Tag Archives: Sales

Sales Coaching

This Is A Sales Call, Not A Marriage Proposal

For some salespeople, maintaining an appropriate emotional distance from their clients is no problem. For others, it’s a real struggle.

Sales is about gaining trust. It’s not about promising a prospect the stars and the moon. If you find yourself getting down on bended knee and proclaiming of course it’s no problem to push the shipment through three days early (knowing full well the havoc this will create for production), that’s a clear sign you’ve lost sight of your mission.

Too many salespeople-especially those new to sales-fall into the black hole of overvaluing relationships. Overvaluing relationships means placing too much emphasis on the dynamic between yourself and your prospect.

Going into a sales call with a mindset of wanting to sell something compromises your filter. Instead of determining if you even have a qualified buyer in front of you, you leapfrog to the marriage proposal and place yourself in the position of saying anything to close the deal.

If this is you, you need to work to maintain an emotional distance. On the one hand, you should be able to engage prospects and clients in a cordial, friendly, professional manner while, on the other hand, allowing objection and rejection to roll off your back. If you slide into overvaluing relationships, the danger is that you:

Lose objectivity Lose sight of the mission

Have a hard time handling rejection

Take it personally when you receive an objection

Compromise too much in negotiation

Overvaluing relationships lead to a number of negative outcomes. However, there are several things you can do to mitgate these issues: Talk with your sales manager. Make them aware of the issue.

Use an in-depth sales assessment or personality assessment tool that can help you understand your cognitive structure.

Ask for sales coaching.

You may believe that ingratiating yourself with a prospect is the fastest and surest way to make a sell, but this is wrong thinking. While there’s no denying that people like to buy from people they like, they will always do business with someone they trust.

If you’re putting too much energy toward relationship building versus following the sales process, take immediate action to seek coaching on the proper method for maximizing each sales opportunity to its fullest potential. By doing so, you are creating a huge advantage for yourself and making the sales process much easier for your prospects and clients. Your closing rates can improve and your overall performance will benefit.

Barrett Riddleberger is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of sales assessment, custom sales training [http://www.resolutionsystemsinc.com/sales-training-program/], sales recruitment and sales consulting. He also is founder of Resolution Systems Inc., a strategic sales consulting firm. His book, “Blueprint of a Sales Champion,” details how organizations can find, train and retain top performing salespeople… even in a highly competitive market. An accomplished author and sales consultant, Riddleberger is also highly in demand as a business development and motivational speaker for organizations seeking to drive their sales force to greater levels of performance. For more info visit ResolutionSystemsInc.com or call 866.350.4457.

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Sales Coaching

Training Sales Managers – The Core Skills They Must Have Part 2

Training sales managers in your organisation will improve your results. An established fact. Though what are the key core skills to focus on that will bring the highest rewards. This is Part 2 of our core skills for sales managers.

In the last article we talked about some fundamentals. Like have good interpersonal skills, business knowledge and an understanding of the actual role that they will be carrying out. Now it is time to get into some of the actual day to day skills that they will be actively involved in. Such as sales coaching, recruiting representatives, running sales meetings and finally managing the whole process.

Recruiting New Sales Representatives

Sooner or later a sales manager will need to recruit new sales representatives. This is such a positive opportunity to bring in new blood to the sales team that can impact results in such a positive way. Recruiting is a skill that can be learnt. Training your managers to assess candidates objectively is key to bringing on board a new sales representative to your organisation that can deliver results.

Sales Coaching

Sales’ coaching is one of the most important skills that sales managers can leverage to improve the results of their team. We all know coaching works in the sports arena. The positive thing for us is that it works in business too. There is a well-known fact that the more practise you have at a skill the better you become. This goes for sales conversations as well. If your managers focus on coaching their team and practise with them the better results you will get, guaranteed.

Running a Sales Team Meeting

Sales team meetings can be nerve racking for even the most experienced sales managers. Yet they are a great opportunity for your managers to communicate a consistent message to all of her or his sales team. They need to be a mixture of skills training and business discussions. A tight agenda led by an individual that is inclusive and yet very much in charge.

Managing The Management Process

The definition of a manager is that they are someone that can manage a process. The same applies for managers of a team of sales people as well. For instance it is important that the sales team hit target. It is also important that data is relayed to the relevant departments on time so that this can be worked out by various performance measures Being a maverick sales manager might produce some outstanding results yet it is unlikely that it will be consistent. So when you are looking at the inputs to develop training for your sales managers. Make sure that you review these key areas.

Training sales managers like any process needs a step by step plan. These key areas we have discussed will give you a starter to get going with now.

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

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]

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Nic_Hallett/1231793

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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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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.

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