Tag Archives: Business Growth

Sales Coaching

Insurance Sales Coach – The Path to Insurance Sales Success

If you keep doing what you’re told to do you’re doomed. If you’re like 85% of your fellow producers, your career will end within your first 18 months. Of those making it 5 years the majority will burn out and give up. Thus if you keep doing what you’re told to do you aren’t likely to succeed.

Doing what you’re doing now guarantees a life of chasing after prospects who don’t want to talk to you, scraping to cover your bills each month, and living commission check to commission check. Most producers aren’t in the business long enough to even get a residual commission. If you want to eat you have to hunt fresh meat every single day.

While it’s great for the insurance companies if you continually sell new policies to new people it isn’t necessarily so great for you. That’s a hard life few can sustain even if they’re able to generate a livable income. Of course, the livable income is where the wheel comes off the wagon for most.

Many newbies innocently do exactly what they’re told to do by their sales manager because they think the sales manager knows how to succeed in the business. Plus they believe the insurance company wants them to succeed. In other words, you buy into not one but two fallacies. First, the insurance company doesn’t care if you succeed there’s another new agent coming on line to replace you as you read this. Plus if you fail they get to keep all the on-going earnings the policies you wrote generate long after you’re gone.

The second fallacy is your sales manager knows how to succeed in the business. If your sales manager were a super producer that sales manager would have a thriving business and wouldn’t want to be a sales manager. They’re struggling to pay their bills just like you and they think taking on this sales manager’s position will help them cover their expenses.

This is how it is, but it doesn’t have to be that way for you.

This is your business, your future, your family that’s on the line. Take responsibility and follow a path that leads to real insurance success. If you want to develop a successful insurance business one you can both sustain and enjoy there are a few things you’ll need to do. These are the things that will produce a path for your insurance sales success:

  • Discover how to market yourself so the people you want to sell to contact you
  • Narrow your focus and expand your expertise to better meet the needs of a select group of people
  • Develop a message that resonates with what your best buyers want to get, what they want to avoid, or what they want solved
  • Develop automated systems that transition strangers to clients
  • Develop automated systems to earn both repeat business and referrals from existing clients.

 

You see you can’t sell insurance until you know how to sell insurance. You’ll never learn how to sell insurance doing it the way you’re told to do it. You can choose to develop a business that produces real results or you can continue to eke out a bare minimum existence one commission check to the next. You can have your sales manager breathing down your neck or you can have your sales manager chasing after you begging you to tell how you’re producing the results you’re producing. As always the choice is yours.

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Sales Coaching

Sales Coaching During an Economic Downturn

“You can’t lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself.” – Gene Mauch

Four Critical Tasks for Sales Managers

1. Now, more than ever, sellers need to spend time on prospecting for new business. Sales managers need to set clear expectations with each seller about the need to do more prospecting. But, the manager needs to do more than just set expectations. A down economy is a great time to be more creative in your prospecting. Brainstorm with your sales team about the best products/markets/regions to target in your prospecting efforts.

2. Managers need to spend more time motivating the sales team. It is easy for sellers to get discouraged when customers are slowing down and reducing the frequency and quantity of their orders. Use positive feedback and reinforcement whenever possible. Celebrate a new piece of business. Congratulate a seller who retains a critical piece of business, because a business downturn is when you are most at risk of losing business.

3. Lead by example. Partner with your salespeople at current clients, especially key accounts. Now is the time to go on more joint sales calls, even if the purpose of the call is to simply thank a current customer for their business. Personally get involved in prospecting for new business. Spend some time each week calling or emailing new prospective customers. This will help to motivate the sellers, and shows them that you are willing and able to bring in new business yourself.

4. Influence other departments to get involved in the sales process. STAR has endorsed the concept of team selling for several years, but a down economy is a great time to communicate throughout your organization that everyone, not just the sales team, needs to work extra hard during difficult times. If every person at your company who interacts with current and new customers can do something extra to impress a customer, you will do a better job at customer retention than your competition.

by Bill McCormick

Sales Training And Results, Inc. (STAR) is a sales management training company, providing customized sales training workshops and one-on-one sales coaching and consulting. Visit our website at http://www.salestrainingandresults.com

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Sales Coaching

Coaching to Win – Is Coaching Part of Your Game Plan?

Whether you are a small business owner or sales manager, you should take advantage of sales coaching. Once a salesperson understands that sales coaching can help them to make more money and have more fun, it’s inevitable that they’ll want to introduce their sales manager or sales trainer to the concept, too. Then it’s up to these potential coaches to decide if they are willing to seriously commit to sales coaching for their salespeople. That’s where the salesperson’s commitment comes into play-can the salesperson show the small business owner, manager or trainer that they will do whatever it takes?-because that’s the first big step in getting their help.

Sales management consists of everything the small business owner and/or sales manager does to develop and grow an effective sales force, including…

· Briefing and debriefing
· Growing salespeople and making them stronger every week
· Being able to motivate salespeople-and keep them motivated
· Holding salespeople accountable
· Finding, hiring, and keeping top performers

The sales manager carries out these functions in various forums, including sales meetings, sales training, the field, and sales coaching sessions. Coaching sessions differ from the other activities in that the focus of coaching is on combining technique reinforcement with one-on-one motivational interaction.

Coaching can be performed by either the sales manager or a sales trainer, although the sales manager must make the final decision as to the length and frequency of each type of session. My own experience has been that each salesperson should receive an hour per week of coaching, in a one-on-one meeting run by the sales manager or trainer, who becomes in this situation-the coach. Some of the areas that should be covered in the sessions are:

Activity.
This includes the quantity and results of dials, walk-ins, contacts, appointments booked, face-to-faces, referrals, and introductions. The coach motivates the salesperson to improve in the necessary areas, as measured against pre-established goals.

Goal Setting.
The coach may permit the salesperson to reduce some of the goals if the salesperson is having trouble achieving them, in an effort to build self-confidence. The goals then would be increased over time to steadily grow the salesperson to higher levels of performance.

Debriefing and briefing.
Debriefs are discussions about the meetings and telephone calls the salesperson made with customers and prospects in the week prior to the coaching session. Briefing is when the coach goes on to ask the salesperson what their next steps will be and how they would handle any scheduled follow-up. If necessary, the coach would work with the salesperson to modify those plans.

Salespeople’s self-esteem.
It’s important that the salesperson is receiving sales training to work on strategy, technique, and behavior. Take the case of a salesperson who just learned that when he approaches a small company in his industry, he should always call on the Chief Executive. Naturally it takes self-confidence to do this, therefore, it is key that the coach complement the training by helping build the salesperson’s self-esteem. Provided that the salesperson demonstrates commitment, the training and coaching will grow the salesperson to the point where he is performing effortlessly in pressure situations.

Future coaching sessions.
I recommend that coaching sessions always be planned out at least four weeks in advance. Sometimes it makes sense to have several shorter sessions each week. Take the case of the salesperson who is having difficulty achieving prospecting goals. Daily sessions of fifteen minutes would put light pressure on the person to achieve their daily goals. This would force the salesperson to avoid putting off their prospecting chores until the next day; after all, procrastination is one of the salesperson’s worst enemies. Daily sessions would also serve to re-inspire that rookie salesperson who is getting beaten up in the field.

If you are a small business owner or sales manager you’re undoubtedly running some sales meetings, but probably not coaching. If you plan to start, congratulations! If not ask yourself this question: If I could find the time and knew how to run quality coaching sessions, would it make a substantial difference in the results I am getting with my sales force?

If your answer is “yes” then what’s stopping you? Start coaching!

If your sales numbers aren’t where you want them to be, visit http://www.gnatraining.com to receive a FREE guest pass to one of our classes! Or call 1-781-848-0993 for more information.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Greg_Nanigian/83536

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Sales Coaching

Empower Your Sales People With the Right Sales Coaching Process!

Nearly all elite athletes have a coach. Rarely do you see an individual or team scaling the dizzy heights of success without a well thought-out coaching structure, appropriate motivators, and when needed; soft or firm guidance in the right direction.

A successful sales coach aligns a team to a common objective by both individually and collectively coaching a team to work through common or unique problems and opportunities. A coach also helps a sales team prepare for competition via a relevant interactive sales coaching process. Designed by the coach this process is most effective when the sales coach applies her experience, relevant insight into what’s worked and not worked in the past towards the team’s objectives. Whilst also being open to change and coaching the team towards uncharted possibilities.

Effective sales coaching is not proclaiming to the sale person; ‘this is how things should be done’. On the contrary; successful sales coaches guide their students to ask ‘what do I need to learn? And ‘how can I do this better?’ And by exploring and answering the question the sales person develops his or her own capacity to think, solve problems and create opportunities. Much like sales theory: telling is not selling. Moreover, directing a sales person is not sales coaching. This type of interaction is simply micromanaging, this process weakens the sales person’s capacity to think for themselves.

A successful sales coach leads the sales person to a place where true growth and personal transformation can take place: from within.

For more information on BOOM Sales! and Sales Training and Development programs and Sales Seminars please go to http://www.Boomsales.com.au

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Trent Leyshan is the Founder of BOOM Sales! and the creator of BOOMOLOGY!™ inspirational Selling Methodology. http://www.Boomsales.com.au

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1826904

Sales Coaching

The Secret to a Successful Coaching Business – It Isn’t Where You’ve Been

Are you more focused on doing coaching than on running a business of coaching?

Your Success Comes From Designing a Business, Not Just in Doing What You Do

Here’s the difference.

  • If you find yourself wanting to coach, and avoiding marketing and sales, then you are playing at coaching and not running a business of coaching. Your chances of success are small.
  • If you are wanting to coach, and not spending time designing and redesigning a business of coaching that delivers exactly the DOLLARS that you WANT, in the TIME that you want to put into this, then you are playing at coaching instead of running a business of coaching. Your chance of making a lot of money coaching is small.

I’ve seen that same pattern among most of the small business owners I’ve coached, and it’s even more rampant among the coaches that I coach. Strange, isn’t it, that coaches have the same problems that their clients have? But it’s very true. 

Are you more comfortable coaching than in marketing and selling? Do you know what needs to be done to successfully bring in tons of new clients in marketing, and getting them to buy in sales? And stepping back even further, from the 10,000 foot level to the 30,000 foot level, where you’ll start designing and redesigning the whole business, that’s where you’ll be asking questions like, how do I go from $150/hour to $500/hour, and then from $500/hour to $1,000/hour. As long as you are working as a coach and not as a business designer you’ll be stuck making $150/hour decisions and never selling many of those. So, in reality you are making way less than $150/hour.

In any business, the more focused the business owner is on “what they do” instead of building a business around what they do, the less likely they will succeed.
Coaches, who discover the principles to resolve this will be even better at helping their own clients design and redesign their business for more success and higher income.

More Time Thinking . . . Coaching . . . Than Designing and Then Redesigning the Business of Coaching

Do you spend more time thinking about coaching than designing and redesigning a business of coaching? How much time do you spend working on coaching, and how much time on building a business of coaching?

As a coach, don’t you work with people to help them get focused?

So, what should you be focused on as an owner of a coaching business?

Obviously you want to focus on becoming a better coach, thinking about how you coach, however, if you never spend time thinking about marketing better, selling better, and, at an even higher level, how would you design this business to make more money, to find clients that would spend more money, and on making exactly what you’d like to be earning from your coaching business, then it’s likely that you aren’t finding those answers that are even more critical to your success than coaching itself. Am I right?

Let’s look at one of my clients who was a cook in a restaurant. As the cook, he believed he could run a business better than his boss. However, do you want a bet that his focus was around making a better meal than in how to become successful at a restaurant business? So, he went across the street and started his own restaurant.

Where do you think he was working? In the kitchen! He believed that his success depended upon how well he cooked and what kinds of fantastic meals he cooked, yet no one was walking through the door. Does that sound like your coaching business?

It Doesn’t Matter How Good You Are at What You Do If You Can’t Sell Any

One of the things I preach to my clients would likely be defined as sacrilege in business schools, but it is the truth. It doesn’t matter how good you are in the kitchen (or in coaching) if you aren’t getting anyone to walk in the door (that’s marketing), and if you aren’t getting anyone to set down to buy (that’s sales).

To restate that: It doesn’t matter how good of a coach you are if no one is walking in to discover you, nor to buy your services. You could be the best, or the worst, and your results will be exactly the same if no one is there to buy it.

You Can Have a Successful Business If You Can Get Tons of People Walking in and Buying Even If You Aren’t Good at Delivering

In fact, let’s look at it from the other side. Let’s say that you are absolutely fantastic at marketing and sales, and aren’t any good in the kitchen (or coaching) at all. In that case you are good at getting people in the door and getting them to set down and buy, but the food (or your coaching) is absolutely horrible. The money is flowing (imagine what that would be like for coaching), yet the food is horrible. What happens is that there are a ton of people coming through the door and buying, but they’ll never come back. As long as you are out there marketing and selling there are still people flowing through the door and you are successful.

In no way am I suggesting that you do it this way, only emphasizing to you that without marketing and sales you’ll never be successful, and that with them you could be even if you aren’t any good at coaching, so marketing (the ability to get tons of people in the door), and selling (getting those that do come through the door to buy) are critical, and the ability to design and redesign a business that includes all of the pieces of your business, marketing, sales, coaching are all critical pieces.

Coaching, and how good you are at it, doesn’t even come into the picture until you’ve got them coming in the door, wanting what you have, and then getting them to buy. Sounds logical, however, most coaches start with coaching and never have many clients.

How to Become the Top 1% of All Coaches

Do, you know the statistics are that over 90% of all coaches and consultants will fail within months, and that, of those that do succeed, most will never make more than $20K? Your success will come only when you can get your hands around the BUSINESS of coaching, learn what makes less than 1% of all coaches the top earners, and design the business that not only works in all of those areas, and then focus on how to make that business deliver EXACTLY what you want it to in dollars and cents, and in the time you want to put into it.

One of the coaches I worked with was having problems getting enough people to even show an interest, let alone someone who would buy. She kept saying, but I’m good at coaching, but I can’t get anyone interested in coaching. When I finally got her to look at how to refocus on the RIGHT customer, how to sell, and THEN even how this business was to make her more and more in less and less time, she changed everything and went from less than $10K in a year to $6,000 an hour. Yes, I said that correctly.

It wasn’t just learning to market and sell, which is very important, but it also was a total redirection of what she was doing, and how she was doing it. It was redesigning her business so that it will deliver the dollars you want in the time you want to spend, and the way you want to do it.

Instead of focusing on selling at $5,000 per client, which wasn’t working the way she was doing it, she developed a marketing funnel that leads people in steps toward coaching. Each step moved from giving a free taste of coaching, to a low cost group session, to full blown coaching. She’s now making $5,000 an hour, not just per job, doing Intro to Coaching at $250 a month for groups of about 100, and has a waiting list for her one-on-one coaching, which, by the way, she now charges a lot more for and spends very little time doing. She spend 4 1-hour sessions a month with about 100 people, $25,000 a month total income for 4 hours of work. And that leads to a waiting list of people wanting her coaching.

Your Job Isn’t Just to Coach . . . It’s Designing and Redesigning a Successful Coaching Business

So, your job isn’t to coach. It is to design, and redesign a business of coaching that delivers exactly the dollars you want in the time you want to put into this. And, of course go do it.

It’s designing the business at the highest level around what you want to make and how you’ll do it, and then breaking it down to how many leads are needed from marketing, what percentage of those will be closed in sales, and, finally the delivery, your coaching.

Do you know how to deliver exactly that many leads each and every week?

Are you delivering that many each and every week?

Is your sales process converting exactly the percentage of those leads into sales that are necessary to hit your target sales in number of customers and dollars per customer?

Do you know how to fix your marketing to make it deliver at that rate, or better?

Do you know how to fix your sales to deliver at that rate, or better?

What are you going to do next to start delivering on all of those critical goals? Those are critical in that if you deliver each and every one of them each and every week, you will get the dollars you want this year in the time you are willing to put into it.

And, if you miss even one of these goals you not only won’t hit your goals for amount sold in the time you want to put into it, but you are likely going to fail in business. That’s critical!

Do you know how to make marketing work to deliver the number of leads a month you need?
Do you know how to close 40-50% of those leads?
What would it be worth to you to be able to do that?

So, would you like to do a quick assessment of your critical business goals? The things that are absolutely critical to your business?

Be sure to look for the next article, “Assessing You and Your business success, The Critical Issues of Coaching Business Success” to grade just how well you are doing at building a successful coaching business.

Do you want to learn more about how to increase your coaching business?

I have just completed my brand new guide to coaching marketing success. You’ll also get a free invitation to join a mastermind group of other coaches as they build their business. Hear what works and doesn’t work.

Get your “how to Build a Super Star Coaching Business” for free.

Alan Boyer coach’s coaches, who want more business than they can handle, or at least more than they imagined…before this…..The reports have been “5-10 times more clients in just a few weeks, and still growing.

http://www.leaders-perspective.com/Super-Star-Coaching-Business.htm

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Alan_Boyer/11225

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