Book Summary – Coaching a Winning Sales Team. I hope you find enough information on this page to stimulate your thought process and encourage you to seek the most effective way to coach/mentor each member of your sales team.
The Primary Objective of any Sales Manager is to achieve and consistently exceed sales forecasts.
Sales Managers seem to have become reliant on software that measures activity, performance, and the conversion ratios of each of their salespeople. While these tools play an important role in helping Sales Managers manage their people and record the outcome, they do not record or measure the play-by-play actions that win or lose business.
Software is incapable of identifying the twists and turns of every sales process; it just measures outcomes. So, if you want to win more business than ever, spend time watching the game rather than measuring the game stats and final score via your CRM systems.
The practice of fine-tuning a salesperson’s selling skills, storytelling, oral communication skills, telephone skills, listening skills, written communications skills, and prospecting skills, to mention but a few, can only be achieved when the Sales Manager spends 80% of their working hours in the company of the people who report to them.
Good Sales Managers will have an action plan for the following
- Get to know the Micro skills strengths and weaknesses of each person in their sales team.
- Have a strong opinion about what training is needed for each salesperson in their team.
- Implement a Micro Skills Development plan for each team member.
- Know how to help each salesperson win more business.
- Know the ambitions and goals of each team member.
- Have a coaching plan that helps team members realise their ambitions and goals
Sales Managers cannot be present when every sales opportunity is identified, qualified, demonstrated, or closed, and so they cannot observe the sales process during each of these phases that either won the business or caused it to be lost.
By spending 80% of their time with their salespeople in face-to-face calls, phone calls to suspects/prospects/customers, and any other sales engagement process, you will build an extraordinarily strong understanding of why conversion ratios differ from salesperson to salesperson.
Book Summary
You cannot fix what is broken until you know it is broken. That means you must be present when there is a breakdown in the first instance—before you’ll know how to coach the salesperson on ways to secure the desired outcome.
While spending time with your salespeople, you will sometimes see sales being lost in the moment and the temptation to step in to win the business will be almost overwhelming. From my perspective, it’s better to lose momentum on a deal and use it as the best coaching opportunity you will ever have because no deal is ever lost, it’s just an opportunity looking for a better conclusion, so use the kerbside conferences after the call to coach Micro Skills and get back into the deal. Remember, rugby coaches do not run onto the field, make tackles or score points for the team. They use game videos to replay the turning points of a game and coach players on how to do things differently next time.
Spending time with your salespeople will help you identify the skills development opportunities of each person in your team, and from there, develop a coaching plan on how to address these micro-selling skills.
When navigating with a compass, you’ll find it is useless unless you know where the fifth point of the compass is: ‘where you are now’. The trouble is, it’s not until we push into this ‘unknown’ corner of our knowledge that we will find out how poorly equipped we were to make decisions about what direction to take.
Following the book summary – Start by developing a list of Micro skills applicable to your industry. Remember our example of the Micro Skills Development plan featured in Chapter Sixteen where I feature a chart that displays a hypothetical salesman with his current and projected Micro Skills development.
In your coaching plan, rank each member of your sales team based on your observation of their performance in selling situations and then the level of improvements you believe you can coach them to over the next six months.
Not everyone gets it right the first time—but review, adjust, and try again, and you will reach your desired target. Did you know that Apollo 11 was of course 97% of its journey to the moon?
To be an effective coach you need to.
Show an interest in people and helping them improve their selling skills, time management, and making them better people. It leads to conversations where they share their ambitions and what motivates them to try harder, to excel.
When salespeople realise how much you want to help them and that there are no ulterior motives, you are well on the way to achieving and consistently exceeding sales forecasts.
Coaching a Winning Sales Team Book Summary
Remember, Sales Managers don’t manage sales; they manage salespeople.
