The preferred approach to Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions requires the Sales Manager to build a relationship with the salesperson based on commitment and trust.
Follow this with the development of a coaching plan, based on first-hand observation of the salesperson’s current and projected improvement in their Micro Selling Skills.
While it is possible to develop and run a coaching plan, to Coach all your salespeople into Sales Champions, you will always achieve better results by doing so with the salespersons’ knowledge and acceptance.
Why? Because I have never met anyone who purposefully wanted to be a failure. I have however met a lot of people who wanted to be successful but didn’t know how to achieve that success.
In your capacity as Sales Manager, you can not only build Sales Champions but you can change the lives of these people and build the next generation of Sales Entrepreneurs and Managers.
The Concept of Coaching
As the word implies Coaching is all about enhancing performance, changing the persons’ confidence, belief system, while building trust between you as the coach and the salespeople who want to be champions.
As the Sales Manager, the only way you will ever identify what I call the Micro Selling Skills strengths/weaknesses of each person in your sales team is to spend time with them observing their behavior, listening to their sales presentation, objection handling techniques and reviewing the material they present to a prospect.
Like most Sales Managers’ you are not the perfect salesperson and as a consequence, you are not always going to have all the answers to every selling situation.
Non-Active Observer
However, by riding along, listening in, reading presentations, and any other steps in your sales process as a Non-Active Observer you will see, hear and read the little stumbling blocks that slow a sale down or lose the sale completely.
As a Non-Active Observer, your role is to be just that a Non-Active Observer but to use the knowledge gleaned from that observation as a coaching exercise that gets the salesperson to offer suggestions of what they could have done to secure a better outcome.
Teach Don’t Preach!
Performance Coaching is all about knowing the WHY.
Why the sale was lost, put on hold, or no decision was made. Knowing why the sale was won is just as important.
Armed with this information create a sales coaching plan for each team member and use your coaching skills to help each of your salespeople realize their full potential.
Key Point
Did you know a 10% improvement in Micro Selling Skills will deliver a 30% improvement in sales.
It worked for me when I was a Sales Manager and we achieved a 180% increase in sales.
Bottom line – You will never see a coach looking at the scoreboard, their concentration is always on the game and the players.
