Sales Progress Blog

Sales management is not always easy. We expect a lot out of salespeople because we want to succeed, and we always want to see better performance and increased profitability. Coaching is tough. Most of the time, sales managers delegate instructions and expect to see their employee’s automatically hit their goals and make their bottom line, but what we really need to be doing is coach. Business coaching is not just telling people what to do. It’s about asking and discovering. Sales managers need to sit down with employees and ask them to define their strengths and weaknesses. We need to clarify any issues that sales people have when it comes to selling. Once the issues have been discovered, managers need to define ways to enhance performance and help employees.
So, for example, if a sales rep has a tough time actively listening, then a sales manager needs to take the steps to fix this. Have your employee come back to you each week with two points of interest that they learned about their customers. This will force them to not only sit back and listen but it will also help them to engage with their client.
It is important to stop managing and start coaching. To get free coaching tools, download this free pointcast and learn our three step sales coaching methodology.

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admin Sales Management business coaching, coaching tools, linkedin, Sales Coaching Methodology, Sales Management

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is probably one of the funniest shows on television. For those who have never seen an episode, you should change that. It is a show about a gang of friends that own an unsuccessful bar in Philly. They are constantly trying to either get rick or establish who is the best. While watching a marathon the other day, an episode caught my eye because it had to do with business practices. The episode, “The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis,” involved three out of the five characters trying to get rich from gas. Their plan was to fill up garbage cans with gas and then hold on to them till there was an even bigger crisis. Then they would be the only place to buy from…therefore, making them rich.
Through the failure of the team to sell any gas, I recognized a couple of important components of a successful sales team. First, the group dynamic was off. They immediately failed because none of them realized their strengths, and they eventually stopped working together. In sales, it is important to recognize your strengths and play them up.

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admin Sales Management communication skills, Enhance Performance, its always sunny in philadelphia, linkedin, manager coaching, sales reps

A while ago I was in the market for a new car; so, one afternoon I went down to the dealership to look around, and a sales man approached me. He asked me if I was looking to buy a car, and when I said yes, he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was in sales and training. He immediately took this information and went on to tell me that as a sales man I must travel a lot and probably needed a car with a lot of miles. Not just any car though, I needed a sporty car that would impress my clients. This was not what I was in the market for; so, I left. I went back to the same dealership a week later and was approached by a different salesman. He started the conversation by asking me what type of car I was looking for, and he listened while I explained that I wanted a large SUV. He then proceeded to ask me why I wanted a large car, and I told him that I had kids. Once he realized that this was my value driver, he brought me to look at SUV’s with high safety ratings. This man realized what I needed in a car because he took the time to listen and understand why I was buying.

There is a point to this story. As salespeople, we sometimes get caught up in the selling part. We go on long-winded stints of telling clients about the product, it’s benefits and it’s features without realizing that the customer may not even be in the market for the product we are describing. Instead, we need to actively listen to our prospects and find out what drives them; why are they in the market for our product?

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admin Sales Management active listening, coaching, communication skills, Enhance Performance, inside sales, linkedin, needs based selling

These days people are more protective of their money, and instead of spending it freely, they are saving. For sales teams, it has become increasingly important to keep a hold of current clients; since, as most studies show, it costs six times more to get a prospect to buy than it does an existing customer. So, the question becomes, “How do we maintain our relationship with our client and get them to buy?”

Most customers leave because they are unhappy, and sixty-seven percent of clients leave because of a perceived feeling of indifference. Managers and supervisors need to coach their inside sales team to keep in front of their customers. Look at who you have not talked to in the past year and who you have not contacted in the past 30 days and make sure to send them an e-mail or phone call to let them know that you are still interested in them. Ask customers how the product you sold them is working out or if they need anything else. This way, you are letting your customers know that you value them.

Here are a couple more steps that you can take to improve your sales and increase your business opportunities:

Send Items of Interest. Find out information about your customers.

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admin Sales Management business opportunities, employee training, linkedin, Manager, Results, sales coaching, Sales Representative, sustained learning, training techniques

Writing thank-you notes has been an idea that has been so reinforced throughout my life that it has just become second nature. As a child, my mom made me write a thank-you card as soon as I opened a gift. There was no exception to this rule. In college, my business classes taught me that it is extremely important to write a card after a job interview. I was told that it would give me an extra edge when the company sat down to consider applicants. We have been taught these things growing up, but it seems that we forget this simple rule the longer we are in the business world.

If writing a thank-you note could possibly help you get a job, what’s to stop it from landing that potential customer or closing a sale? Writing a note is a simple and effective way to impact the amount of sales that your reps make each year. There are multiple different reasons to write thank-yous to clients:

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admin Sales Management business coaching, effective coaching, inside sales team, linkedin, prospecting, Results, revenue, sales, sales coaching techniques, Sales Representative, Sales Success, sales techniques, thank you

Throughout most of our blogs, we have discussed the importance of learning reinforcement. It important to know as much information about your product as you can, and it is equally as important to learn new techniques that are arising in the sales world. We have always stressed that you should constantly be learning, and it has become apparent that this old adage is necessary as more and more younger generations come into the workplace.

We all know by now that there are four generations working side by side in most businesses, but what does that mean from a learning standpoint?

Generational Learning Requirements

As a society, we have slowly progressed into an era where technology is starting to become the forefront of most industries, and as this transition is happening, generation X and generation Y are being taught how to successfully harness the tool. Veterans and baby boomers should be given online training because technology is second nature to the younger generations, as professional speaker Garrison Wynn puts it,

Read more and win Summerfest tickets…

admin Sales Management, Sales Training business coaching, business coaching tools, effective coaching, Employee Coaching, Enhance Performance, Facebook, generation gaps, Leadership, learning strategies, learning techniques, linkedin, online learning, Sales Manager, sales techniques, training and development, training reinforcement, training techniques

Today is an important day for most Mid-westerners because it marks the beginning of summer and the end of those cold, brutal winter months. With all the distractions of summer days, managers may begin to worry about one thing: their employee’s sustainability.

Sustainability - to keep up or keep going.

Everyone has those days, when work is the last place you want to be, and you’ve already started to think about weekend activities…but it’s only Monday. The sun is shining outside, the pools are packed and you’re stuck in an office. As a manager, how do you keep sales up and employees going during the summer months?

There are many things you can do to keep your employees motivated and train them to increase their sales sustainability :

admin Sales Management, Sales Training Add new tag, coaching, effective coaching, Employee Coaching, employee training, Enhance Performance, linkedin, management leadership training, motivation, sales, sales coaching, Sales Management, summer sales, sustainability, sustained learning, teamwork, training reinforcement

Below are a few coaching tips to increase the learning opportunities when riding along with sales reps for observation:

• Always debrief at the end of the day or in the car on the way to the next appointment, and most importantly be absolutely sure the client is out of earshot.  It can be very discouraging and detrimental to a potential deal for a client to hear you critiquing and coaching the rep.
• There will certainly be things you will uncover that your rep must work on.  However, don’t lay them all out on the table at once as this could be overwhelming.  Present only 2-3 ideas or potential areas of improvement, and make notes of others to be brought up at a later date.  Bringing up 16 issues is a good way to get your rep to go on the defensive and shut down.  Plus, realistically even the quickest learners can only effectively work on a few issues at a time while producing real results.

Finish Reading….

Tim Hagen Sales Management, Sales Training effective coaching, Employee Coaching, employee coaching tips, learning opportunities

There are THOUSANDS of books out there on selling and customer service skills, use them as a part of your coaching or training initiatives for access to great and inexpensive information.  Have your team read 1 book a week, and require them to apply one new thing they learned from the book everyday.  This one new thing could be a specific skill or technique, or even just a new attitude or way of looking at things.

Ask them to give you weekly reports on what they implemented, what worked and what didn’t.  This interactive learning strategy could be done in two different ways. You could have members of your team read different books and then share the useful information with each other in group coaching sessions, OR have the group read the same books and let them discuss what specific things worked or didn’t work for each individual. Reading different books means the team can gather the useful information of multiple books in the time it takes to read one, while reading the same book then sharing with the group opens other team members up to new ways of looking at the same information they might have otherwise missed. Either is a successful solution.

Tim Hagen Sales Management, Sales Training active learning strategy, coaching or training intitiative, employee growth and development, Group coaching, Learning strategy

Years ago I was walking through a client site, it was strangely quiet and all the manager’s office doors were shut.  I asked a manager, “What’s going on around here, why is everyone so quiet today?”  He responded by explaining that all the managers were busy doing their yearly reviews of their staff, and that they were due to HR by the end of the day.  While this may be a typical scenario, it left me thinking, “How unfair?”

Here were managers busy trying to finish up reports that could very well determine raises, promotions, firings, bonuses, etc, with nothing more than their memories.  An entire year of performance wrapped up into one sheet of paper.  How could that possibly accurately reflect the performance and skills of someone from the entire past year?

Next my worries wondered to the process after these reviews.  After they were handed in and used to determine the fate of these subordinates, who was rating the management?  Shouldn’t management be held responsible for helping those with weak reviews get better?  They were given the power to judge them, without a responsibility to do anything about it.  It seemed  unfair, and completely useless in terms of helping the company grow.  What a waste of time, trying to remember months or even a whole year worth of tasks, projects, accomplishments, and errors.

That eerie experience solidified my passion and belief in employee coaching and my belief that the typical employee review should be banned from every company.  Typical reviews focus on your weaknesses, and because they are so objective they often leave employees thinking, “The boss doesn’t like me,” not “The boss is right, I should work on that.”   An honest, straightforward, and conversational relationship that focuses on results (not personal qualities) should replace all one-sided manager dominated employee assessments.  One step further from that, all managers should be held accountable for the success of their employees, not just the pointing out of their weaknesses.

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Tim Hagen Sales Management, Sales Training coaching culture, employee assessment, Employee Coaching, employee coaching program, employee performance review