Building Your Coaching Skills
Are you a better coach or manager? As a sales manager you are directing, supervising, managing, delegating, appropriating and reporting. While these are important tasks, they may not lead directly to sales. In some of my previous articles we discussed how important it is to coach your salespeople and how little time and training you may actually have to do that. This article will give you some tips on how you can build your coaching skills and spend more time coaching. Let’s start by defining coach.
“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” — Tom Landry
Coaching is an interactive process that helps individuals and organizations develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results.
Professional coaches are trained to:
- Listen and observe
- Customize their approach to the individual’s needs
- Elicit solutions and strategies from the individual
As a result of coaching, salespeople:
- Set better goals
- Take more action
- Make better decisions
- More fully use their natural strengths
Coaches believe that the salesperson is naturally creative and resourceful and that the coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the salesperson already has. While the coach provides feedback and an objective perspective,the salesperson is responsible for taking the steps to produce the results he or she desires. (This is modified from the official ICF — International Coaching Federation — definition.) Are you a better manager or a coach? What types of activities are you engaged in daily?
Coaches:
- Help salespeople set goals and then make a plan to reach those goals.
- Ask salespeople to stretch more than they would have on their own and give them the encouragement to do so.
- Focus salespeople on productivity, not activity, so that they produce results more quickly.
- Provide salespeople with tools, support and structure to be efficient and effective.
Many sales managers feel they only have time to tell their salespeople what they want them to do and what they expect. Most sales managers need to have more time to show salespeople and plan with them. This will change behaviors,which will increase results rapidly. Too many times managers assume that salespeople can get the expected results, but in reality they are not sure how.
Let’s say you tell your salespeople to increase their sales by 20 percent. They all agree. The next thing you know several of them have increased sales but the rest of them have not. In fact, sales have decreased for some of them. How can this be?
Most high performers respond to a challenge and have the natural ability to increase sales. The majority of salespeople will try to increase sales but little of their activities will pay off because they are already doing the best they can. The ones that have had a decrease in sales are probably already struggling and demotivated by the expectation to increase sales when they can’t even keep their sales steady.
When you set an expectation to increase sales, your salespeople will benefit from specific instructions on how to do so. Part of this can be done in a sales meeting and the rest in one-on-one coaching. For example, explain at the sales meeting where you expect the increase to come from. It could be that the increase should come from a mix of new business and existing customers. If that is the case explain that they should start with existing customers because the easiest business to get is more business with satisfied customers.
Have each salesperson choose 10 customers with whom they feel they can increase business. Ask them to create a plan for increasing business with each customer. Discuss some of things that will need to be done, like checking on current satisfaction levels, asking questions to learn of needs, educating the customers on ways you can serve them and closing the deal.
Then meet with them one-on-one to determine how they will execute their plan and how that will be measured. Check in with them weekly to see how their plans are working and give them coaching if they are stuck.
Once they feel they have exhausted getting more business from current customers help them make a plan to get new customers. Since the easiest way to get new customers is through referrals, develop a referral process with them that they can all use. Put a timeline in place for implementing the referral process and coach them to stick to it by helping them prioritize their work. Of course, there are many other ways to get new business and they should not be penalized for those, especially if they work, but do reward them when they implement the plan you have coached them on.
Closing is a crucial area where salespeople need coaching. How many of your salespeople have deals that are stuck? What type of coaching do you give them to help them move the sale forward? Each week, provide time as a team or one-on-one to help salespeople close business.
Definitely spend time coaching your less productive salespeople but don’t let them consume you. You will get the most results from coaching your productive salespeople because even the best salespeople get better with coaching. So how will you find the time to do more coaching? Make a list of all the things you do in a week’s time. Then “check”whether they are revenue-generating activities or not.
Weekly Activities
Revenue Generating? Yes No
Now examine what percentage of your time is spent taking actions that do not directly generate revenue.
What percentage of your time do you currently spend coaching your salespeople to close business? What would have to change in order for you to have more time to coach? Many times it is a matter of becoming more productive and doing a better job at time management so that sales managers are more efficient and effective.
If you put coaching on the top of your priority list and schedule time to do it, then it will happen. You also may need to get some help from your boss so that perhaps less important things can be delegated elsewhere. The result will most certainly be more sales. And that should make the changes worth it.
