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Are You Failing Your Salespeople?

by Tom Reilly

You know how to run a business; do you know how to run a sales force? I will bend your comfort zone in this article. I will challenge your sales management practices and share with you some of my observations from training salespeople. I will discuss the fundamental sales management role—coaching. How well do you coach your salespeople? Are you a great sales coach? Would your sales team elect you to the Sales Manager Hall of Fame?

Let’s begin with some coaching rules:

1. If salespeople report directly to you, coaching is your number one job. Even if you have account responsibility, coaching your salespeople is still your primary job function. This is how you add value to your sales team.

2. If you believe you are too busy to coach, re-read rule number one.

3. If you believe that hiring experienced pros relieves you from coaching, re-read rule number one. Even Tiger Woods works with a golf coach. Are your salespeople better at their jobs than Tiger is at golf?

4. You cannot coach from the locker room. You must be in the field with your reps to provide them with accurate and meaningful direct feedback. How many professional sports team coaches sit in the locker room during a game and wait to give feedback after the game? They understand the importance of being on the field with the team.

5. Coaching is for the rep’s benefit. This is not the time for you to unload pent-up frustration with the sales force. Your objective in coaching is to guide your salespeople, provide corrective feedback, and inspire them to rise to the challenge. It’s about them, not you.

6. The quickest way to change behavior is initially reinforce the effort, not the results. Profit follows performance, and performance follows effort. If salespeople put forth the effort you desire, they will create the results you want.

7. As the coach, you provide two kinds of feedback—quantitative and qualitative. 

Quantitative feedback is achievement driven. This is what most managers are comfortable with—data. Quantitative feedback tells the rep how much they perform. Some managers call this hard data feedback. They love it because you can measure it. These metrics include sales-to-quota, number of calls made, closing ratio, cross-sell ratio, sales profitability, product mix, customer retention, on-time performance of paperwork, and other numbers-oriented issues. A coach can deliver this type of feedback at the end of the game by handing the athlete a statistics sheet. A sales coach can email statistics to a sales rep. The feedback speaks for itself. That’s why managers like it. It’s cold, hard data.

Qualitative feedback is performance driven. Managers are less comfortable with effort than they are with accomplishment. Qualitative feedback describes how the rep performs. Some managers call this soft feedback. They are not as comfortable with this because it requires interpreting effort. It includes the quality of a sales call, product knowledge, internal and external relationships, attitude, how the rep handles rejection, how the rep spends his or her time overall, salesperson confidence and competence, whether the rep listens more than talks, if the sales rep is achieving other career goals, and other sales related activities. This feedback requires more one-on-one time between the sales manager and the sales rep. How can the manager comment on the quality of effort if the manager does not spend time with the sales rep, observing his or her performance?

Over half of the salespeople I train cannot differentiate their company from the competition or define good business for their companies. These are coaching issues. Sixty percent of salespeople say they spend adequate time with their managers. The most precious resource you offer your salespeople is time. From this time they spend with you, they draw from your knowledge base and your inspiration. How much time do you spend with your sales reps? Your job as a sales manager is to coach the sales performance you want from your reps. You lead them and guide them to success. As they succeed, you succeed.

Tom Reilly is a professional speaker and author of Value-Added Selling. You may reach him at tom@TomReillyTraining.com or call him at 636-537-3360.

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