Tag Archives: sales growth

Sales Coaching

Things to Remember If You Have a Sales Coach

There is a science to the art of selling that sets some minimum skills for a person to become excellent at the job. Books may describe these minimum skills but mere textbooks may have a hard time getting these skills ingrained into your system. Only experience can really do that. It’s great if you have been selling stuff since you were five. By the time you reach 20, you’re likely to be selling some really juicy stuff that can keep your wallet plump and your ego satisfied. However, if you started selling rather late, the only way you can speed up the process of really learning all the tricks in the book is to vicariously absorb someone else’s experience or be goaded to near perfection by someone who knows the terrain.

That is where a good sales coach comes in. If you have been a salesperson for some time, chances are high that you already know how rewarding, fulfilling, and frustrating the world of sales can be. If you have achieved some measure of sales success, it is also likely that you have learned not a few techniques from someone who–knowingly or unknowingly–has been a sales coach or mentor to you. Whether it is about how to get your numbers in order or how to make a good first impression on clients, your sales coach have been pivotal to your growth and performance as a salesperson.

The most ideal scenario is quite familiar: a new recruit working his or her way up the ladder and eventually getting under the wings of a wise and sympathetic sales veteran. Count yourself lucky if you found yourself in this rare and fortunate turn of events. This situation is rare simply because there are a lot of sales neophytes who do find themselves partnering with sales veterans, who, unfortunately are not as sympathetic or wise as they would have hoped. There are also greenhorns who eventually partner with sympathetic coaches who, unfortunately, either lack the communicative skills to share their knowledge or are in serious need of some training themselves.

Regardless of whether you are under the wings of a veteran office peer or have acquired the services of a professional coach, there are fundamental attitudes that you need to adopt in order to make the learning process more productive and more meaningful. When you start on a coaching relationship and you are the one being coached, remember to establish goals and expectations at the onset in order for both you and your coach to draw up the appropriate engagement plans.

The adage that a good sales person is a good listener rings no less true when applied to a sales coaching relationship. If anything, listening skills are actually most needed in this particular relationship in order to turn the engagement into a transformative platform that will propel you to achieve success levels you have only dreamed about before. Remember that working harder is often inadequate to achieve the next level. Only learning new rope tricks from people who have been there can really bring you a notch higher.

Aside from attentive listening, you must force yourself towards meaningful improvement. This means admitting your weaknesses as a sales professional and being open to developing new positive work habits that your sales coach will ask you to learn. Simply put, this means that you should will yourself to change.

It’s your sales coach’s job to push and challenge you until it hurts and you have to commiserate by having the professional agility to roll with the punches. Otherwise, the relationship could develop into one of resentment, and nobody wins in the end. Argue and be honest about what you feel but remain anchored in the knowledge that being a pain in the neck is only incidental in performing the job of a sales coach. Your sales coach’s true mission is to goad you until you unlock a secret. And whatever this secret is, it will take you to the next level of your professional journey. At the very least, appreciate the fact that someone is goading you to perform beyond any of your previous successes and take every opportunity to leverage your coach’s energy to your advantage.

As a credit to yourself, develop the constant awareness that sales coaches generally work with people with considerable selling potential and that you happen to be one, yourself. That said, a sales coach is there to ensure that you consistently generate only outstanding results. There simply is no room for mediocrity. Think of your coach as an Olympic trainer, and yourself as an Olympic-grade sales professional. Nothing but world-class performance is acceptable; and that should be an all-pervading target.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6666058

Sales Coaching

Sales Coaching – The Means to Reaching Your Full Potential in Sales

If you are working in sales, you realize just how gratifying and financially rewarding it can be. Yet, to fail to achieve your full potential in this cut throat business can also find you caught up in one of the most frustrating, stressful and completely wretched ways of trying to make a living.

There are two schools of thought that emerge when it comes to selecting the ideal salesperson. One states the individual has to be a special type to thrive in the sales world; the other believes anyone who has learned the right techniques can perform this job. The truth lies somewhere between. Being an excellent salesperson requires a certain amount of specific skills, personal characteristics and knowledge. You can work your way through every book on sales and still not be a top salesperson. In fact the different and often outdated approaches in some of these books may result in confusion rather than a clear success. The same is applicable to relying solely on innate personal traits. If you do not have the knowledge to reinforce them, you are not going to make Salesperson of the Year.

If you want to be at the top of the sales ladder, you have to combine a wide variety of talents, skills and innate personal characteristics. You must be able to recognize the key-decision makers, develop a solid relationship with them and know just what to hone in to and how hard to press home your point. You must be compelling in your arguments, deal with a massive amount of diverse figures including costs and calculate correctly. It also means you need the perseverance to stick with the sales pitch and close the deal at the right time for the right price.

Many individuals have a few of these characteristics. They have the ability to persevere or are mathematic whiz kids. Yet, only the very best can combine all the ingredients. They are the few who can deliver on every single account. If, however, you turn to online sales coaching, you can work on and improve your sales capabilities on all counts.

Online sales coaching is not to be confused with those generic types offered through various books, videos and training courses. Online sales coaching is a personalized one-on-one approach. It allows individuals to discover and learn how to utilize their natural and learned abilities to achieve the best results possible.

When it comes to selecting a sales coach be cautious. The task requires more than knowledge of sales and sales techniques. It also needs the individual to pass on that knowledge in a positive manner. To teach someone how to be successful in the field of sales, you need to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the student and know how to support them towards their goal.

Another issue to consider is the relevancy of the knowledge. Sales techniques have changed over the years. Today’s approaches are not consistent with those of the past. You need to take care the sales coach you choose has completely accurate and current understanding of what has now become a global market. Today, technological advances dash in and affect the way you can sell products and services. Moreover, the aggressive sales techniques of past years are no longer in vogue. They have been replaced with more sophisticated means – the result of research into human behavior and other aspects involving sales. As a result, you need to be very careful, selecting only a sales coach who is aware of the latest methods and can introduce them into his or her teaching techniques.

Online sales coaching is currently available at http://www.freelancecoach.com, who ca provide you with an opportune and helpful way of addressing any of the issues restraining us. You can easily access the guidance and help of an experienced and professional mentor from your home at times that suit your often busy schedule. With one simple click, you will have what you need to get you back on the right track moving towards an exciting future – a future of which we have control and can direct to achieve what we are truly capable of achieving.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6528008

Sales Coaching

How to Spend Less Time and Get More Results for Your Sales Coaching

Kathy has just been promoted as Sales Manager of her team, and she just found that being a Sales Manager is quite different from being a Sales Person. More importantly, there seems to be tons of people issues that she would have to help resolve through coaching.

For instance, there’s Sam, who’s a new sales person and showed a lot of promise during his initial training with the company. When he went on his work, he also put in lots of effort. Still, after 3 months, there wasn’t any results generated.

Then there’s Susan, who’s one of the better sales persons in the team. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been producing much results lately. When asked about her performance, she replied that the customers just need a little longer time to make the decision this year..

And there’s Simon, whom had been in touch with a prospect for quite some time. He had seen their decision makers, technical buyers and even end-users. While responses were positive, there was no further progress in the customer’s buying process.

To make things worse, Kathy hadn’t even received much coaching from her former manager when she was a Sales Person, and hence don’t even have a role model to emulate when she needed to coach her team. The good news for Kathy is that coaching for Sales People is not as difficult or as daunting for newly on-boarded Sales Managers. The concepts are simple and easy to master, although it will require some practice to get the best results!

Where You Are, and Where You Want Your Team to Be

The approach that most Sales Managers take when coaching team members is that they tend to look at low-performance incidents sporadically and just give advice on how their team member needs to do to correct that behaviour. This action is what is known as “Corrective Feedback”, which could be part of coaching, but is inadequate to equate it with coaching.

To make coaching really deliver desired results, we can borrow concepts from the Six Thinking Hats to formulate an effective coaching strategy. Here are the first steps:

1. Blue Hat – What do you want your team member to become, and how you want to go about achieving this.

2. White Hat – What current information (e.g. sales results, prospecting effectiveness, selling prices etc.) do you have about your team member? What other information do you need so as to really understand where he/ she stands right now?

Conveying Your Coaching Message

Although coaching your sales team is really about what you want your team member to become, you will need that team member to agree to your goals and objectives for him or her. Coaching is a 2-way street, and hence if your “coachee” does not agree or buy-in to your goals, the coaching will fail.

As such you will need to communicate your Blue Hat with your team member clearly, and be open to feedback if there are any disagreements or modifications to your original plan.

During your coaching session, you will need to communicate the following:

1. Yellow Hat – Give affirmation on the strengths and positive contributions of the team member. Coaching is as much about helping team members to correct mistakes, as it is about helping them to strengthen or improve on their existing strengths. In any case, team members ALWAYS feel good when their bosses tell them something nice about them.

2. Black Hat – Let your team members understand which are the areas that need correction or improvement. One thing to be clear in such communication is to make sure the team member understand that you are not picking on their mistakes. Instead, they have to be clear that you are helping them achieve better results.

3. Green Hat – Instead of telling them what they need to do to get better results, invite and engage them to suggest creative suggestions to help improve their own performances. You will be surprised by the ingenuity of the suggested solutions, and best of all, since your team member suggested the solution, you will get the full commitment of that team member to implement the solution that he or she suggested!

4. Red Hat – At suitable intervals, find out how your team member feels whether he or she is OK to continue with the coaching, or if he or she is comfortable with the conversation between the two of you. If at any point of time your team member feels uncomfortable, that could be a sign that the coaching is moving in the wrong direction. You may then want to stop, and re-strategise for a different coaching session the next time.

Despite your best efforts, not all coaching will turn out in the way you envision it to be. But that’s OK. What is more important is that you adapt different coaching strategies to different team members based on their:

* Desired behaviours and performance;
* Current behaviours, traits and performance metrics; and
* Temperaments and communication styles of each individual.

Achieving Sustainable Results

While MOST sales managers agree and believe that training and coaching team members is very important for boosting the team’s performances, FEW actually took systematic steps to train or coach their team members.

The key word here is “systematic”. Coaching your team members, while very important, is usually NOT urgent. That is, if you don’t coach your team members today, nothing catastrophic is going to happen tomorrow. Hence, with the heavy workload and the number of more urgent matters to attend to, most sales managers keep on postponing the required coaching for their team members until it’s way too late.

Hence, to achieve sustainable results with your coaching, you will have to:

* Schedule the appointment with your team members and everybody will have to treat it as important and urgent as a key customer meeting;

* Put on your White Hat prior to the coaching session to gather as much information of your “coachee”, and also make a list of questions for the information that you would like to know;

* Put on your Blue Hat at the end of each coaching session to set mutually-agreed action plans on what behavioural changes that your “coachee” needs to make; and

* Listen to the feedback given by your “coachee” and determine what changes that you need to make too!

The steps to being an effective sales coach are simple. The difference between a good sales coach and a mediocre one boils down to: practice. Just like any new skill, the initial practice is going to be awkward. However, with more practice, you can be an expert sales coach real soon.

C.J. is the world-class sales force effectiveness (SFE) expert who have helped international companies achieve quantum improvements in sales profits in China and beyond. So far, c.j. Is the 1st and ONLY Asian sales force effectiveness expert to have been invited to speak at the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) International Convention. c.j. has helped:
• International hospitality chains such as InterContinental Hotels Group, Sofitel and the Ascott Group to onboard their newly promoted Directors of Sales to make the transition from sales people to high-performing sales team leaders
• Leading pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche and Merck to improve their senior managers’ leadership skills so as to excite their people to exceptional performance
• World-wide leaders in the construction market such as Philips Lighting, Saint-Gobain, Ingersoll Rand to develop competencies in their sales force so as to achieve quantum leaps in their sales results.

Prior to this, c.j. was Asia Marketing Manager for a Fortune 500 logistics company, as well as Corporate Training Manager for Ringier AG, Switzerland’s largest media group, in China, where he was responsible for sales team development, and helped increase the percentage of new hires to close their first sales within 2 months by 30%, as well as increase overall sales targets by more than 50%. Visit http://www.psycheselling.com/page4.html for more details.

c.j. is also a certified facilitator of Six Thinking Hats® and Why Should Anyone be Led by YOU TM training programmes

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/CJ_Ng/131282

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Sales Coaching

Coaches – How Are You Handling the Sales Part of Your Free Consultation?

Are you selling your coaching services through a “free consultation” model?

If so, then you know it’s challenging to transition from one role to the other in that call. On the one hand you’re a coach, and you want them to value you deeply and be motivated to work with you. On the other hand, you need to close the sale.

These two tasks seem incongruent.

But they don’t have to be.

I was having a chat with a business partner the other day about how sales managers often complain that members of their sales force don’t LISTEN and ASK QUESTIONS very well. They present, handle objections, and close, but fail to engage and motivate. So in the end, they lose the sale.

Coaches know how to listen and ask questions VERY well. They know how to engage and motivate. But in the end, they lose the sale because they don’t know how to present, handle objections, and close.

In fact, coaches may see the selling part of their free consultation as distasteful and separate. While sales reps see all that listening and questioning as too touchy-feely.

Let’s get together!

Coaches…you can blend your coaching consultation with a sales conversation, not have two separate things that are stuck together. By adding the sales part onto the end of a consultation, your job is made harder than it has to be. By making your consultation itself into a sales tool, you’ll find converting clients to be much easier.

And sales reps, you can make your sales call more of a coaching conversation. By mingling sincere and warm communication with your sales calls, your job will be easier.

How To Meld the Two Halves of the Free Consultation and Sale

I’ve had many clients comment that my sales conversation with them seemed very much like a coaching conversation. What it really is, in fact, is a consulting conversation in which I use coaching skills to draw the person out and explore their situation.

Sales calls by sales reps are not typically coaching conversations…you don’t want to delve too deeply into the interpersonal workings of the customer. However, you do need to connect at a deeper level than most sales reps are comfortable with, and so coaching-type questions can serve this purpose.

The right type of question is Openhanded and provides what Judy Rees calls, “intelligent influence.” Whether you’re a coach or a sales rep (you’re both if you’re a coach selling your own services), your sales questions need to be just deep enough to guide the customer to a decision, not to solve their problems.

Secrets of the Soft Sell?

If you’ve ever wondered how to DO soft selling, you’re not alone. Grab my free report on the tips and tricks of Openhanded Selling [http://openhandedselling.com], showing you how to have persuasive, confident, high-integrity sales conversations without caving in and without changing your personality.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Linda_Schneider/347501

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Sales Coaching

Sales Coaching To Get To The Top

The good news is a lot of your competitors seem to be looking at the sidelines – that is good for you and bad for them. Next, even though historically on-boarding has been understudied, in the last several years enough has long been completed to provide a starting list of best practices to get the job done – and getting it right.

Today a sales force must not simply be in the position to sell an aggressive advantage; they have to be considered a competitive advantage. In most companies, it is significantly difficult to sustain a competitive edge by conventional means. Traditional factors like: superior products, scale, and innovative manufacturing technology may possibly give temporary benefits, but unfortunately they could be duplicated in relatively small order by an increasing number of agile and aggressive domestic and international rivals.

Although an excellent sales staff is difficult to build, they have the potential to provide a significant competitive advantage and, maybe more excitingly, one that’s difficult for competition to easily copy. So refining sales performance matters a lot more these days compare to what it did yesterday and it will make a difference more the next day compared to what it does today. A significant length of time is spent in most sales calls asking questions about simple background information – and rightly so. Today, however, there’s a much better way. Sales people can and should obtain nearly all of that basic information by using the Internet. Clients anticipate sales agents to provide value – however they can’t add value if they’re spending their time having basic information that may have and should have been obtained prior to the call ever started. You’re basically squandering your time budget with the physician, nurse, or administrator.

Today, if you want a world-class sales force, you have to specify on boarding as an on-going training process, not as a one-time event. Sales training programs are needed not only for on-boarding new hires for the company but also for on-boarding your existing sales team to handle an extremely changing buying environment. As your company enters new markets, launches new products, deals with keener competitors, as well as deals with ever changing demands within customer organizations, sales training is among the answers for executing an excellent response to these changes. You just cannot sustain superior sales force overtime, if you don’t invest in skill development overtime.

Sales Coaching could open up your eyes to assist you to meet your sales goals. In the past, sales training had a questionable report card. That was then and this is now. Today, leading edge sales training companies have crafted a new generation of sales training – they work, they make a difference, plus they are affordable.

Do you want to increase your sales exponentially and triple your revenue? Joining a Sales Training Workshop along with the proper Sales Coaching techniques will surely help you. You will definitely earn more and will maximize your business opportunities!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6130000