VIDEO: Benchmark Best Sales Practices to Ensure Success
Jun 24, 2010 Business Advice, How To Sell and Sales Tips, How to Manage Your Team, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, Videos, accountability, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, management tips
Are You Selling By the Numbers or Selling With a Blindfold On? Statistical Benchmarks for Success and Self Accountability That Most Organizations Are Still Missing
Yes, these questions I list below the video are that important. So important, in fact, that they could change your entire perspective around what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and how much you really need to be doing in order to generate the worthwhile results you’re looking for. Because the truth is, you just may be running so fast in an attempt to catch up on your sales numbers, that you didn’t recognize the blinders you’ve developed which are obstructing your view of the fuller picture; the landscape you’re trying to farm and manage when it comes to selling and driving the right sales activity.
Here are those questions you need to ask yourself (and your sales team). “With all the effort I’m putting forth in an attempt to generate more prospects and selling opportunities, following up and retaining existing clients to ensure that I’m bringing in as much business as possible:”
• Am I acutely aware of the activities and benchmarked proven practices (both the activities and the dialogue/message I need to communicate) that I need to engage in daily that would secure my success?
• Am I measuring the numbers and the results of my efforts and allowing these statistical data points to be the driving force behind my sales activities?
• Do I know how much cold calling and prospecting activity is actually enough (emails, voice mails, live calls/connections, letters, and so on) and when to call it quits and move on when attempting to convert a contact into a qualified prospect?
• Do I know how many calls/contacts I need to make each day, each week and how often I need to follow up with a qualified prospect in order to earn their business or move them to the next stage of my sales process? (And have I even defined those specific steps in my sales process to begin with?)
• Am I holding myself accountable when it comes to engaging in the right activities in the most efficient way possible through the effective use of a daily routine?
• When calling on or meeting with prospects, do I have a clear set of outlined objectives that I need to accomplish on every call and during each meeting, especially when delivering a presentation?
• Have I identified the lifetime value of each client or account in order to classify customers according to their sales potential? (What’s the economic impact of the time you invest?)
• Do I have a detailed strategy for each of my clients to ensure that I’m maximizing every conceivable up selling and cross selling opportunity?
• Am I fully leveraging the power and potential of my CRM solution for prospect, client as well as territory management? Do you have a call report system?
• Do I have the right questions that provide me with the critical intel I need in order to qualify each person as a viable prospect so that I can most effectively determine where my limited and precious time is best invested?
And to clarify further when it comes to the type of questions you need to be asking each prospect, this isn’t limited to Selling 101 – Uncovering a Need. I’m also referring to understanding how they buy, how they make decisions, the internal workings of the company, the people and egos involved, the process they are going to go through when they hang up the phone with you or end the meeting and then attempt to solve the problem or find a new solution on their own using the resources or venders they currently have, the concerns or roadblocks that you could encounter down the road that would stall or destroy the potential for a sale, the timely and relevant issues that are going on internally, the overall mood of the company and its leaders, and so on. (Hint: Low closing percentages = misalignment in who you should be presenting to and following up with in the first place.)
If you don’t have the answers to these crucial questions, you’re robbing yourself of the opportunity to enjoy the certainty and peace of mind that comes from utilizing a formulaic approach to selling. After all, if you define it, you can then refine it. So, if you’re ever wondering why you or other salespeople fall into what’s known as a ‘sales slump,’ here’s the main cause of that. They aren’t honoring their sales process by the numbers and as such, those who continue to ‘wing it’ as their overall selling strategy are destined to experience the ups and downs in performance and in their stress level, as well as the waning sense of satisfaction and confidence that’s sure to follow in its wake when this amount of ambiguity and uncertainly is present.
In this video, discover why it’s no longer about simply ‘doing more’ but about doing more of what’s right. Your product has changed over the years and while your selling and management strategy needs to evolve as well, this evolution must be guided by the numeric benchmarks in order to see the full, panoramic picture of the truth that surrounds your current situation.
Note: If you’re looking for a great tool to help develop your prospecting formula and the measurable efforts needed to achieve your sales goals, check out my Prospecting Calculator here and enjoy the confidence and certainty you’ll experience when you prospect by the numbers.
Here’s the link to the Prospecting Calculator.
Tags: benchmarking, best practices, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, Executive Coaching, management training, Sales Coaching
Is My Team Uncoachable? The Top Ten Reasons Why Coaching Fails When Managers Attempt to Coach Their Team
Jun 2, 2010 Executive Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, training for managers
“I’ve tried coaching my team. It didn’t work.” Really? Was it the coaching that didn’t work, the manager’s coaching that didn’t work or was it more about how the coaching was delivered that didn’t work? As a manager, there are many things to consider when rolling out a coaching program for your team that will lead to a successful initiative, a mediocre one or a coaching program that will go down in flames.
Since my last book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, I’ve been spending the majority of my time (every week!) delivering my management coach training programs for both domestic and global organizations. And the more I deliver my program, whether it’s to a team of sales managers who want to learn how to facilitate more effective sales coaching interactions with their salespeople that drives more sales or to a team of executives, VP’s and senior leaders who are in the position where they can provide a deeper layer of support by authentically coaching their management team, the more I find consistencies as to why coaching doesn’t work.
For any company wide coaching initiative to be effective and long-lasting within your organization, there are important obstacles that a manager or internal sales coach needs to address. Rather than do a deep dive into each of these 10 points, leverage this as more of a checklist for you to use before rolling out your coaching program.
If you’ve already attempted to coach your people and have experienced varying degrees of success, do not give up! This checklist can be used for you to diagnose where the breakdown is so that you can recalibrate your coaching efforts and overcome some of the obstacles that may have been outside of your line of vision.
The Top Ten Reasons Why Coaching Fails When Managers Attempt to Coach Their Team
1. Coaching In Your Own Image. “I’ve been doing this for 10 years. I already know the ‘right’ way to sell which has always worked for me. So if I were you, I would do it this way.” Note: Your building robots using this approach, not tapping into people’s individuality.
2. Poor Positioning. How did you set the expectations of coaching? “All the underperformers, please stand up! Here’s your chance to redeem yourself!” Ouch. This “Broken Wing Mentality” (Remedial Coaching) doesn’t create an atmosphere where everyone would want to be coached.
3. Past Experiences. “I’ve already tried to coach my people. It didn’t work.” Well, maybe it’s more about how you tried to enroll them in coaching that didn’t work. Every day, more and more statistics and surveys are showing the R.O.I. that good coaching generates. It’s time to do some self analysis and ask yourself what role you’re playing in this.
4. Inconsistent Coaching and Support. Sure, you may have been excited to coach your team but what message are you sending them when you cancel that coaching session you scheduled with them, regardless of how good a reason you had, your employee is thinking is “I guess I’m/the coaching isn’t a priority/important enough.”
5. No Training. The manager is not trained in coaching. It’s tougher than you think, especially around observation techniques and delivering actionable feedback that drives positive change and measurable results. This leads to two other challenges.
• Hollow Coaching. Focusing on the ‘what’ rather than going deeper to uncover the ‘why.’ Managers are good at uncovering what’s going on; you can see that by looking at a monthly activity report. Where managers drop the ball is uncovering why the behavior is going on or the actual reason behind the lack of activity. This often leads to something that many managers experience, which is:
• Repetitive Coaching. “Now we’ve already had this conversation five times over the last month. Looking at your activity the problem is you need to make more calls. So, make more calls! Call reluctance you say? Well, you just have to be more resilient.” Can you envision the salesperson walking out of that conversation with a powerful epiphany?
6. Event Based. The coaching is event based rather than culturally based to ensure long-term consistency. No coaching plan – no long term success.
7. The Manager Assumes They Have the Trust of Their Staff. This is a common challenge amongst many teams which breeds the resistance to coaching at the very core. Your experience as a manager is one thing that can inhibit your coaching effectiveness but what about your employee’s experience either with you or their prior manager? What if they had a prior experience that was less than favorable? Has this been addressed? Do your people really and truly trust you? How do you really know? Conversely, maybe the manager doesn’t really want to coach or doesn’t believe in coaching or maybe the manager doesn’t have the full authentic commitment to want to make their people more valuable and truly put them first. This is also felt by your team and will affect the level of trust you can foster.
8. The Manager is Coaching the Wrong People. “I only coach the underperformers and leave the top performers alone.” What a great strategy if you want to send the message that coaching is ONLY for the underperformers, while isolating your top performers. Then we wonder why we’re losing our good people. Everyone wants the attention of their manager but for different reasons and we need to align our coaching with where we can deliver the most value for them, individually.
9. Investing the Right Time With the Wrong Approach or Conversation. I can keep spending time pushing on a brick wall but that wall is never going to move. Just like I can say I’m investing the time coaching but am I truly coaching my people or am I simply doing what I did yesterday and relabeling it coaching? I can tell you that this is probably the biggest challenge I see amongst management teams today. That is, they think they’re coaching but they are not. The role plays and skill practice scenarios that I do during every training event continually support this to be true.
10. Toxic Management Style.
• Reactionary
• No patience. Here’s a tip – there’s no such thing as speed coaching. One of the most valuable parts of coaching is creating a safe place for your people to process and self reflect. You don’t always get that in a five minute interaction and if you rush the coaching process, you are only robbing you and your people of a powerful coaching experience. Remember, just because they don’t ‘get it’ as fast as you do or as fast as you think they should doesn’t make them wrong or less valuable. Honor and respect where each of your performers are regarding their own learning style and path of development.
• Misconceptions of what coaching is from both the manager and the salesperson. Time to even the playing field by uncovering each person’s perception of coaching, creating a universal definition of coaching and then setting the expectations on both sides.
• Managers not modeling it, walking their talk
Tags: Executive Coaching, management coach training, Sales Coaching, training for managers
STUDY: Employee Engagement Ranked As the Most Important Organizational Success Driver: Event This Week!
Jun 1, 2010 Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Live Events, Sales Management, Surveys and Polls, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople
An unscientific poll of visitors to the EEA portal over the last two months suggests engagement in early phases. More specifically, this poll found that:
• 47% had received at least one survey from their company in the last year; the rest had not;
• Only 32% said their organizations provide them with a dynamic environment that encourages excellence and advancement;
• 51% believe engagement should be measured by customer and employee retention; 31% by revenue and profits, and 17% by employee absenteeism and productivity;
• In terms of what drives people to perform, these respondents ranked, in order: helping the organization achieve its goals and objectives; open and honest communication with management; belief that the organization is a best place to work; compensation and benefits; feeling that one is making a contribution, and rewards and recognition;
• Employee engagement is ranked by these respondents as the most important organizational success driver, followed by customer engagement, and then supplier engagement;
• Only 25% of organizations seriously consider channel partners when making business decisions that affect them;
• 67% of companies think they have no better than ordinary relationships with vendors;
• Respondents said their companies generally did a good job of developing products with customers in mind, and measuring results, and showing commitment, and not as good a job at internal marketing or getting customers to “identify” with their companies.
Given the direct relationship between employee engagement and coaching – as a manager, executive or business owner, your ability to effectively coach your team is what will make the difference between average or mediocre results and securing as well as retaining your position as a leader in your market. Now more than ever, executive coaching and sales coaching for your sales team and management teams is what will truly provide you with your competitive edge.
If you and your organization are interested in learning more about engagement and the impact it will continue to have on your business, then join us June 3-4 at the Doral Arrowwood, Rye Brook, N.Y. (just 10 minutes from Westchester County Airport (HPN) in White Plains, N.Y.)
As a subscriber and reader of my blog, I can offer you a complimentary registration to the upcoming Enterprise Engagement Expo and Conference, which I am speaking at. Simply go to eeaexpo.org, and use the code PF2010 to register to get complimentary conference and exhibit area access. I’ll be speaking on the role of sales leaders in relation to fostering a deeper level of engagement with their people and meeting with clients and potential clients in a “conversation center” at the event where we’d be happy to meet with you as well! (I’ll be there on June 3 only so shoot me an email if you’ll be there and we can meet!)
Understanding how to engage key customers, channel partners, employees and vendors provides a competitive edge for your business and a maybe even a potential boost to your career.
This conference offers a unique introduction to a proven path to business success critical to professionals seeking to improve the performance of their organizations and themselves. The program is designed to help you learn from experts, peers, and leading suppliers about the emerging new of enterprise engagement and how you can profit from it.
Let me know if you’re coming by shooting me an email to info@profitbuilders.com and I’d be happy to meet you there!
Click here for a complete program agenda and to register. Be sure to use code PF2010 to take advantage of this complimentary offer.
Tags: coaching, conference, engagement, event, leadership, live training, speaking
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