So many companies miss the opportunity to grow their sales when they neglect a very straightforward solution. They don’t train their sales managers to be effective coaches.
How can the lack of sales management training for your new sales manager affect your company’s bottom line? Sales revenue is dependent upon many things but primarily upon the quality of your salespeople and the effectiveness of their manager. When the sales team manager is inexperienced, the team flounders and is less productive. However, when the sales manager is adept at motivating their sales reps and coaching them to ever higher performance, you have maximized the team’s potential.
The problem is that too many sales managers are promoted without having had the benefit of sales leadership training. They may have had consultative selling training when they were selling directly. That was when they caught your notice as a high performer. But they were promoted without the benefit of leadership training on how to manage and get the most out of their people.
First, sales managers need to get to know their team members individually and to understand what motivates them. A good manager
• spends quality one-on-one time with each of their reports to get a sense of who they are and why they behave as they do
• realizes that each team member responds to different motivators and each has a preferred style of communicating
• adjusts to the style of each member in order to communicate more effectively and also understand what will motivate them to high performance
If, for instance, you have a very expressive, sociable rep, your quiet, slow-paced analytical communication style will not capture their attention for very long. And if this same rep loves sports and checks on the stats regularly, a pair of tickets to a sports arena would be an ideal motivator or reward for extra effort or achievement. You get the idea…
The other piece of effective sales management is sales performance coaching. Know what sales skills are most critical to success in your market and then assess, develop, encourage and measure those skills in your sales team. Good managers know how to guide toward consistent performance improvement. They can diagnose performance problems and ferret out the root cause. Then they can solve the problem with the right mix of sales training, sales coaching, incentives, resources or an improvement plan with clear and fair consequences for non-performance. Good sales managers know the strengths and weaknesses of their sales team and find ways to build on the strengths and overcome the weaknesses.
Give your sales managers the tools and support they need to succeed and watch your company revenue increase. Our research shows that consistent and effective sales coaching makes a 4-to-1 revenue difference. Doesn’t that seem worth it?
Learn more by going to http://www.lsaglobal.com/solution-selling-training
