Sam Reese
President & CEO, Miller Heiman, Inc.
When I was a runner, the tougher my competition was, the more my coach pushed me to perform better. He knew that getting me to buckle down and focus on building muscle memory and endurance was the best way to secure a win.
In the sales arena, that coaching task falls to sales managers who need their salespeople to step up and perform under serious pressure. This issue of the Sales Performance Journal explores how this pivotal role has evolved, requiring new tactics and a paradigm shift to enable salespeople to win.
In “Be the Change You Wish to See”, catch three can’t-miss lessons that play a big part in enabling sales leaders to successfully implement change in their organization. You’ll find critical areas where sales managers can maximize their limited coaching time to have the greatest impact on sales results in “The New Guard: Tomorrow’s Sales Manager.” This edition also includes, “In Sync with Customers: The People, not the Data,” which details how managers can use specific communication styles to better connect with their reps and help salespeople build stronger customer relationships.
Sales managers have always had a tough job, but it just got tougher.
The New Guard: Tomorrow’s Sales Manager
All individuals within a sales organization work to achieve the company’s big-ticket goals. They all have a significant stake in the outcome. But overseeing the day-to-day execution falls to sales managers, who are finding they need to evolve their strategies to pull the figurative rabbit of results out of their hats.
Andrew Hepburn, vice president of business development and diligent services at international healthcare solutions provider ArjoHuntleigh, Inc ., recognizes that managers have to be more than just managers today. “They need to have a greater stake in their team’s sales success,” says Hepburn. “The management mentality of ‘let’s just put [sales reps] in the field and see how they do’ – a wait and see sort of approach – is no longer acceptable,” he says.
Sales managers, he comments, must be more than just metrics keepers. They must stay closer to the team’s execution of sales processes to make an impact on results. This line of thinking reigned during the company’s recent effort to transform its own sales process. ArjoHuntleigh recognized the increasing pivotal role sales managers play in process adoption and subsequent sales growth and therefore focused their transformation effort first on educating their management team on the new initiative.
“The management team needs to spend some time thinking about the type of coaching their salespeople will respond to,” says Hepburn. “All their actions need to enable the sales force to obtain goals, whether they be financial or personal.” Hepburn attributes much of the organization’s recent success, despite the challenges of last year’s economy, to the sales management team. But as celebrated and recognized for their contributions as they are, Hepburn notes his company still expects more from its managers. The pressure hasn’t lifted, despite pinched resources. “Sales managers can’t let up on the type of activities he or she has performed up until this point,” says Hepburn. “There’s a higher expectation of sales performance handed down from senior leadership.”
Sales leaders are in equally uncomfortable positions. They’re watching business dynamics change and are questioning whether their sales force is properly equipped to adapt:
- Are salespeople equipped to sell more complex products?
- Are they poised to transition from a transactional sale to a complex sale?
- Are they recognizing when to position comprehensive solutions, instead of settling with single transactions?
- Are sales managers instigating and enabling behavioral change?
The New Cue to Reassess Activities
Many companies are working at break-neck speed to produce sales, but while operating at a hundred miles an hour may generate a few quick returns, it isn’t sustainable, nor is it efficient. Today’s sales managers need to determine the pace at which their company is operating.
A fast pace that doesn’t produce results is a sales manager’s cue to reassess current sales activities. But the prospect of applying the brakes can be daunting. Executive vice president of sales operations for Miller Heiman, Leigh Hooker, admits that while it’s difficult for a sales manager to ignore the urgent fires at their doorstep, they’ve got to think critically about where to invest their limited time.
“If record-breaking speed isn’t delivering proper results, you’ve got to take a step back and think through where to make an impact,” says Hooker.
More important than frequent coaching is the right coaching – meaning to focus coaching on areas where a specific rep is having challenges as opposed to what a manager assumes the challenges to be. This requires dialog that gets very specific. To prioritize who to connect with, Hooker advises investing coaching time in top performers first as they have a greater ability to quickly turn coaching into results. Recognize the topics that will help those individuals improve and engage in constructive dialog.
“The most unproductive coaching conversations are ones that lack specificity,” she says. “[Those conversations] will never change behavior. If you don’t think a salesperson’s close ratio is good enough, questions like ‘why aren’t you closing more business,’ or ‘what do you think happened,’ won’t do anything. Managers need to use one-on-one sessions to really drill down on the specifics of a real deal and review the salesperson’s actions, their customers’actions, and the results [salespeople] are seeing.”
Hooker remarks that managers need to find the coaching opportunities that will advance changes in behavior.
Derogatory comments that blatantly point out a rep’s shortcomings don’t help. “Talk tracks should be aligned more on detailed steps they took, like ‘Tell me what activities you did. What letter or communications did you send, what was your business reason for connecting with a customer, who did you speak to, what outcome did your actions have?’”
Answers to these questions shed light on specific areas the manager can work with the rep on to change behavior and positively affect results.
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