include in their approach call a "benefit statement," which is two or three generic customer benefits that attempt to create interest so the prospect agrees to an initial appointment. But the vast majority of prospects you call are either in the Change or Discontent steps when you call them.

They may or may not be aware they have a problem, which is nowhere near having the kind of explicit need for a solution that would allow them to respond positively to your pitch.

Describing benefits is a match for customers’ state of mind much later in the buying process, in the Comparison step. In talking about benefits off the bat, you’re out of sync, steps ahead of your customer—and, unfortunately for you, buyers rarely skip steps.

Coaching "symptoms" instead of underlying causes does more harm than good.

Accurate diagnosis of a performance problem means looking for the common threads, then applying a bit of detective work to consider:

• Is this a skill problem? If so, teach.
• Is this a willingness/motivation problem? If so, help the rep understand the reasons why they need to improve.
• Is this a self confidence problem dealing with C-level prospects? If so, encourage and coach the rep. Have them take a class to improve business acumen.

As all doctors know, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. Don't throw a bunch of symptoms at a sales rep. Instead, think it through. Then prescribe the coaching solution that will address the underlying cause of the performance problem.

Is your sales team lagging well behind where they should be? You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “success breeds success.” Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: failure can breed failure.

Here are some specifics about how you can turn around a lagging sales team. Even if your team is doing fairly well, you’re bound to pick up some tools and techniques for immediate sales improvement. Below are a few of the topics we will discuss at our upcoming Sales Management Training Seminar:

• How to set minimum standards with consequences for poor sales results.
• How to gain the buy-in for team development by involving your top salespeople in setting standards.
• De-hire those not making a positive contribution.
• How to leverage your best people to contribute more to the team’s development.
• How to manage yourself better, and make better decisions about how you allocate your time.
• Lead from the front. Get out in the field and make coaching salespeople your #1 priority.
• How to create a contest that will get everyone fired up and focused on making those extra sales calls that can make the difference.
• Coach sales skills. Coach sales strategy.

Click here for more information on our Sales Manager Training Seminars.

Webster’s defines the word solution as “the answer to a problem.” So why is it that so many sales organizations fervently believe that they are the “preferred solutions provider” in their marketplace, but their sales proposal document makes no mention whatsoever of the customer’s problems and issues? How can we call ourselves solutions providers if we don’t specify in our proposals the problems customers have that we can solve?

When I engage with a new sales training client my first request is for the client to send me what they consider to be their three best sales proposals. The sales proposal is the salesperson’s opportunity to communicate his/her solution to the customer, and sales proposals help me gain a better understanding of how that client’s salespeople sell. Nine times out of ten, I receive a sales proposal that is a comprehensive description of the seller’s “solution” but there’s no information whatsoever about the customer’s current situation and problems! More specifically, the capabilities of the seller’s solution are not linked to explicit customer needs (needs that your customer has described to you, in your customer’s terms). For example, one proposal I read recently espoused “Our focus will be on raising the bar within your Operations Department and empowering your personnel with robust data that can be used to reduce charge backs.” My questions about this “big fat claim” were:

1. What problems typically exist within the Operations Department that you can solve?
2. Specifically why does this client currently experience charge backs? What types of charge backs would be reduced by your more robust data, and by how much?
3. Your answers to questions 1 and 2 need to be differentiated from competitors, both major national competitors as well as “regional low-balls.” Remember, every capability that you present that is not differentiated from your competition moves you no closer to winning the sale.
   If your sales proposal is outdated, and does a poor job of communicating your solution to prospective customers, give me a call.