Just Three Tasks- Coaching in sales team management

This is a true case study of simplified sales management. The names of the main character and the company have been changed for the purposes of this article.

Ronald Oppong transitioned in 2017 from a small Ghanaian company manufacturing glass and sliding doors and fittings to a Multinational company dealing in building finishings. From the outside, the multinational company looked great on the revenues and Ronald was hired mainly to galvanize the sales team and protect the revenues. His first week at work was great and full of warm greetings.

Between the 2nd and the 8th week, Ronald slumped from the excited new senior management hire to one who was reevaluating his decision. He had come to understand the real meaning of “Galvanize the team and protect the revenues”;

· The company was shrinking fast towards exiting the industry and the country.

· Property developers who were regular buyers were ordering from other sellers and sometime even directly abroad at higher cost.

· Very few new clients were coming in week on week.

· The team was lethargic and with a high sense of apathy.

· Every sales person showed up for work but just a few showed up to work.

Ronald moved the company’s clients and revenues to a new level by the 6th month!

· The company was bringing in suppliers weekly due to high demand.

· New clients came in in drones.

· The sales team transformed to a community of happy achievers and the revenues had that positive impact.

Everybody played a role but it all began when the wheels of sales begun to move.

What Ronald did is our subject and we believe that if you can relate to his initial situation, you can also relate to his success by adapting some if not all of what he did.

Sales management is one exposing role; your results are as clear as crystal! Many times, sales managers are driven to measure and monitor several sales objectives and results but the long standing question has been whether what is being measures can be managed. Over time, sales managers have spent 83% of their time measuring metrics that cannot be managed and in effect, do not get the needed time and attention to the manageable revenue impacting management metrics and activities.

Roland decided to execute a three task sales team management strategy; Lead, Manage, Coach. And this brought him the much needed turnaround. This strategy encompasses a large section of sales management and moves the management activity into the sphere of sales activity enablement. The time spent in management has a direct bearing on what the sales team does on and off the field and once the sales manager guides the team into guides the sales team to execute positive selling activities, there is that increase in certainty that the sales results would be achieved.

Let us begin with a management activity that was fully within Roland’s control.

Sales Coaching

Sales Coaching happens to be one of the best know management interventions. Every sales manager is expected to be, by default, an excellent sales coach. Hold on; sales coaching is NOT a default setting! It has principles that cut across industry and companies but in every sales environment, coaching is different!

· What is your company’s sales cadence guide?

· And when and where do you start sales coaching.

Best practice advises us on a hidden fact; sales coaching is most effective when it starts very early into the sales person’s role. Actually sales coaching should be part of your onboarding process. Why? Because you aim to introduce the sales person to your company’s selling culture! A successful sales coaching regime is one that clearly defines what, when and where sales coaching is needed and executed.

How did Roland successfully deploy sales coaching in his company? He focused on what not to do with sales coaching; he avoided three mistakes made by sales leaders on coaching;

1. He developed a coaching plan: Roland had a well laid out plan to use sales coaching. Your sales coaching plan guides you and your company on critical elements like

• who performs coaching,

• what attributes should be available for coaching,

• when to introduce sales coaching and

• what to do on a coaching call.

The trick in sales coaching, according to Roland, is to identify that one or two skill or attitude areas that impact all other selling activities. E.g., It is more impactful to go on a coaching call with a sales person during the information stage of the buying process, when the sales person is required to use impactful questions to gather as much information as possible from the prospect, as compared to going into a negotiation. Why?

Because

i. learning more in impactful questioning is a skill that is critical and useful in a negotiation

ii. Negotiations are at the make or break stage of the buying and selling cycles and it requires a joint call whiles an information gathering call allows time and space to make mistakes and learn from them.

Developing and consistently refining your coaching plan will always introduce freshness and the much need “swat” intervention to get your sales person back on track before the die is cast.

2. Roland observed on coaching calls: Roland struggled with the temptation of budging into the sales conversation on a coaching call to “rescue the situation”.

In the beginning, stepping in delighted everyone including the sales persons. But a couple more times and Roland was now selling on a coaching call whiles the sales persons sat and observed him. It caused a role transfer and that is one thing you should guard against in sales coaching!

After several mistakes, Roland begun to sit and observe. It is very “simple” to just sit and observe but not really so in sales coaching. Roland’s experience guides us to build up our coaching skills especially in the coaching call.

a. In your sales coaching call, gradually build up your personal coaching confidence by starting with “low impact calls” i.e., coaching your sales persons on sales call that are in the early stages of the cycle. It is even better to start with the sales persons first sales calls. This gives you’re a good view of where to start the sales person off without a high risk of damaging the company’s reputation of killing a sales opportunity.

b. Introduce your role in the meeting without explicitly saying “I am coaching” and without telling the prospect “I am the Boss, let’s make a deal today!”. Your purpose is to observe and guide the sales person after the meeting and not necessarily to close a deal. And this is how Roland did it; “We have identified some positive skills in our sales person here (xxxxxxx) and I am here just to observe, learn and teach that skill to our other sales persons!”

Note the confidence boosting introduction! After this introduction, the sales person was empowered, the prospect was delighted to be dealing with a preferred and recognized sales person and most importantly, the meeting environment has been boosted with positivity!

c. Be guided in your coaching call, mindful of the red flags and possible eternal pitfalls. When you have a sales playbook for your company, the whole team is guided on what to say and offer at what stage of the selling cycle. There is a high risk of a sales person on a coaching call to try and speed up the process by jumping several stages. “After all, why not bring up and negotiate pricing since my manager is here; I can get the discount I need without having to go and justify it”.

It is important, as the coach, to avoid these pitfalls by guiding your sales person. A pre-coaching session is one way to do this.

· Set the objectives with the sales person.

· Perfect the roles.

· Set the limits and no go areas.

And in the worst case, remember, for every rule, there is an exception! So in danger of a company or deal threatening communication from your sales person, gently step in, steer the conversation back on track and hand over to the sales person.

3. Coaching focuses on positive and constructive feedback: In the beginning, providing feedback after a coaching session was challenging. There were just too much negatives than positives and this made the feedback session degenerate into criticisms rather than enabling feedback. Sales persons begun to block of the feedback and were already cooking up the excuses for what went wrong.

Roland’s feedback situation is not so difficult to relate to. The strength of the sales manager lies in how he can focus on the positives, generate a positive feedback environment of that and open the sales person up to hear and learn about the negatives.

Here are a few things we can learn from Roland for coaching feedback sessions

a. Give prompt feedback: Coaching feedback in more impactful if given in near real time. Give feedback as soon as possible. And this is made easy when you have a pre-coaching session with clear objectives and aims. A quick reference to your objectives sheet will guide you on what feedback to give

b. Build rapport: Be mindful of the closed mind of the sales person. In an environment where there is no rapport, this becomes the greatest risk to your coaching session. To gain the best result in giving feedback, it is important to build rapport with your sales person. Ice breaking questions, eye contact, body language mirroring are all ways to build rapport.

The sales person has logical and emotional buckets. Positive word, recognition, acknowledgement of the sales person doing well all boost the emotional bucket and prepares the salesperson to hear the logical part of lessons and corrections.

i. Start of coaching feedback by boosting the morale of the sales person.

1. Acknowledge that he was on time.

2. Appreciate him for making the sales call happen.

3. Appreciate him for identifying the prospect and the opportunity.

ii. Loosen the sales person up and watch your feedback sink in deep and your guidance working magic

c. Avoid judgement when giving feedback. Whenever a sales manager gives feedback without a link to specific actions, it is most likely to be taken as a judgement. “You did well”, “The meeting could have been better”, “You should have prepared well” are all examples of judgement statements.

Feedback should focus on behaviours and less on or absolutely have no judgement. The feedback conveying a good result or a bad one should be linked to a specific action or behaviour.

i. “You did well with the answer you gave on the question about our company’s experience. It was spot on!”

ii. “The meeting could have been better if we had started on time and also had the full attention of the HR Manager. Going forward, lets us schedule our sales calls to this contact on Wednesdays when he is less engaged”

iii. “You should have prepared well on the benefits our solution would give the client. This would have taken their mind off comparing our features with that of competitors.”

One of the most empowering and motivating sales interventions is when a sales person learns new and better ways to sell whiles at the same time, the sales manager exhibits support and guidance to that same sales person. Sales coaching can become a pleasant learning, bonding and empowering activity for your team and as in Roland’s experience, it can contribute to a total turnaround for your company’s sales function.

If you are open minded about getting an expert to support your company in building an effective sales coaching environment as part of sales management, contact us and let’s schedule an engagement.

Inner Excellence Solutions is a sales support solutions partner. Our goal is to help you hit your sales targets and achieve your revenue expectations. Visit our website www.ies-gh.com and lets engage further

Tel: +233266000405

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Email: engage@innerexcellencesolutions.com