Improving Performance

Improving Performance

Looking to improve your team’s performance?

Whether you are looking to improve sales, productivity or the client experience, the first step to improving performance is discovering what your team needs to do better and what you can do to help. This means looking at their training and coaching needs. The training is for what they need to do better and the coaching is to help them do it even better.

If you are trying to increase their sales, examine your sales training and sales coaching. Ask yourself a few questions about each.

For your sales training:

• How do you know what you are teaching them will help them sell better?
• Is what you are teaching about theory or is it practical?
• Who decides on the content of the sales training? The team? Or you?
• What process do you use to determine what is included in the sales training?

For your sales team coaching:

• What is the structure of your sales coaching?
• Are they continuing to get better? If not, how come?
• Are you sales coaching them or their sales results?
• How do you ensure you follow up on your team’s sales commitments?

If you want to increase productivity, take a look at how you are coaching your team. Are you focused on the productivity or the individual? Experienced successful corporate leaders who focus on helping the individual find productivity improves as a by-product.

With this in mind, focus your management coaching on helping your team think more clearly about what they did yesterday so they perform better today. Once team members see where their thinking got in the way of doing better yesterday, their productivity will improve today.

And if you are looking to improve the client experience, coach your team to perceive their activities from the client’s perspective. It’s natural for people to see things from their perspective so it’s not unusual for your team to not be client-focused. Yet the key to helping them shift their ‘self’ tendency is to help them examine alternative interpretations of their behaviors. You can do this in your coaching sessions with your team members.

To be able to do this kind of perception shift coaching, you’ll need to have a high degree of trust in your coaching relationship with your team. Otherwise your coaching session could end up being a defensive tug of war. With this in mind, it would be wise to work on your trust building strategy first. Get the trust between you up and then engage in the client experience coaching. The results can be very rewarding not only for clients but also for both you and your team.