In an informal survey of over 100 sales leaders, we found that most viewed coaching their salespeople as their first or second most important responsibility.
1) Build Trust With Your Team
Coaching today’s sales professional begins with this element – do they trust you? We all understand the importance of trust as it pertains to our personal relationships and even how it pertains to selling and account managing. But have we created an environment of trust with our sales teams? A large part of building trust is how you treat the different levels of performance. In other words, do your top performers feel empowered? Do your underachievers understand their development areas? Some additional questions to ask yourself may include:
- “Do you effectively communicate with your team, and do you listen to what they have to tell you?”
- “Do your team members get excited when they learn that you’ll be conducting a sales call with them?”
- “Do they resist in sharing their goals and long-term visions for their careers with you?”
A key element of building trust is creating a non-threatening environment.
There are a number of questions to ask yourself when contemplating whether you’ve created that non-threatening environment. They include:
- “Do I consider listening a strength of my character?”
- “Do I have an open-door policy?”
- “Do I use my one-on-one meetings to better understand my rep’s territories, their progress, and to offer strategy?”
2) Accurately Assess Performance
Assessing performance may seem like a simple task; but if done correctly, there may be more than meets the eye. For example, do you understand what each member of your team’s strengths and weaknesses are and have they been communicated to each individual? Do you understand “why” each person enjoys selling and what truly motivates them? Do you have a system for continually checking what motivates your team members, knowing that the reasons can evolve over time?
An additional aspect of assessing performance has to do with professional development plans – does your team utilize these plans to drive new behaviors? Do they view development plans as something negative, like a punishment? And lastly, are you reviewing these plans in your weekly one-on-one’s?
3) Provide Positive Encouragement
All you need to do is mention the word “feedback” and
people begin to get nervous. Over the years, we have learned to associate
feedback as negative – mainly because that is typically what happens in a
feedback session. Too often, coaching
is directly related
to telling someone what
they’ve done wrong. In order to truly coach today’s salesperson effectively, we
need to understand that positive
encouragement is as important as any other type of feedback.
When was the last time you went out of your
way to identify something
positive about the members of your sales team?
There are some key areas to focus on when working with salespeople. For example, “Do you dominate the customer meetings – sending the message that you have to be in charge?” “Do you fully support your rep in the meeting through both verbal and non-verbal communication?” And, “do you recognize development effort and not just the results?”
There are some key areas to focus on when working with salespeople. For example, “Do you dominate the customer meetings – sending the message that you have to be in charge?” “Do you fully support your rep in the meeting through both verbal and non-verbal communication?” And, “do you recognize development effort and not just the results?”
4) Be a Role Model
If you had to self- assess your ability (and effort) to be a role model for your team, how would you do? Do you practice what you preach?
A key area that we have much influence over is our attitudes. As a leader, the team’s attitude often starts with us. Do we understand what controls our attitude? Have we identified ways to maintain a positive attitude even through tough times?
Maybe a better way of looking at this is, “Are you a role model in your industry or in your profession?” Do your team members view you as that “Industry Expert” and do you provide “Expert Guidance”?
Tied closely to being a role model is being able to model the behaviors you expect in your people. The ability to model behavior is one of the strongest teaching methods for developing skills in your team.
But have you considered how you coach the behaviors you desire in your salespeople? Being an effective coach can range from the ability to model a change initiative down to modeling a sales technique or process. It can also be used to establish a new practice such as goal setting. The old phrase, “The speed of the pack is determined by the lead dog” has relevance – what we do as leaders and the attributes we model is what we’ll see from our teams.
5) Bring Value to Customer Meetings
As a coach, when we get invited to be a part of a sales call or customer meeting, we are given the greatest opportunity to evaluate our salespeople. It’s also a great opportunity to build trust with our team members. How frequently do you get invited to go on sales calls? Is there a definitive strategy in place to always be on the same page? Are roles defined beforehand as to who will be doing what? Or do we take the motto, “We’ll just wing it”?
We all know the importance of planning for meetings – especially with our salespeople. Yet few of us actually go through the process due to time constraints or lack of skill. As coaches, this can be a development area for most of us – especially as schedules get squeezed with more distance coaching and larger teams.