Sales Coaching Tip – Often Overlooked Benefit of Sales Coaching

When you effectively sales coach your salespeople, you expect their sales skills to improve, their productivity to rise and their results to increase. And typically, you’ll also find your time is easier to manage, your relationships with your team members improve and your job satisfaction increases.

Yet, there’s an added bonus to sales coaching your team that can prove to be very helpful to you, your team and your company.

When you effectively coach your team and listen wisely to what they share, you’ll gain valuable insights into what is going on in your industry real time. You’ll discover patterns that provide you with a unique and important perspective that your competition may not be leveraging.

This perspective can help you to adapt to industry and client needs in a more timely, effective and responsive manner.

If you have peers in a similar position, you may find it helpful to meet on a monthly or quarterly basis to share the patterns and insights you discover. This will assist you to be proactive in responding to any trends you unveil.

What patterns or insights have you discovered from coaching your team members?

What can you and your team members do to be proactive in responding to those patterns and insights?

Would meeting with your peers to discover trends in your industry be helpful to your team and your company?

Sales Coaching Tip – What Salespeople Crave

Saless people crave feedback. They want to know how they are doing. They want to know if they did well. And if they are not selling as well as they could, they want to know what they can do to do better.

Experience demonstrates that salespeople will work harder and more productively for managers who provide effective and timely feedback. Also retention is greater when managers give great feedback.

Knowing that your team craves feedback, what are you doing to provide them with timely and effective feedback?

Ideally you want to be providing positive feedback to reinforce the sales behaviors you value and corrective feedback to help them sell better, on a regular basis. By doing this by design and not by default, you ensure you are consistent in providing your team with what they crave and need to sell more.

Consider developing a feedback plan. You may even use a checklist to get yourself developing good feedback habits with your team members. It might include their names and the number of times you’ve provided feedback in a day/week for each. This will help you identify if you have missed anyone and improve your follow through on delivering feedback. The bonus will be an increase in sales. A win for all of you.

Have you been providing feedback for your team in timely and consistent manner?

Who on your team could use some additional feedback?

What is your feedback plan?

What’s Your Focus?

Sales coaching is a process of helping your team members sell better. Yet sometimes sales managers are so focused on their team targets it causes them to miss that coaching is also a process that is customized to each individual.

Even though your overall focus is to increase your team members’ sales, your individual focus with them will vary. For example, some team members you may be focusing on what they can do to improve their call quality, some on their calls per hour and yet others on their quote ratio. And even with this variety, keep the focus of your coaching, not on the numbers, but on each team member and what they are learning. The increase in the numbers will be a by-product of your focus on what each of your team members is learning.

It’s a subtle difference but an important one.

If you only focus on the numbers and not on each team members’ learning, you are functioning in a void. From your team members’ perspective, it will feel like all you are interested in is the numbers and that they are a pawn in the game. This isn’t motivating for the most well-intentioned of individuals.

Yet when you focus on the individual and let the numbers be the by-product of your coaching, team members will feel more motivated as it will feel like you have their best interests in mind.

Who on your team are you more focused on their numbers rather than on them and their learning?

What you do to be more focused on them and their learning?

What specifically are you going to do today or tomorrow to focus more on them and their learning?

When You Get Feedback from the Team

Ideally you’re asking feedback questions at the end of each of your coaching conversations. And when you do ask those questions, if you have developed enough trust with your team members, they are giving you valuable feedback you can use to improve your performance and help them sell better.

And when you get constructive feedback for improvement, thank them for sharing and listen. If appropriate, ask more questions.

For example, if a team member gives you feedback that she finds you’re not clear enough in your direction, ask her for more detail. You might ask something like, “Can you give me an example of when I did that recently?” And once she shares an example, you might dig deeper into her expectations by asking, “What would have been more helpful for me to have done from your perspective?”

Be sure to say thank you after each time your team members share an answer to one of your questions. It will help facilitate their sharing.

And above all, engage your genuine curiosity, leave your judgment at the door and be sure to act on the feedback your team members provide. This will help keep their feedback flowing and their sales increasing.

Have you been consistent in asking for feedback from your team members?

Who on your team are you going to get back on the feedback wagon with?

What are you going to do with the feedback they provide?

Sales Coaching Tip – Two Ways to Sales Coach

Many sales managers act as if there is only one way to sales coach. When in reality, there are two ways to coach.

You can use the typical method of helping your team members improve what is getting in the way of them achieving their desired results. This approach, of focusing on the aspects of their sales conversations that aren’t as effective as they could be, works well with team members who are motivated, interested in improving and who have a high level of trust with you.

But with team members who are not as motivated, who don’t have a high level trust with you, or who are experiencing a lull in their confidence, you’ll find it helpful to try the other approach of helping them do more of what they do well. Noticing and reinforcing what they are doing well in your coaching can help transform your team members desire and commitment to improve. The successes they gain will help motivate them, increase their level of trust with you, and boost their confidence.

Let your team members state of mind be the determining factor as to which of the approaches you will use during your coaching sessions with them.

Who on your team is motivated, interested in improving and trusts you?

Who on your team is not very motivated, doesn’t seem to trust you as much as they could or is having a lull in their confidence?

Which approach are you going to use with which team members this week?

Sales Coaching Tip – Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

As you know, sales preparation can have a huge impact on sales. Often salespeople focus their sales preparation on learning new techniques and “tricks” to sell more. Yet experience has proven that this kind of focus does not produce better sales results. Quite often these kind of new techniques and “tricks” work against their sales efforts causing their sales conversations to seem canned and manipulative from their clients’ perspective. It’s like building a home on a faulty foundation.

When coaching your team members on their sales preparation, you’ll find it most helpful and sales-conducive to focus on the fundamental key components of sales.

Why? It helps your team members fine-tune their basic sales skills and ensures they have mastered them before focusing on additional skills. It makes sure they are building their sales skills on a strong foundation rather than on a faulty one that clients perceive as canned manipulative sales techniques.

So ensure you include the basics in your coaching of their sales preparation. For example, before your team members meet with their next client, coach them by reviewing and preparing some of the following with them:

• Sales questions to identify and understand their clients’ needs
• Phrases to pre-position additional products
• Transitions for shifting the conversation from discussing needs to sharing a true client story
• True client stories that fit their clients’ industry
• Sales questions to discover their clients’ decision making process
• Sales questions to invite their clients to buy
• Transitions to move the conversation from “the initial close” to discussing additional products

This kind of basic polishing will provide clients with kind of assistance to help them with their buying decisions. And in turn, your team members will sell more.

How often do you coach your team members on their sales preparation?

When will you next be coaching them on their sales preparation?

Which one or two items from the list above will be the focus of your coaching?

Sales Coaching Tip – Help Your Team See Objections Differently

Too often salespeople see objections as field mines littering the path to their sales success. This can cause them to avoid inquiring about their clients’ concerns and, as a by-product, to miss the opportunity to help their clients sufficiently to complete a sale.

Keep your ear to the ground for comments from your team members that indicate that they are objection shy.

Once you discover who your objection shy team members are, help them shift their perception so they begin to see that objections are an essential part of their sales conversations. And that in fact, objections can be great leads into deeper conversations with clients that can result in more. As you know, the more clients share about their problems and concerns, the more your team members will be able to provide the solutions to solve those challenges. Translation: more sales.

As clients share their concerns, your team members can help solve those objections by sharing the missing information that will help shift clients’ perceptions. For this reason, when you are coaching your team members, you want to coach them on how they use their client stories, examples and information during their sales conversations to address clients’ objections.

For example, you might ask your objection shy team members to write out the three top objections they got this week and then to share with you what stories or ideas they could tell that would eliminate those concerns. They may say that for objection number one they would share a particular story, for objection number two they would talk about some recent research and for objection three they would discuss the criteria others have used to make their buying decision.

As you hear what your objection shy team members say, determine which one of the three you are going to dig into in more depth. You would base your decision on which one was not as strong as the others.

Let’s say you chose to get into more depth about the criteria others have used for their buying decision. You would then proceed to ask your team members about the specifics they would use to:

• Ask to discover if clients are interested
• Specifically say about the criteria
• Mention about the ways to use the criteria
• Transition to asking for the sale

Once you know your objection shy team members understand what you do, you may then engage in a role play with they to ensure they can apply the ideas in a conversation.

By helping your team members to embrace the power of objections, you will help them sell more … more often.

Who are your objection shy team members?

What are you going to do to ensure they embrace the positive effect objections can have to their sales?

What can you do to help them provide information effectively to shift their clients’ concerns?

Sales Coaching Tip – Mama Was Right

When it comes to being truthful in life, your mother was right. And when it comes to sales, being truthful is just as important. Particularly since many clients have their truth detectors on high because sales has a reputation of being manipulative and untruthful.

What does this mean to your coaching? When you’re coaching your team members about the “truths” they share with clients, be sure to coach them to back up their claims with the most appropriate supporting material.

If your team members expect that their clients will be less likely to believe what they are going to say, coach them on the facts and research they can use to support what they say. If your team members think clients will be less likely to understand what they are going to say, coach them to give an example, story or analogy to demonstrate what they share.

During your coaching session, examine the “truths” your team members share and ask them if their clients are less likely to believe or understand. Then help them plan their supporting ideas accordingly. It will help them build their credibility and trust with their clients sooner in their sales conversations, and ultimately lead to greater sales.

What “truths” do your team members typically make that they haven’t backed up with the appropriate supporting information?

Are clients less likely to believe or understand each of those claims?

What kind of support material can they use for each of those claims?

Sales Coaching Tip – Making the Sale

You’ll notice I avoid using the word closing the sale in my coaching tips. I do this for a reason. Too many salespeople are looking for the magic phrase to close the sale and lose sight of the important fact that the greatest closing techniques will not work if they haven’t done a good job of the earlier parts of their sales conversations.

So making the sale is not about closing techniques. Making the sale is about what your team members do earlier in their conversations. It’s about how they identify and address their clients’ needs. It’s about how they demonstrate they have clients’ best interests in mind. It’s about how well they develop credibility and build trust with their clients. And it’s about them working with their clients to help them with their buying decisions.

If your team members do all these well, their sales will happen naturally. But if they miss out on any one of these, even the best closing techniques are less likely to lead to a sale.

When you are looking for ways to help your team members close more sales, first examine what they are doing during the first half of their sales conversations rather than at their closing techniques.

Take a close look at the list below and rank your team members skills for each (one for very low and ten for outstanding).

• Identifying your clients’ needs
• Addressing your clients’ needs
• Demonstrating they have their clients’ best interests in mind
• Developing credibility
• Building trust with their clients
• Helping their clients with their buying decisions

How did your team members do? For those that didn’t do so well, help them set out a plan to improve the skills that they didn’t rank as high as you would like them to.

By focusing your coaching on what happens before the end of the conversation, your team members will more likely make more sales. This kind of focus will help them increase their sales more than simply using the latest closing techniques. It will clearly demonstrate to clients that your team members are working with clients rather than trying to twist their arms to slam dunk a close.

How did your team members rank on the list above?

Which items in list are you going to focus your coaching on this week?

What questions are you going to ask to specifically improve those particular skills?

Sales Coaching Tip – Price Confidence

Many salespeople have a dislike or at least an aversion to bringing up price. They often treat it like taking off a band-aid. Do it quickly to get it over with.

If your team members have any kind of dislike or aversion to talking about price, they are in need for some price confidence.

You can help your team members develop their price confidence by mastering the various ways they can talk about price with their clients.

There is the more traditional sandwich model of:

• Reviewing the benefits
• Mentioning price
• And then referring to perk that clients will get when they buy

They could talk about the price of the product relative to a daily expense by:

• Breaking the price of the item they are selling to something that is daily expense for most people (like a coffee)
• Then contrasting that into the number of days (or coffees) to the item would cost when they mention the price

There’s also the cost recovery model where they would be:

• Working out the length of time it would take for clients to break even on their investment
• Asking clients to project what kind of difference that would make to their business
• And then mentioning price with the time to break even based on the projections the client shared

Or your team members can be direct and refreshing and just simply state their price and wait.

Help your team members practice the various models for talking about price. Try the models above or help them come up with their own. Practice with them until they find a model that works for them and their clients. This will build their price confidence.

Do your team members have any dislike or aversion to talking about price with clients?

Where would you say is their confidence on a scale of one to ten (one being real low confidence and ten being super confidence)?

What models are you going to practice with your team members to raise their price confidence?