Welcome to the third sequel of Are You Building a Strong Sales Organization. This time, we are going to take a look at sales managers, because the sales manager role has changed. In the past, it was, “I want you guys to get out there and I want you to sell a lot of stuff, and I’m going to reward you with an annual program, the president’s club, the diamond club.” Or it could be, “I’m going to drive you, I’m going to beat you until you give me what you want.” Those days are gone!
What the sales manager has to be is a coach, and in order to be a coach, you need to understand each one of your salespeople. Take a look at a salesperson and figure out, where are they excelling, and where are they hesitating? And the places they’re hesitating, you need to have conversations around that and give them strategies to overcome it. Let’s say you have got a salesperson that does everything well in the sales process, but they’re kind of hesitant when it comes to handling objections. Then you coach around that area of the sales process, you give them some advice how to do better, do lots of roleplaying, set clear expectations of what you want them to achieve and what they need to do this week, and send them out into the world so they get lots of practice. Next week, when they come back, you can have a conversation around, “Alright, did you try those new techniques? What went well, and what didn’t go well?” And from that, their expectations and accountability, you help people improve.
So let me give you a real-world example. A friend of mine, his name is Steve Richards, and he works for Foresight – actually, he owns Foresight – and they got a product in called Team Visibility that records conversations that salespeople have on the phone with their clients. Initially, when they installed the software, all the salespeople were like, “Hey man, I don’t want Big Brother watching me.” But what they ended up doing was getting the salesperson themselves to come back to the manager and saying okay, this call this week went phenomenally well, I want to share that with you, and this call didn’t go well at all, I want to share that with you. And then they can actually watch the game tapes of both of those situations.
What happens is, when a salesperson does something exceptionally well, the manager gets a chance to reward them. Also, they might actually capture that recording and put it into the company archives to help the knowledge base of the company grow, so other employees can see how it’s done right. And where the salesperson fails, the sales manager can give specific coaching around that, so they do better. So now if I had a difficult sales call, and as a generality, it’s like, let’s listen to the call together and go oh, this is where you went wrong, this is what you need to do. They find out what the problem is, get suggestions how to solve it, they do some role playing and set expectations. This is what I want you to do this week, and they send the salespeople out in the world to do that. And what Foresight has found is that the sales performance of their sales reps has gone up dramatically since they incorporated playback of live recordings and coaching around it.
So as a sales manager, it is your job to nurture and guide your folks to do better. Hold them accountable, and that’s the way you help them to get better and better and better, and the same thing is true when you work with salespeople that are at the top of their game. It’s all about mindset, and as the sales manager, you can figure out where in the process it could be better, and coach them around it.
–
To check out the rest of this awesome series, click below:
Build a Strong Sales Organization – Part1
Build a Strong Sales Organization – Part2
Build a Strong Sales Organization – Part4
Build a Strong Sales Organization – Part5
Build a Strong Sales Organization – Part6
