Tag Archives: sales growth

Sales Coaching

Improve Your Sales With Sales Training Coaching

Sales training coaching can be likened to a sport or dance wherein when you get past the theory, finish with the class you enter into reality. It is also a performing art where one has to practice and perform. Sales is all about the results one achieves, thus the sales coach’s role is to help the client master theories, develop skills and produce results. If you are good in dance, sports and sales you have the potential to earn a whole lot of money.

Now just what is a sales training coach? This type of coach is one who recognizes the art of sales and one who can teach the techniques that comprise the outer game. The sales is a performance that should be mastered and practiced. This coach is also a strategy coach who works the inner game by eliminating one’s performance barriers. They devise strategies on how to work and improve his game/performance. Lastly, he is also an accountability coach, one who delivers the action required to stand out. A sales training coach is a sum of all these skills rolled into just one.

With sales training coaching one needs to know the mechanics of the outer game. This includes an understanding of psychology and persuasion skills. As a coach you should be able to help your client develop these skills in order to improve and later on master theses skills. The inner game deals with motivating your clients and removing any relations he has of past negative experiences. The final part of sales training coaching is the performance. This is where time and effort is placed to produce the determination one needs for his success.

All of us have the capability of performing better. All of us have the capacity to achieve the best and one way of ensuring this achievement is through a coach. A coach can help and guide you towards the right path you should take in order for your success. For those involved in sales, a sales training coach is required. The sales training coach has better knowledge on sales and helps you with specific skills that will be included in your work. To become a better coach and master the art of sales coaching training one should keep these tips in mind: One must start with mastering the science of sales and the art of influence. Second, one can become a master strategy coach. And lastly one must develop the fortitude of an accountability coach.

Jeffrey T. Sooey is the CEO of JTS Advisors and the founder of the Coaches Training Blog community, a free, self-led video training for coaches growing their businesses to $10,000 per month and beyond. Watch videos about life coaching jobs and coaching skills. Discover how to become a life coach. Go here: http://www.coachestrainingblog.com/becomeacoach.

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Sales Coaching

Using the SMART Objectives in Attaining Your Goals in Sales

Any business man who wants to succeed in his respective field needs sensible and tangible objectives to obtain his goals. Likewise, if a company states that they would reap two billion dollars in revenues by the end of the year, it should definitely start with an attainable objective in which its goals are anchored to. However, even the smallest companies sometimes do not have any idea where to start building their goals. If “gaining revenues” is the only objective that companies have without concrete or substantial strategies to back it up; then it is time to reconsider the steps on how its goals are attained.

Many companies now employ what business experts call SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound set of objectives. Through the years, this simple yet catchy acronym has enabled many companies to come up with objectives that are within their reach and are realistic enough to be achieved in a certain time. This acronym is also helpful to sales where standards for selling or even sales persuasion are a must.

Specific means that goals should be well-defined and focused. For instances, reaping two million dollars in five months by marketing a product through advertisements sounds more plausible than saying reaping revenues alone. This ‘focus’ can help businesses center their objectives and strategies toward a specific goal. Measurable pertains to the numbers that are used in the objectives. These numbers are indicators if the business or sales are growing or declining. For example, a publication company can assess if they are hitting the 40 per day quota for magazine distribution. Some experts experienced in sales coaching can help you identify your measurable objectives.

Attainable refers to the manageability of realizing a specific goal. More often than not, some business and sales people raise their goals to a point that they cannot reach them anymore. This then leads to the fourth word which is realistic. This means staying relevant in your goals and being honest in setting them. If you have problems with making your goals relevant or realistic because of stiff market competition, you can get help from a professional sales coach.

Last but not the least, all objectives should be time-bound. Since time is of the essence, it is important for business to clearly define when their objectives should be accomplished. Having time constraints not only helps you achieve your goals on time, but also puts discipline in the whole venture. There are sales coaching experts who provide training for sales employees to be manage their time well when it comes reaching sales objectives.

If you have questions, please visit us at http://www.SalesCoachNow.com for complete details and answers.

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Sales Coaching

Decrease Employee Turnover With Sales Coaching

One of the most significant costs to a company can often be the employee turnover in the sales department. This is can be costly because the success and quality of the sales organization has a direct impact on top line revenue. There is always going to be some level of turnover, but if there is something that a company can do to decrease employee turnover, there can be strong financial benefits.

Employee turnover in the sales department creates two different types of costs for a company: direct costs and indirect costs. The direct costs are the hard-dollar expenses that are incurred when sales resources are recruited, hired, trained, and terminated. These costs can be tracked and will typically show up in financial reports.

The indirect costs that a company will see are in the form of opportunity cost. This cost is all of the business that is lost or missed while sales positions are open due to turnover and then while new sales resources are being trained and ramped up. This cost can be a tremendous amount, especially when you factor in recurring revenues that are missed for future years. Unfortunately, opportunity cost can be difficult to truly measure and will not show up in financial reports.

The main cause for employee turnover in the sales department is poor sales performance. Either sales resources are not performing at a high level and not making the money they want to be so they chose to go somewhere else where they feel they will be more successful. Or the sales resources are not performing at a high level and management determines that a permanent change is necessary in order to drive better sales results. This is how sales coaching can help as it can improve sales performance and that alone can decrease employee turnover.

Sales coaching will decrease employee turnover by working with sales resources on an ongoing basis to help them to perform at their optimum level. Coaching will help bring clarity to sales resources with where they are in terms of attainment, identifying what they need to do to be successful, and then help them with dealing with challenges and hurdles as they occur. Sales coaching will help the sales person to be more successful than they would be if they were completely operating on their own.

By being able to decrease employee turnover, the company will stand to retain a tremendous amount of knowledge. This includes knowledge on company information, processes, products, customers, etc. By being able to retain this knowledge, the company will stand to perform better in the area of sales effectiveness, which will decrease the amount of business lost or missed driving down opportunity cost. In addition, the cost to replace this knowledge can be tremendous in terms of both time and money. This is a hard-dollar cost and to decrease employee turnover will yield immediate savings.

Sales coaching can be provided by a company’s internal sales management team or it can be provided by outside coaching professionals. The benefit of outsourcing the coaching responsibility is that outside resources will likely be trained in the area of coaching and will have experience that can be leveraged. In addition, if the internal management focuses on more strategic activities, there can be a better return on investment for the way their time and attention is spent.

Michael Halper has a passion for coaching individuals toward personal and professional development. For more information about coaching and development visit Compass Coaching you can read more about Decreasing Employee Turnover or Sales Coaching.

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Sales Coaching

Training Sales Managers: Why It Could Be Your Best Investment Ever

Training sales managers is not always the first thing that sales directors think about. Instead the focus seems to be on training the new sales representative. Yet the reality is if a new sales representative is supported and coached they are likely to sell twice as much as a representative who is not.

You only need to look at some of the most powerful sales teams in any organisation and you will notice that they normally have a highly skilled sales manager behind them.

The facts are that to become good at most things in life we all need some help and support. This is especially so in business where core business and selling skills are vital to an individual and companies success. A well trained sales manager will be able to help support teach and guide their individual sales team members to success.

A sales manager has a wide remit to what he or she needs to deliver. Generally they are responsible for delivering on a sales target, managing the marketing plan, reviewing the budget and staying within spending limits. In addition they also need to ensure that each of their sales team members is hitting their individual sales targets and quotas. This is an area that many new sales managers struggle with. It is OK signing expenses and managing the process part of the role, yet a focus on sales coaching will potentially produce even bigger results.

We all I am sure know the saying, ‘teach a man to fish?’ and it is a popular saying because it is true. If individual sales representatives are coached on their selling skills it will improve your bottom line exponentially. Sales coaching is a process by which your sales training managers can enable your sales team to become more effective in front of both existing clients and potential prospects. Sales coaching will work with both new and experienced sales representatives. Depending on their level of experience different styles can be used.

A new sales team member might need more directive sales coaching. As the saying goes you don’t know what you don’t know. Their level of experience in coming across the different customer scenarios will be different and here a sales manager can really help in making suggestions of how best to move forward and get a desired result. Making sales coaching align with your current selling skills model make everything work smoothly for all concerned.

When the sales representative focuses their interaction on achieving the outcome they have set, results happen quickly. In today’s new economy, selling is a definite process. If a prospect is new it is unlikely that they will place a huge order in the first meeting. Yet this initial interaction is vital to set the tone and possibility of the next one happening. Rookie representatives can be helped in the process if your organisation has a focus on training sales managers in the sales coaching skills that will deliver results for everyone involved.

So when you are planning the improvement of your sales force if you want to accelerate your results make sure you factor in training sales managers as well.

Nic Hallett is the MD of Excel Enterprise and an expert in training sales managers [http://www.excelenterprise.co.uk] To Find out more about how Excel Enterprise can help train your sales managers to deliver superior results visit [http://www.excelenterprise.co.uk]

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Sales Coaching

Top Five Ways of Becoming a Better Sales Coach

Sales Managers execute several roles and wear many hats: manager, trainer and coach. These multiple roles can create challenges for some sales managers. Where should they invest their time? Should it be in attending internal meetings? Analyzing reports? Training and coaching the sales team? If you are serious about hitting and exceeding your revenue goals for 2012, invest your time in training and coaching your sales team. (It makes analyzing reports a whole lot more fun when the numbers are in the black.)

Sales managers may have attended sales training courses on their journey to mastering the art and science of sales. How many sales managers have attended training and coaching courses to learn how to transfer the skills that made them a top producer? In the words of Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

We have found the best sales managers make the leap from producer to teacher. If you can’t teach and grow others, you are doomed to be the major rainmaker versus a sales leader.

Here are five tips to help you grow your sales team.

#1: Know when to train and know when to coach. Training is telling and imparting knowledge. Coaching is asking questions to make sure that the knowledge landed in the salesperson’s gray matter. When a sales manager identifies a performance issue, they usually go into training mode, telling and teaching the salesperson a sales technique or concept one more time. The problem may not be about selling skills. In working with sales teams for over a decade, we have found that salespeople know what to do, however, don’t execute selling skills because they don’t believe it works or it make them uncomfortable.

It’s time to take off the training hat and put on the coaching hat. Ask questions that help change the salesperson’s paradigms and beliefs. Presumptive questions are a great coaching tool for shifting perspective.

For example, “When you asked the prospect how much the problem was costing, what did she say? When you shared with the prospect that you couldn’t put together a recommendation until you met with the CFO, what did he say?” The answers from the salesperson range from, “I can’t ask that question” or “I forgot.” A couple of good follow-up coaching questions are:

· “What makes you believe that? Is that perception or real data?

· What is the reason is that you keep forgetting? Is it knowledge or comfort zone?

· What will you do differently the next time?

If you want better answers, ask better questions.

#2: Document your sales process. If you don’t have a defined sales process, you don’t have anything to train, coach or inspect.

Many companies state that have a defined sales process, however, there is no written documentation such as key questions to ask during the sales process, value propositions, gaps in the competitors offering or common objections.

Some sales managers respond with the excuse, “I hire people with ten years experience….they should know how to sell.” Have you heard of something called the NFL? They hire players with years of experience and pay them millions of dollars to play. The NFL wouldn’t dream of a team showing up to a game without working from a common playbook. They know a playbook allows a football team to sit down, review the films and see where they executed well and where they fell short. The players can debrief the game because they have a process to compare, analyze and improve against. Without a defined sales process, a sales manager is forced to debrief 10 different playbooks with very average results.

#3: Eliminate fire hose training. Training is often delivered through an impact training model: two days or two weeks of training with NO reinforcement. Effective sales managers know that reinforcement coaching and training allows the sales manager to take her team from:

· Unconscious incompetent (don’t know what they don’t know) to

· Conscious incompetent (they know they don’t know) to

· Conscious competent (they know how) to

· Unconscious competent (the salesperson is masterful)

Reinforcement is the key to mastery. Think about how you learned in grade school. Remember multiplication tables? Flash cards were held up and you repeated the formula’s over and over until they landed in long term memory. (Okay, I am dating myself.) Sales managers need to hold flash card sessions with their sales team to develop their selling skills on:

· Dealing with objections

· Developing and delivering customized value propositions for various buyers

· Quantifying the cost of the problem or opportunity

· Ask impact questions

These are fundamental skills that eliminate chase mode, price shopping and looking and sounding like your competition.

#4: Prioritize your time. There are the corporate meetings to attend, reports to analyze and of course, investing time with the team. If you want to grow revenues in 2012, make training and coaching your number one priority.

A successful sales manager in Denver, Colorado, invests one hour each week with 16 direct reports. Is it difficult for him to find the time to meet with his team and balance all the other responsibilities on his plate? Yes. Did his sales team grow revenues 20% in a flat market and competitive market? Yes. Time is a limited asset. Choose to invest it wisely.

#5: Stretch your team. You signed up for leadership and part of that responsibility is stretching your sales team. Push salespeople out of comfort zones by following Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Call on that prospect you’ve been avoiding. Ask the tough questions during a sales call. Insist on excellence and don’t allow your sales team to settle for being average. Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach said, “If you settle for nothing less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your life.”

Colleen Stanley is the founder and president of SalesLeadership, Inc., a sales development firm. She is a monthly columnist for national Business Journals, author of ‘Growing Great Sales Teams’ and co-author of ‘Motivational Selling.’ Prior to starting SalesLeadership, Colleen was vice president of sales and marketing for Varsity Spirit Corporation. During her 10 years at Varsity, sales increased from 8M to 90M.

She is the creator of the EI Selling™, a unique and powerful sales program that integrates emotional intelligence skills with consultative sales skills. Training and consulting services offered are:

• Benchmarking, Selection and Hiring of Top Sales Talent
• Consultative Sales Training
• Leadership Training for Sales Managers
• Major Account Sales
• Prospecting and Referral Training
• Sales Compensation
• Territory Management
• Customer Relationship Management

Reach Colleen at 303.708.1128, cstanley@salesleadershipdevelopment.com, visit http://www.salesleadershipdevelopment.com, or become a fan at http://www.facebook.com/SalesLeadership.

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