Why I Never Have To Go Out And “Sell” Sales Coaching/Executive Coaching
Nov 30, 2005 All About Selling, Experiences in Marketing, Insights in Business, Prospecting, Cold Calling and Networking
It’s taken years to master but the formula is actually quite simple. It’s executing and acting on the formula that people struggle with most.
drive/desire + competencies/mastery of skills needed (selling/leadership skills and characteristics, time management, etc.) + positive mindset/attitude/confidence + right product/service/audience + action plan (vision/goals) + resources (people/training) + ability + fearlessness = Extreme Success
If there’s a breakdown in any of these components or if any are missing, it will have a very strong impact on your results and will dramatically slow down your progress.
So, what’s there left to sell? Either you are the type of person who wants more out of your life or career and are willing and ready to do something about it or you’re not. That’s why success really is a choice.
Insights on Leadership – Excerpt from SMM Interview
Nov 22, 2005 All About Selling, Clients are fun. Case Studies in Sales and Leaders..., Leadership Academy, Prospecting, Cold Calling and Networking
1. What would you tell sales managers to help them motivate the various members of a sales force—some high achieving, some midlevel producers, some new and untried, some never quite achieving what they seem capable of, and channel partners as well?
Begin by upgrading your philosophy about managing and motivating. Most managers tell me they believe their primary role is “problem solver” to their employee’s challenges- a role probably learned from their predecessors and mentors. Many attempt to control their environment, working within the limits of what they already have. Some spend their time extinguishing fires. Others derive their energy by keeping certain challenges alive, providing them with some sense of purpose. Perhaps the real issue is not tapping into what might drive employees to motivate themselves. Continually providing employees with your own solutions can train employees not to be accountable. It will likely result in the lackluster performance you are working so diligently to avoid. It creates an environment of dependency, preventing employees from sharpening problem solving skills or discovering their own solutions.
Coaching, for example, utilizes a process of inquiry which allows your staff to articulate what they want, then access their own energy to achieve it. Otherwise, you’re using your energy to get someone else in motion. To uncover each person’s internal drive, ask questions. Invest the time uncovering what is truly important to your staff in order to improve performance and align their efforts with the company’s vision and direction. Unfortunately, in today’s business environment managers don’t feel they have the time or patience to ‘coach’ their team. Instead, they’ll just provide the answer or solve the problem, then wonder why their staff is so dependant upon them to be motivated.
2. Maybe there’s something you see being done over and over that just doesn’t make sense. How can managers motivate the top sales performers to outperform themselves?
Great managers realize one of their key roles is maximizing their team’s productivity. However, with long work hours, keeping up with deadlines and balancing personal responsibilities, something gets sacrificed. As such, professional development for their team takes a back seat to the problems that arise daily. Managers don’t have the time and resources needed to effectively coach their staff or develop the skills to become a masterful coach. If it’s not getting done today, it may be faulty thinking to believe that one day, something will miraculously ‘turn around’ and you’ll finally have more free time to invest in developing your people.
The managers who are realizing this are turning to coaches as a way to help balance their workload and provide the guidance and support salespeople want. The right coach can further refine your sales team’s selling skills that will bring in more sales. Coaches also provide the structure, focus and accountability needed to ensure your team is engaging in the right activities consistently so they don’t have to practice on their prospects. With this time savings, managers can focus on helping the company thrive, not just survive. After all, how can you expect more production from your salespeople without giving them more resources and support? And quite often, that additional support equates to more time the manager needs to devote to that person; time they simply do not have.
Here’s something else that doesn’t make sense.
Managers wind up spending more time on the weaker areas or problem areas than they do on the things they want to reinforce or create more of. For example, think about those people on a team that require more of the manager’s time and attention. These are the people who may cause problems at work. They may be the underperformers who you’re trying to help boost their productivity. Unfortunately, managers reward these people more than the top producers by giving them the greatest reward available and that is, their time. Your time is the most valuable of rewards and ironically, many managers invest their time in the wrong people. More of your time should be spent rewarding the top producers, investing your time in them, the people that make you look good, the people that consistently reach and exceed performance goals.
3. Will an awards program really improve retention? For that matter, will an awards program improve sales performance?
An awards program will help if:
A. It’s an award that the salesperson truly wants.
B. You have the right people on your team. (You certainly can’t expect an awards program to work if it’s offered to someone who shouldn’t be on your team in the first place.)
That’s why I suggest, instead of developing a one size fits all awards program, Tap into the individuality of your team. For example, if you manage a ten person sales team you may consider that you have ten salespeople. In reality you have 10 individuals who just happen to be salespeople. In other words focus on their individuality, their personal and unique needs and goals to uncover what drives theme. Otherwise, you are making the assumption that your 10 sales people are exactly the same and motivated by the same things. Now, how do we uncover their internal drive. By using one of the most valuable tools as a manger, asking questions.
We may assume for example that everyone is motivated by money. This is not always the case. As a mater of fact, it is often what causes people to lose their motivation.
To uncover each person’s internal drive, schedule one to one meetings with each member of your team and invest the time asking your staff questions to uncover what is important to them. Listen to their responses and ask more questions as you uncover what they most want. Sure, you need the right answers to stay in business. However, to get ahead, you need the right questions.
4. What’s a good way to get salespeople to swallow their dose of training?
Have them develop their own training module. A few years ago, I put together an online assessment I call the Sales Diagnostic. This assessment is designed to gather more information about a person’s selling skills, competencies as well as their selling and learning experience in order to uncover the skills that need to be developed and strengthened.
The point is, when I finally get in front of the people that I’m training, I remind them who created the curriculum. It was them. Because they filled out the Sales Diagnostic, they were able to share what they wanted help in and the areas they want to improve. As such, you know have the opportunity to let your team know that it was them who designed the curriculum rather than someone else who feels this is what they ‘should’ learn.
Designing the training curriculum around your salespeople’s response creates a strong sense of buy in from your team. After all, if they created the curriculum, they own it. And if they own it they are going to be more apt to listen and act on it rather than report back to you saying, “Well that’s not really the training I was looking for” or “That really didn’t apply to me.”
When The Wrong Number Is The Right One
Nov 20, 2005 All About Selling, Clients are fun. Case Studies in Sales and Leaders..., Experiences in Marketing, Insights in Business, Leadership Academy, Live Responsibly: Life Tips, Great Living, Prospecting, Cold Calling and Networking
Selling is The Art of Creating Possibility
I came into the office one morning and noticed the light on my telephone flashing. So, like any other day, I retrieved my messages from the day before to find one voice mail from a gentleman looking for a Michael N. Now, there’s no Michael N. working in my office, so I figured it was a wrong number.
Regardless, I wanted to honor the commitment I make to people who call me, which is to return their call within 24 hours, even if it means returning a call to someone letting them know there’s no Michael N. in my company.
So, I called and left a message.
Two days later, I was left another voice mail from the same person. This time, they sounded a bit frustrated, even irate. They said they left several messages for Mike N. (now it’s ‘Mike’) with no return call from him.
So, now I’m getting more curious about who this elusive mystery man is. I called back and nicely left another message, explaining the situation.
The gentleman called me back, this time sounding angrier than before. I was available to answer the phone.
I let him know there was no Michael N.
He started laughing, first realizing that he had obviously had the wrong number and then secondly, after reflecting on his behavior, laughed more, this time more of a nervous laugh you would hear if you were a bit ashamed of your behavior.
Supposedly, one of the 800 numbers I own belonged to another business years ago. That had to be one old business, since I’ve owned this number for over 15 years.
My innate curiously enticed me to ask him who he was, what he was looking for and who is this Michael N. person?
He told me his name was Alan, and he was a financial planner. Mike N. works for a marketing firm and supposedly offers a service that Alan was looking for. It seems, after several more questions, that Alan was struggling generating enough qualified prospects to help grow his business and was looking for a company to provide him with qualified leads.
I asked more questions, this time about what he’s done over the years to generate leads; what’s worked for him, what’ hasn’t and what he has not tried yet. I asked him to pitch me. He did as he mentioned he spends a few hours each day on the phone, attempting to generate business through cold calling.
It seems that Alan has relied heavily on using the phone to generate new business.
He finally stopped and asked, “So, what was your name again? What do you do?”
I then shared with him who I was and what I did. The next thing that happened; we were in a full coaching call, evaluating his business, and him.
Exactly one hour after my phone rang with the wrong number, Alan gave me his credit card number and hired me as his coach.
Those people who you consider a master of networking, selling or at generating referrals, consider one common denominator that makes them so great at what they do.
They have adopted a concept that I illustrated in the story I just shared. That is, they realize that selling is the art of creating possibility; possibilities and opportunities that didn’t exist before.
After all, when you network or ask for a referral, isn’t that what you are doing, creating something out of nothing? A new relationship, a new contact, a new prospect, a new business acquaintance, a new friend.
The greatest salespeople on the planet realize this and as such, do so consistently. What possibilities are you going to create today?
Kill The 80 – 20 Rule
Nov 3, 2005 All About Selling, Experiences in Marketing, Insights in Business, Leadership Academy, Live Responsibly: Life Tips, Great Living, Prospecting, Cold Calling and Networking
For years, I’ve managed salespeople. And over two decades later, now as an author and Executive Sales Coach, the one constant I still hear when speaking with managers is that the 80 – 20 rule is still alive and well.
For those who may not be aware of what the 80-20 Rule implies, it is this: 20% of your (sales) team will be responsible for roughly 80% of your volume/making quota or achieving productivity goals within a collaborative team environment.
Considering the resources and outsourced professional coaching available to assist in developing a high performance team, this culture seems a bit antiquated in this day and age; one that should have gone by the wayside like pagers did once mobile phones became easily accessible to anyone.
Why does this rule still have to be in existence today? Granted, I know many companies where this doesn’t apply. But what about the population of companies that still breed this culture?
And what does this say about the manager managing the team he or she has? Can we surmise or look past the fact that if the manager is the one responsible for hiring, then the problem at it’s core is that managers are simply making poor hiring decisions.
The 80-20 Rule now takes on a new meaning: 80% of the time, management will make a costly hiring mistake.
Unfortunately, this statistic isn’t far from true. So, it’s not a wonder that managers are only getting it right 20% of the time. If you don’t have an HR department or at least someone strictly dedicated to this function in your organization where it would demand this type of position, then the burden typically falls on management, the same managers who are responsible for other people’s production, and quite often along with their own personal productivity/quota.
If you’re still a victim of this philosophy, lets take a look at your recruiting and retention system. Do you have a step by step recruiting process that you follow which reduces the costly mistake of mishires, while continually offering your people the coaching and training they need on a consistent basis? (That means more than 4 times a year or once at the annual conference.)
A depiction of insanity; managing a team of (sales)people who shouldn’t be there in the first place. Oy. Corporate America still has a ways to go. I certainly have my work cut out for me. In the meantime, I’ll keep hunting for those companies suffering from this philosophy.
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