Sales Performance Coaching
Critical Skills for Leaders
Sales Performance Coaching is defined as the ongoing practice and process by which sales leaders empower and support the learning, growth and sales performance improvement of an individual salesperson, by clearly defining their goals, mapping out a strategy for their accomplishment and then providing regular guidance, feedback, insight and direction to ensure successful execution.
When sales leaders drive their sales team using Sales Performance Coaching it helps to solve the problems of:
- Sales teams that continue to miss their revenue and/or profit targets, regardless of the economy.
- Salespeople who do a lot of presentations and demos and write a lot of proposals but are simply not closing deals, and when they do they tend to give away too much margin.
- New product launches that don’t achieve the expected results.
- Salespeople who are unable to sell value and convey product differentiation to justify your price to customers.
- A sales team that consistently overestimates their “closed sales” forecasts.
- Holding onto your top sales producers
- Salespeople who are under-performing because of fear or are stuck in a comfort zone.
- Salespeople that leave sales lying on the table because they depend too heavily on the capabilities of the product/service to win business.
- A sales team that is struggling to grow revenues in a predictable, consistent manner and sustain sales performance over an extended period of time
- Preventing good salespeople from being poached by competitors by actively engaging and developing them.
- And much, much more...
Sales Performance Coaching will not guarantee overnight success. For a Sales Performance Coaching programme to deliver the huge impact promised, it will require the sales leader to drive the process hard for a minimum of 4-6 months to achieve traction.
There is no “silver bullet” solution to increasing sales production.
However, working regularly with your sales team, coaching, mentoring, guiding and supporting them, you will not only help them to grow their individual businesses, but you too will grow.
Sales Performance Coaching Is More Than Simply Training!
To achieve sustainable and real behavioural change will requires much more than simply sending your people off to another sales training seminar or workshop program to be “trained.”
To get a measurable improvement and have your salespeople begin to do things differently will require a different approach. As the saying goes, “if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve got!”
If we want to see “real” behavioural change we need to use proven adult learning strategies and behavioural change tactics to boost and enhance salespeople’s capabilities. It is no secret that we learn best by doing. There is no question that we learn best when we are actively involved in what we are learning. However it’s not just enough simply to “just do!” Sales Performance Coaching is very much an experiential “learning on the job” experience.
A “Learning On the Job” Experience
To summarize the research of David Kolb, a world authority on experiential learning, people learn best by having actual experience and experimentation, as well as by observation and reflection. In Sales Performance Coaching we call this, “learning in the real world as and when we have to deal with real world issues” Sales Performance Coaching happens on the job not in the classroom!
Sales Performance Coaching is very much an experiential “learning on the job” experience. As sales leaders we coach in the field and in the meeting room. A Sales Performance Coach meets regularly with their salespeople in their working environment and focuses on the critical issues the salesperson is currently facing and the actions required to improve that specific area of sales performance.
In your role as a Sales Performance Coach you will support your salespeople to cut through all the “stuff” that comes at them on a daily basis. You will empower them with clarity and focus and where needed equip them by instruction and the tools required to execute their specific action plans. The effective sales leader will use the 4 core practices of development in their Sales Performance Coaching
Improving your own sales leadership and Sales Performance Coaching skills
Sales Performance Coaching is a skill. Like any other business skill it requires a degree of training and competence for it to deliver effective and measurable results. To learn coaching, one can attend one of the many “Coaching” workshops available in the general market place, or one can go to a book store and read any number of books on the subject. One of the most dynamically effective ways to learn is to be coached yourself. Sales Managers are hiring Sales Performance Coaches to help them solve their sales performance issues.
The McKenzie Sales Performance Tutoring program is so effective that it is the only “Sales Development program” that will actually guarantee you achieve a pre-determined result. To find out how being coached by a McKenzie Salestutor© will support you to get your Sales Team up and firing in the most competitive of selling environments, and produce stellar sales results contact us.