Effective Sales Manager-Coaches
Don’t Add Sales Training, They Embed it!
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- Driven by real manager challenges and opportunities
- Pragmatic – offering “how to” solutions
- Instructional – teaching specific sales leader skills, mindsets, and principles
Most sales managers know they should provide more sales skills training, but don’t. While coaching and training is no motivational silver bullet, strategically deployed it can improve performance up to 19%.
Top expressed sales manager barriers to coaching and training include:
– I’m buried with manager duties and can’t find the time
– My sales reps resist my coaching and training efforts
– I’m not confident in my ability to teach and train sales skills
– There is no budget for training
“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
–Peter Drucker
Embedding, not adding on, sales training and coaching into daily workflow overcomes all of the above barriers. The 80/20 principle of results guides the strategic manager’s thinking. She believes that consistent training is a lead indicator – a predictive activity that will lead to increased sales results.
Winning Sales Leader Mindset: I am responsible for coaching each of my sales reps, however, I am not responsible for training all of my sales reps.
I can’t stress enough that effective sales leaders delegate sales skills training to their team! Learning and collaborating together is a best practice for ensuring your team develops the capacity to be adaptable and nimble in a fast moving, changing marketplace.
Embed this Sales Training Plan into your weekly team meetings:
Your FBO (Flash of the Blinding Obvious): You must replace 25 minutes of *trivial meeting content and replace with vital training focus. *Sobering Tip: Ask your team what is trivial, they’ll educate you.
Your Delegation Action Plan: 1) Explain to the team the new training plan, 2) Answer “What’s in it for me?”, 3) Gain buy-in (this doesn’t mean 100% agreement!), 4) Delegate the weekly sales skill training plan – who is teaching what (co-partners work best because they need to develop a very strong role play script that targets real customer scenarios).
Teach/Lecture – Top 2-3 best practices of one targeted sales skill (5 min)
Strong Real/Role Play – Use sales reps real customer scenarios (15 min)
Q&A, Feedback, and Plan next week’s sales skill focus (5 min)
PRACTICE = PROFITS! 25 min x 50 work weeks = 20 hours of annual sales skills training!
Embedding sales training into normal workflows is a sure bet to increasing the team’s motivation and engagement. And why not? Elite sales performers understand that perfect practice makes perfect!
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