Sales Management or Sales Coaching which is more effective in achieving the sales forecast?
Prospective customers form opinions of an organisation based on information they glean from Social Media, company websites, and the people they meet, and work with and brand awareness obtained over time.
Salespeople are tasked with reinforcing this knowledge or if they are responsible in the first instance for creating that awareness then any research the prospective customer undertakes must conform with the imagery painted by the salesperson.
Either way, the salesperson is a critical part of any purchase decision and as such is any company’s most valuable resource.
Sales Management today is not about managing the metrics, it is about coaching individuals to improve their performance outcomes.
It is about the Compound Effects of making continuous improvements to the Micro Selling Skills and the decisions and commitments people make in their lives every day.
Helping one of your salespeople to set and achieve realistic goals may be counterintuitive to the concept of building a strong sales team, particularly if it results in the salesperson outgrowing the position.
Stop being a Sales Manager who manages the metrics and start coaching and developing people and you will build a reputation such that the best people will want to work with you.
Metrics Managers monitor and report on ways to:
• Improve sales effectiveness
• Improve customer service/loyalty
• Improve communications
• Improve forecasts
• Provide current information
• Increase revenues
• Support team selling
• Increase selling time
• Improve sales management
• Improve marketing effectiveness
• Increase margins
• Decrease sales costs
You can manage a sales team by managing the metrics or you can dig deeper and understand the WHY.
Why the performance level of each of your salespeople is different in each of these metrics and what you can do as a coach to identify the WHY and coach each individual to enable them to realise the Compound Effect of improving their Micro Selling Skills.
Over five years the compound effect of developing the Micro Selling Skills of the salespeople I had the pleasure of coaching resulted in a 10% improvement in their skills and a 30% improvement in sales.
By the fifth year, that compound effect translated to a 180% increase in sales.
