Seven Steps to Effective Sales Management Coaching, Part 1

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Ralph

seven sales management coaching It’s a tragedy that sales management coaching is the most underutilized skill in the sales manager’s bag of tricks.

The even greater tragedy is that if sales managers did actually take the time to coach their salespeople, and did it right, the effectiveness of those salespeople would quickly improve.

In survey after survey done with thousands of sales managers from around the world, “lack of time” consistently comes up as the number one reason why sales managers don’t coach their salespeople.

In those same surveys, the second reason why sales managers don’t sales coach is that when they’re pushed on how to actually coach their sales teams, the majority have very little idea how to do it.

This is largely because they have never received any formalized sales management training on coaching.

The Sales Management Coaching Dilemma

So how does a sales manager make time for sales coaching and do it effectively at the same time? Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | The 5 Biggest Sales Management Mistakes

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Ralph

sales management mistakes Last year, in a very non sales management training related move, we made the decision to leave home, travel cross country for a year and homeschool our two grade school boys.

We figured that instead of paying the $20,000+ per year to pay for the to go to a perfectly nice private school on Cape Cod, we’d save that money, indulge in our passion for travel and see the country instead.

So as part of that, we decided we would take our kids out of school for a year and home school them along the way…even though neither of us are teachers.

Sales Management Training and Homeschooling

All summer long, as we visited National Parks, new cities and had a real good time, we knew September and “back to school” would soon arrive. Both my wife and I work from home so we figured with the kids the ages they were, now was the time to do it before they (or we) got too old.

The real difference for me was when September rolled around…back to school time.

Uh oh.

As the guy who used to be a sales management professional in the medical and other health related industries, Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | Why Stupid Questions Are Really Smart

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Ralph

stupid sales management questions Stupid questions can be your best friend.

And when you are interviewing salespeople, you’ll hear a lot of them.

In this occasional sales management training series on How to Interview a Salesperson, in this session, we delve into the question and answer part of the interview.

The Q & A Part of The Sales Management Interview

Most sales managers think that once their questions are asked, the interview is over. Most sales management training completely discounts this part of the interview.

That’s really too bad because its probably the most important…

The sales interview is only “over” until, as Blake (played by Alec Baldwin – way before 40 Rock and twenty-something appearances on Saturday Night Live) said in the greatest sales management movie of all time Glengarry Glen Ross… “get them to sign on the line that is dotted”…

(Any opportunity for me to show a video clip of Glengarry Glen Ross on this blog I will! :-) )

Unlike Alex Baldwin, you don’t have to swear and insult the sales interview that asks the stupid question…all you need to do is listen for the questions that are the ones that knock them out of the running.

And these questions are the stupid ones.

Because you don’t want to hire those guys.

And “put the coffee down”! Continue reading →

How to “Spell” Sales Management Coaching

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Ralph

When my kids ask me how to spell a word for their homework, I don’t tell them.

When they were younger, I would just tell them, eager to show them how smart I was because I could spell the word “guarantee” without looking it up in the dictionary.

But now, I never tell them.

They used to then go to their mom and ask her, but although she used to do what I once did and just outright tell them, she now does what I do. She doesn’t answer either.

Sure, they didn’t like it at first. In fact, they never liked it and now that I think of it they still don’t like it.

But now they don’t ask me how to spell words nearly as much as they once did. They just wanted the answer, they wanted the easy way out. They didn’t want to have to go through the trouble of THINKING.

No, we don’t Continue reading →