Tag Archives: Business Growth

Sales Coaching

Sales Coaching – Revealed – 4 Rewarding Methods to Make Money Through Coaching

You can really make more money through sales coaching. How? These coaching programs can help your sales people improve their selling skills. When this happen, they’ll be empowered to easily convince your prospects to make a purchase. As you know, this can lead to more sales and more revenue.

To make your sales coaching more effective, I recommend that you focus your sessions on these aspects:

1. Active listening. You will need to teach your sales force to listen actively to your prospects not only to make these people feel valued but also for your sales personnel to get a deeper understanding about their needs and demands. Teach your team not to do all the talking during the sales process as this can easily frustrate potential buyers.

2. Probing questions. Teach your sales force to be more inquisitive when talking to your prospects especially if these people are not giving them clear picture of their problems. Tell them that the probing questions they use must be open-ended, succinct, simple, and easy to understand.

3. Sell value. It’s important that you make your sales personnel realize the importance of selling value as this can affect the buying decisions of your prospects. Teach them how to properly communicate the benefits, selling points, and competitive advantage of the products and services they offer to make them extremely valuable and useful to the eyes of your potential buyers.

4. Close the sale. Your sales people must know the best ways to close the sale. Coach them how to create a sense of urgency to easily get their prospects to swipe their credit cards.

By the way, would you like to get the newbie-friendly insider’s secrets to building a stable, thriving business online… year after year? Swing on by our friendly Business Builders Cafe at http://infobusinessuniversity.com/cafe for the latest freshly-made marketing techniques… that just plain work beautifully. You’ll love what you receive!

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Sales Coaching

Sales Coaching – Revealed – Intriguing Methods to Excel at Coaching

If you are a sales manager, it’s a must that you coach your sales team so they can be more productive. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Identify areas of opportunities. The first thing that you need to do is to analyze the weakness of your selling processes and the areas of opportunities of your sales representatives. They might not have great communication skills, they maybe struggling when faced with objections, or they may not be persuasive enough to get people to buy. Knowing the things that you need to work on ahead of time can help you make your coaching programs more targeted thus, more effective.

2. Design coaching modules. Design modules for each area of opportunities. Include all the information that you need to share and all the activities that your trainees will need to perform in order to improve their performance or in order to overcome their issues during the selling process. Make sure that your modules contain all the answers to their questions and all the instructions on how they can properly deal with their issues.

3. Medium. Aside from doing one-on-one and group coaching programs, you can also use the internet or the phone when conducting coaching sessions. Every medium has pros and cons. Research and identify which one is more effective and use it. You can also run surveys to know the preferences of your target audience.

4. Feedback. Solicit feedback from your trainees after each training sessions. Ask them if they find it useful. Take each feedback seriously so you’ll know what you need to improve on to make your future coaching sessions more effective and more impacting.

By the way, would you like to get the newbie-friendly insider’s secrets to building a stable, thriving business online… year after year? Swing on by our friendly Business Builders Cafe at http://infobusinessuniversity.com/cafe for the latest freshly-made marketing techniques… that just plain work beautifully. You’ll love what you receive!

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Sales Coaching

Problems That Sales Coaches Can Solve

Are you as a Sales Leader or Manager facing any of these issues with your team?

Sales training often isn’t enough to produce long term change in your sales team.

Read this list to see if you might benefit from a sales coach:

Having trouble with:

 

  • Generating new customers
  • Increasing returns on marketing campaigns
  • Failure to consistently achieve sales revenue goals
  • Reduce ever-lengthening sales cycles
  • Increasing costs of maintaining an effective and productive sales team
  • Keeping the sales team motivated
  • Shrinking margins – mounting pressure to discount
  • Protecting and developing dwindling key accounts
  • Increasing erosion of market share
  • Increased failure to forecast revenue with any degree of accuracy
  • Increased quantity and ferocity of competition and being outsold by competitors
  • Limited product knowledge in the field
  • Declining customer satisfaction and increasing customer expectation
  • Global market rationalization Increasing number of stalled sales opportunities
  • Finding and keeping good people
  • Managing salespeople who plan and manage their time and territory by the seat of their pants – they don’t seem to have a game plan or a strategy as to how they are going to win
  • Reducing the “last three weeks of a sales quarter” syndrome where everyone scrambles to try and pull in as much as they can to hit sales targets and we end up giving away our margin
  • The current economic crises are impacting on sales team’s ability to consistently achieve their sales quotas
  • Operating in markets where there seems to be more and more “gatekeepers”, buying committees, tendering processes, RFPs, etc., all of which prevent the sales team from gaining access to decision makers
  • It is becoming increasingly tough to get to talk to the people who matter about what they really need and want when it comes to buying our services
  • We struggle to speed up the buying process and close more deals more often
  • Sales teams that needs constant motivating. They seem to lack passion, focus and commitment
  • “Give us a quote” is a common response my salespeople are hearing. So what I find is that my salespeople often invest large chunks of their time putting together proposals for prospective clients that have no real intention of buying from them
  • The message we hear from our customers over and over is, “Your competitor can do it faster and cheaper.” And they are right! How do we sell against that?
  • No predictable and accountable selling process that moves the sale forward smoothly
  • Constantly grappling with costly, wasteful, and ineffective sales practices (e.g., low yield on direct marketing, low close ratios, high costs for branding, tradeshows, or product development)
  • I don’t have a clue where to start to get sales back on track!

 

If you or your sales team are facing any of these common issues, you should consider getting coached!

As one of Australia’s leading authorities and coaches in sales management, Ian Segail has been involved in the coaching, training and development of sales managers and salespeople for over two decades.

Drawing on 25 years of experience in sales, sales management and leading an HR and training team, Ian brings a strong dose of fiscal reality and practicality to his works as a Sales Performance Coach.

Engaging directly with business owners and both novice and experienced sales managers alike, across a wide variety of industries and selling disciplines, the focus of Ian’s work is to transform sales results for companies by improving sales management practices. Ian is the author of “Bulletproof Your Sales Team – The 5 Keys To Turbo-Boosting Your Sales Team’s Results” and a number of business articles, business reports and white papers including “The fish stinks from the head!” and “Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work.” Ian has an insatiable hunger for studying selling and people management and has passionately pursued answers to the question “How come some people can sell and most can’t?”

Check out sales resources and Ian’s blog at [http://www.salestutor.com.au]

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2231945

Sales Coaching

Effective One on One Sales Coaching Sessions

Recently I have read posts on this subject on a several popular blogs. My most recent “snooping around” session revealed on one of those blogs that an “effective One-On-One coaching session should be planned six months ahead of time”. My curiosity ended, as did my snooping session. If you are holding your coaching session every six months you should be fired as a sales manager! You sales people are customers of your leadership, and they need service from you more often than every six months.

There are four types of coaching sessions:

Behavioral – something has come to your attention that must/should be shared. Though we think of these sessions as addressing negative behaviors you should use them to recognize positive behaviors also.

Discovery – As a manager you have uncovered a developmental issues that should be addressed. This is the first session of a field training program that should end with a bi-lateral contract between you and the sales person.

Follow Up – These are frequent mini-sessions to check up, and exchange feedback.

Bottoms Up – If you are a great leader this should happen often. Instead of you discovering a developmental issue one of your team members seeks out your help. Why? Because you are trustworthy and they know you are there to serve them.

First a note about tone. Attitude is everything. If this is a behavior coaching session do not send mixed messages. If a negative behavior issue is serious enough to warrant exploration and coaching, don’t mince in other topics. The outcome of behavioral coaching sessions are usually uni-lateral next step contracts. If you have discovered a specific sales skill that needs improvement you do want to recognize those other skill areas that are best in class. If this session is a follow up you should summarize previous discussions, recognize progress and discuss next steps. The key to follow up coaching sessions is that this is a bi-lateral agreement to next steps.

Coaching sessions should be orderly. You should control some parts of the discussion and you should let your team member control others. However, this is not a free flowing, never ending conversation. You may end up being friends with some of you sales people but remember, friendship is the outcome of effective leadership, leadership is never the outcome of friendship.

The coaching session outline;

Warm Up – I guess you could just hit them over the head, but why? This is a team member. The only reason to minimize this part of the discussion is if you have uncovered a negative behavioral issue that if not addressed could result in the termination of this team member. Initiating a serious conversation with frivolous small talk is disingenuous.

Orientation – If this is the first coaching session to reveal something you have discovered, particularly if the team members overall contributions are satisfactory, this part of the discussion is crucial. For instance, if you are concerned with this team members prospecting skills you should discuss what lead to this discovery. “Jim, thanks for your first quarter results. It helped show the others that the goals are achievable even with this difficult economy. But I was exploring our CRM system and think I discovered something. I noticed that you not only made your goals, but had the highest proposal to contract closing ratio! In fact, you also had one of the highest closing ratios in moving prospects from the needs analysis to the proposal, congratulations! But that led me to think, are you motivated to dramatically increase your earnings? Because if you are I think I discovered something that is holding you back…” Now the stage is nearly set for you to focus the conversation.

Focus – This is the meat of the conversation and two-thirds of your time should be spent here. But step back a little. Dust off those sales skills from your past life. If you sold like I did, you’re best sales pitches were not about what you told a prospect right? First you need to sell the need. Continuing our conversation with Jim…”Since you have world class skills at the end of the sales cycle, I did a little arithmetic. You may already know this but if you were able to put 3 more prospects into your pipeline every quarter your earnings would increase by 10%!” My best sales presentations came about because of the questions I asked! You need to use your open ended probes, your directional probes and confirming probes. You need to find out if the lack of prospecting is a skill gap, or a will gap (see separate articles on each subject on blog). If Jim agrees he has a need to increase the number of prospects in his pipeline, you’re halfway home! You now have to come to agreement on how to satisfy that need.

Contract – Every coaching session should end with a contract. Simply put this is the agreement going forward, which defines each person’s action plan and roles. In my Sales Excellence Process there is a form which defines each person’s commitment. The contract (unilateral or bilateral) should be driven by what you determined to be the cause of the problem. If the issue is skill then you as the leader will have an obligation to the sales person to deliver the training. If the issue is one of will to do the task then the sales person will have more obligations to the contract while your role will be inspecting what you expect.

Coaching sessions are the most important duty of a sales manager. How you go about delivering a coaching session will define your leadership. Get your mind right! Are you there to help, or are you there to catch someone doing something wrong? Remember “Cool Hand Luke”?

Boss: Sorry, Luke. I’m just doing my job. You gotta appreciate that.

Luke: Nah – calling it your job don’t make it right, Boss.

Sales Performance Advisors delivers field ready tools to help sales people, sales managers, directors and executive management optimize their sales results.

You can contact Gregory Deming @ (925)216-5081
gregorydeming@gmail.com

You can view our blog @ http://www.peaksalesperformance.wordpress.com

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Sales Coaching

Buying Email Lists – Perspective From the Insurance Sales Coach

Are you thinking about buying an email list to increase your insurance sales? Before you make that purchase there are some things you should consider Before you throw money away that could be invested more wisely for a better return. Plus you want to make sure you aren’t getting yourself into legal hot water and potentially huge fines.

It sounds like such a great idea. You could buy a list of 1,000,000 names and then send your sales message to those people. Just think if even 1% of those one million people bought from you, why you’d get 10,000 new clients. Hold the send button email breath it doesn’t exactly work that way.

Exactly how did the company selling you those email addresses get those names? Typically those companies have a website where visitors have to agree to get messages either knowingly or unwittingly from a whole host of other companies in order to get something they want. As an example, during the political campaign season there were banners ads all over the internet you could click on claiming you would get a free t-shirt for your favorite candidate for free.

Once you clicked on the banner ad you went to a website where you had to jump through a bunch of hoops agreeing to get other free gifts from other companies in order to finally get your free t-shirt. So if you did everything you needed to do to get your free t-shirt does that mean you wanted email from those other companies? Not likely.

The legality of this process is tricky and one I’d never personally want to risk. I certainly would never want to jeopardize my personal integrity with the people I hope to work with in this way. The people who got on this list didn’t really agree to opt-in to your email list. They may have opted in so they could get a free gift, but that isn’t the same as opting in to your opt-in email campaign.

That’s exactly what could create a legal or technical nightmare for you. When you send out your email thinking these folks are happy to get your message you might just get a nasty surprise. When some of the big internet service providers get a sudden burst of emails from an unknown sender, you, going to their clients they’ll flag you as a spammer and block all your messages so no one on their service gets them. Your own internet service provider may also flag you as a spammer when they notice that all of a sudden you’re sending a huge number of outgoing messages and they could block you from sending any email messages to anyone through their services. Both of these nasty surprises are a headache and can take a great deal of time and sweat equity to correct. A third nasty surprise is far worse.

Either one of the internet service providers or even an individual email recipient could report you as a CAN-SPAM legislation violator. Guess who bears the burden of proof on that deal. Yep, you guessed it…you.

Even if none of those bad things happened a purchased email list is still a bad investment because they’ll opt-out of your email campaign in huge numbers. Even the ones who don’t opt-out are about as likely to do business with you as you are to win the lottery. So getting a return on your investment will be challenging to put it in the best way I can.

There’s simply no logical reason to buy an email list when you could easily build your own list of highly responsive people who will buy from you. All you need is a one page website, a way to capture information from your visitors, and an offer to give them something they’ll want. Then once you send them the information they asked for they really have opted in to “your” list and you can legally prove it if you ever needed to. Plus you have the opportunity to develop a relationship with this stranger and convert them to a buyer.

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Selling Insurance made easy. Get your free report here. [http://increasesalescoach.com/selling-insurance.html]

Increase Sales Coach Cheryl A. Clausen Gets Results Sales Training Can’t BECAUSE it’s never just a sales issue

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