At this time of year, many are beginning to feel a bit of a wane when it comes to energy and enthusiasm for the day-to-day work engagement. One of the areas of business where I find this most obvious is salespeople. It is perfectly natural and most of the time a bit of an escape and some rest and relaxation solves this nicely.
It is not a bad time of year to engage in some additional training and development. It may seem counter-intuitive but offering your salespeople some time to reflect, recharge and learn new skills can help them stay engaged. If you do not currently have a sales coaching program operating in your business, consider starting one. The impact can be transformational for your business.
I have outlined 6 simple steps to get a sales coaching program started in your business. These steps are not exhaustive and there is plenty more I can add to each step to help you successfully implement sales coaching. If you would like to discuss, get in touch via LinkedIn.
The first step is setting up some goals. Ideally, these are goals you have already ‘cascaded down’ from your strategic plan. If not, you may need to backwards engineer some goals now and plan to create your strategy sooner rather than later. I encourage you to work with your sales team to establish both team objectives and individual goals. This process will help you to visualize and form some ideas and strategies to execute your coaching program. I recommend the team objectives are documented and visible in a location that is frequented by the sale team, e.g. in the CRM, LMS or on an intranet site like SharePoint. The individual goals are documented and remain with you and the person.
One of the keys to ensure the viability of your coaching program in engaging regularly with individuals and the team. In these interactions, constructive feedback is essential. This feedback must be specific and actionable. If providing feedback makes you feel uncomfortable, do some self-learning on how to deliver feedback and the mental paradigm that removes the anxiety and fear of this type of interpersonal communication. I teach my clients how to use a weekly meeting rhythm with structured agendas for the team and individuals. This structure will liberate you from any fear of the program lapsing or stalling due to engagement failure.
Every salesperson is unique, and you will need to tailor your coaching work accordingly. People have different learning styles, and it is likely that your team has individuals who adapt and learn quickly and others who may be resistant to change. I use behavioural profiling to understand learning, communication and other preferences before I start any coaching program.
I use a dashboard for sales teams that is updated weekly in our meetings and is fully aligned with the business strategy and supporting goals. The dashboard is a great way to maintain a sense of esprit de corps and reduce the risk of a culture of self- interest and territorialism in the sales team. For individuals, I recommend asking each person to maintain their own performance metrics and share these in the weekly one-to-one meetings.
Coaching is a way of promoting a continuous learning culture. Build a framework around your coaching that includes online learning, workshops, guest speakers and other learning channels. Use your LMS effectively to encourage user generated content that will foster a peer-to-peer learning process and deeper collaboration.
Knowledge is a business asset that is easy to overlook. Knowledge can be a major contributor to the value of your business if you decide to sell or merge at some point. Knowledge is frequently lost when people leave organisations and this can leave gaps in capability and competitiveness that are costly and time consuming to replace. Use your LMS as in the previous step to encourage user generated content. Record meetings and other learning activities that can be uploaded to the LMS and shared. Other software platforms such as wikis, project management tools, customer relationship management (CRM) and document management systems all play a role in maintaining a knowledge management ecosystem that supports execution and growth.
Sales coaching is not a ‘nice to have’ add-on to your people and culture processes. Sales coaching is core to having a successful sales operation that is consistent, reliable and growth focused. Late in the year seems an odd time to start a sales coaching program if you do not already have one. But if not now, when? Implementing sales coaching now will help invigorate your team and provide some momentum for a great start to the new calendar year.
If you have an interest in sales coaching, but not sure where to start, you can get in touch and I am happy to help out where I can.
