Seven Steps to Effective Sales Management Coaching, Part 1
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?
Below are the first three of seven sales management training steps so you CAN find the time to do effective sales coaching. And when implemented, will help you to dramatically improve your sales team’s performance.
1. Change Your Sales Management Coaching Mindset
In spite of what many sales managers think, sales coaching is not a separate sales management activity. Instead, it can be easily incorporated into how you interact with your sales force on a daily basis.
You just need to be on the lookout for it.
If you think of sales coaching in terms of “sales coaching moments”, you’ll never coach anyone because, yes, you most likely will not have the time.
The best sales coaching opportunities come to you every single day, you just need to identify them as such and seamlessly integrate sales coaching into your interactions.
Best of all these sales coaching interactions can range from the mundane to the complex.
View every phone call, every sales meeting, every sales call, every email as an opportunity to coach. When you do that, you’ll soon be sales management coaching almost non-stop.
2. Ordinary Questions Are Sales Management Coaching Opportunities
Unless the salesperson is asking you a question of extreme urgency, like: “Boss, there’s a fire in the mail room where is the nearest emergency exit?”, you should resist the urge to answer ordinary questions.
What is an “ordinary question” you ask?
Its any question your sales rep asks you that doesn’t involve crisis, danger or the prospect of imminent demise…
Its the questions you get dozens of times every day.
So instead of answering those questions, ask a question right back to them like:
- “What do you think you should do?”
Then, once they answer your first question, and then ask a follow up question like:
- “So if you did that would that solve the issue?”
If they say no and you agree, then ask:
- “Then what else could you do?”
What eventually happen is that the salesperson starts to think (imagine that) and more importantly begins to learn their way through the solution, with your helpful sales coaching guidance.
3. Identify “The Situation”
Some sales management coaching sessions provide you with a more formalized way to coach your salesperson.
These kinds of more formal coaching sessions may be after you sit in on a sales call or perhaps overhearing a phone conversation. In these more formal sales coaching sessions, the first thing you do is need to identify “The Situation” that needs to be coached on.
Let’s say you have a salesperson named John who frequently interrupts his customers during sales calls, not allowing the customer to answer or speak about his problems.
After seeing this behavior first hand, you first ask an open ended question to identify “The Situation”.
An ideal question to start may be:
- “What do you know more about this customer?”
If John is honest, he’ll likely answer with:
- “Frankly I do not know much about this customer after this visit”
This is when you would then ask another open ended question to identify “The Situation” even further:
- “How did that happen then, John?”
John answers:
- “I didn’t asked a lot of questions and I talked a lot – apparently I need to listen more to my customers”
You would then reply:
- “I agree, this is a skill we need to focus on”
“The Situation” has now identified. More importantly, the salesperson identified it themselves. A successful management sales coaching session should always begin with the “buy in” of the sales rep.
Next week, we give you sales management training steps four through seven. Stay tuned.
