Assistant Sales Coaches, how to identify them and engage them in lifting the Micro Sales Skills of other sales team members.
When the Micro Selling Skills of the salespeople used in last week’s blog, Macro vs. Micro Skills, are compared, it is evident that each sales team member has different strengths.
The question is, can you use these salespeople to help improve others’ skills?
Paul, for instance, had the highest Prospecting Skill conversion, while John had the highest Closing Skill conversion.
Neither is perfect, but it would make a fantastic difference if these skills were transferable to another sales team member.
Measuring each salesperson’s Micro Skill performance levels allows you to develop a coaching plan that delivers more substantial conversion ratios and identifies team members who can serve as assistant coaches.
Why use assistant coaches instead of doing the coaching work yourself? Your role is identifying and training your replacement while helping people grow and prosper.
Knowing each person’s aspirations and doing whatever you can equip them to realise those ambitions builds a stronger rapport and ensures maximum productivity from that individual.
Life has taught us not to trust everything we hear, read, or see but to question its accuracy and authenticity, so getting someone to share an approach that will identify sales skills that can be improved will always be more accepted than any other approach.
For these reasons, my approach to coaching Micro Skill improvement has been by posing questions like,
- Is there another approach we could have used to secure a better outcome?
- What could we have said differently to secure a better outcome?
- Is there another way we could have demonstrated the product to secure a better outcome?
Importantly, if the answer you receive to any of these questions is not perfect, stay on point by asking what else we could try until you are happy or happier with the response.
The objective is to get your salespeople to think about current sales opportunities and the approach (sales strategy) they plan to advance the sales process or close the business rather than go through the motions.
Every prospect and potential customer differs; our sales strategy should reflect that difference.
These or similar questions posed as part of a curbside conference after a sales call are ways in which we can help people take ownership of ideas and change the way they approach selling situations in the future.
Using this discovery in a sales meeting allows you to use key individuals as assistant coaches who reaffirm the need to change and improve the selling skills of all team members.
Why? Because I stopped telling them what they should do and started sharing success stories from their peers.
Next week, we will look at things from the CEO’s perspective at Belief Systems.
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