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February 28, 2012
3 Sales Coaching Activities to Separate You from Your Peers
By: Matt Sharrers
This is the first problem to solve. Let’s assume you have your time allocation at best in class levels. How do you monetize your coaching time? There are 3 critical coaching activities that separate average from great allowing ‘A’ player sales leaders to generate an ROI on every field interaction.
Preparation
Average – Nothing is worse than a sales leader showing up for a day in the field and says “what are we working on today”? As a sales leader, you have on average, 6 to 8 direct reports. On a % basis, each of them is responsible for 10%-20% of your success. Why would you put yourself in this position? More importantly, why would you short change them? People leave bosses, not companies. Each time you show up unprepared to coach, you are moving your reps closer and closer to calling a headhunter back.
Great – You review three things:
Demonstration
Average – You tell your team what to do on sales calls, but you are unwilling to demonstrate it in a live customer setting. You either can’t sell or you don’t want to show vulnerability in front of your reps. If you have either one of these challenges, your sales coaching will never reach ‘A’ status.
Great – You demonstrate exactly how each step of your sales process can be executed in a live setting. As one of my bosses told me about ten years ago, “nothing beats putting on your cleats and running the play the right way so your team sees the standard”. Introduce a new sales tool or job aid? Demo it with each rep. Before you watch them do it, you need to show them how to do it.
Customized Advancement
Average – You give the same feedback to every rep in the same manner sounding like a broken record and you don’t focus on incremental improvement.
Great – You take into account tenure with company, time in sales, background, personal learning styles and each rep’s goals. Some crave public recognition, some crave customized 1:1 feedback, some want money, others independence while others want promotion. Secondly, great sales leaders focus on making small incremental gains. Literally, giving a rep 1 thing to work on between call 1 and call 2 as a way to create an environment of continuous improvement and deep focus.
To allow this list to be impactful, free yourself of excuses as to why you are not doing these. Most importantly,if you are looking for some more tips for sales coaching, download our competency assessment which breaks down the behaviors of some of the best sales coaches we have witnessed.
What other tactics have you seen deployed by great sales coaches? Share them with us.
Matt Sharrers is the CEO of SBI, a management consulting firm specialized in sales and marketing that is dedicated to helping you Make Your Number. Forbes recognizes SBI as one of The Best Management Consulting Firms in 2017.
Over the course of nearly a decade at SBI, Matt Sharrers was an instrumental early partner guiding SBI as the Senior Partner. Matt’s functional responsibilities included acting as the head of sales where he led SBI’s double-digit revenue growth, and was responsible for the hiring function to build SBI’s team of revenue generation experts.
Prior to joining SBI in 2009, Matt spent eleven years leading sales and marketing teams as a Vice President of Sales. Matt has “lived in the field.” As a result, he is the foremost expert in the art of separating fact from fiction as it relates to revenue growth best practices. CEOs and Private equity investors turn to Matt’s team at SBI when they need to unlock trapped growth inside of their companies.
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