Blog

Coaching the Best - The Philosophy

In every field of endeavor, a philosophy (set of attitudes/beliefs) drives the system (people, processes, tools and skills).  It affects the hearts of its listeners.  It brings staying strength to action.  It reinforces confidence in the system as THE structure to embrace for greatness .  It puts purpose and meaning into work.  It inspires. 

For great sales managers who coach well, their coaching philosophy forms early, even at home.  It takes shape from those mentors or authority fiqures whom they allow to shape their thinking.  The list of possible influencers include parents, teachers, team coaches, and bosses at work.

As thoughts form, attitudes and beliefs emerge, and behaviors turn into habits which produce results.  For example, some coaches believe that people cannot be trusted and they micromanage processes.  Others do not believe in the coaching role at all and believe that people will succeed or fail despite their intervention - so they stay away.  Some sales managers believe that people do better when they are afraid.  As a result, they brow beat their salespeople and work to create an atmosphere of fear and control.

When we think of these examples, it’s easy to see how a sales manager’s attitudes and beliefs motivate or empower their sales system.  Their philosophy drives how they install their system and either moves its acceptance and effectiveness toward or away from greatness.  Consequently, their attitudes and beliefs make all the difference in their team’s sales production.  Salespeople leave, flourish, or become demoralized as a result of the created sales culture.  It also attracts or repels great performers.

The attitudes and beliefs of the coach form the spirit of a sales organization.  This ‘spiritual effect’ begins its work during recruitment decisions and continues into employment.

The cultural effects are obvious.  Sales teams operate out of a fearful spirit while others are courageous.  Some are honest and some are not.  Some believe in serving others - some do not.  Some are creative and innovative while others wait for orders from the manager.  We also see more salespeople make confident and winning moves In the heat of the moment or we see them quit in defeat. 

We see these same effects working within the sporting teams we love.  Players operate fearlessly or fearfully.  They believe in themselves or they do not.  How many of us have every witnessed a Little League baseball team or a youth soccer team that was under-performing simply because of the coach?  Most of us.  I’ve even seen the same team lose one year under one coach and excel the next year under a different coach.  Same team.  Different coach.  It was once said about Bear Bryant, the former and late Alabama football coach, that, “Bear could beat your team on one Saturday, and then take your team and turn around and beat his team the next Saturday!”

So, what are the attitudes and beliefs that great coaches accept into their thinking?  How do they get people to reach inside themselves for extra effort, ingenuity, and creativity - to hit a ball to right field, to make extra sales calls, to develop new strategies, or to cold call?  What are the most important attitudes and beliefs that define great coaching?

Here’s what I found from a study of coaches with three (3) national championships or more.  After reading autobiographies, biographies, news clips, player remarks, and videos, the following consistencies emerged.  The top seven (7) attitudes and beliefs for coaching teams to greatness are ..

Great coaches ...
1.  Care about their people and demonstrate this by paying attention to player needs and progress.
2.  Believe that their people have what it takes to get their jobs and goals accomplished. Faith is demonstrated and communicated.
3.  Define success as giving your best for the benefit of others and striving each day to get better. (While goals are important, the effort to reach them is more important.  They make their players responsible for effort applied in the right places.)
4.  Individualize their coaching approach because they know their people as unique persons with different motivations and skill levels.
5.  Teach that the team is more important than the individual.
6.  Expect people to get better - and those expectancies are specific and communicated.
7.  Focus on the process and not on winning.

These attitudes and beliefs describe a winning philosophy - one that wins for sales teams, families, and even churches.  And, they can be caught.  Now, go out and catch them.  Lance.

The Value of a Salesperson’s Time

How much do you aspire to make next year?  50,000, 100,000, 200,000??

For the sake of an example, let’s use 100,000.  You can adjust the example for your situation.  If you work 2000 hours a year (40 hours per week), you will earn $50 per hour.  Every hour that completes itself contributes the most cherished component of a salesperson’s day - time.

For high activity salespeople, with sales cycles, from initial contact to close, is 90 days or less ...
How do you handle interruptions to sales time?  How does your world interrupt your selling time.  How much of your day do you spend either in front of someone or fighting to get in front of someone?  How much of your day is spent idle?  How much of your day do you react to things rather than schedule them?  How much of your day do you spend prospecting or selling in a face-to-face meeting in order to achieve your sales goal?  And, finally ... how much of your day is spent maximizing the amount of time you spend face-to-face in front of prospects?

And, for major accounts’ sales teams, with sales cycles of 90 days and up, even 2 years or more ...
How much of your time is spent thinking about strategies?  How much of your time involves getting other peoples’ input into next steps?  How much time do you put into writing and rewriting emails, approach letters, responses to questions, powerpoints, etc.?  How much of your time is spent finding ways to get the next important advance accomplished - one that moves the sale another degree in your favor?  In other words, how do you structure your sales time to plan out the next thing to do with the right person(s) at the right time - then do the sales action - and then review your account positioning to plan out the next thing to do, etc. etc. etc.?  Plan - Do - Review, Plan - Do - Review.

For a salesperson, whether high activity or major accounts, time is valuable.  It may be used differently - it’s still valuable.  With 2000 hours in a year, one hundred thousand dollars is earned one hour at a time ... $50 dollars an hour. 

And, once gone, a salesperson cannot recover time - it’s gone - $50 or more each and every hour - burned up by waste or good intentions or a lack of understanding

At $100,000 a year - $50 an hour
At $200,000 a year - $100 an hour

How many sales do you need to make to earn $100,000?  $200,000 ... $300,000
Divide the number of sales in a year by 2000 hours in a year and you know the number of hours available for each sale.

For example, a cellular salesperson for some companies must make 1000 sales in a year to earn $100,000.
1000 sales ÷ 2000 hours = 1 sale every 2 hours (lots of face-to-face time in a week)

In some firms, a commercial real estate broker must make 10 sales in a year to earn $200,000 ...
10 sales ÷ 2000 hours = 1 sale every 200 hours (200 hours mostly made up of planning and reviewing before doing a prospecting or face-to-face activity)

So, do you value your time at $50 or more per hour?  Do you realize that what you do with time is having a dramatic effect on your family’s security or well being, or your achievement, or your security, or the recognition you receive, or just your ability to do your duty - to achieve a minimum sales amount for your company?

Remember these tips ...
- Every meeting does not need to be an hour long.
- Do not automatically say yes to any use of time.
- Every email does not instantaneously need to be responded to or even read.
- The use of the Internet needs to improve your sales during sales time.
- When someone wants to talk with you for “30 sec,” do you just react and by your actions say, “Yes?”
- Schedule more of your day calendar into blocks of productive time.
- Block out time to find new opportunities (lead generation) and time to prospect them on the phone.
- Block out appointment time for face-to-face sales calls.
- Block out time for important strategy sessions (major accounts)
................
We often forget about our most valuable sales asset - time.  The activity trap of multiple tasks, sensory lures, and interruptions get us off track.  Let’s stop the cycle or at least begin the process of slowing it down now.  You can do it.  Keep remembering at the end of the day, and the year, what’s important - really important, and change.  Get better.  Lance.

The Wisdom of an Ant

What can salespeople learn from an ant?  What knowledge can we find in its ways?  Common varieties are only 1/4 to 1/8 of an inch long.  What could we possibly learn from this insignificant creature of the earth?

Plenty.

Some years for us provide economic strength.  Others do not.  Several years may pass before this planet’s people live with greater prosperity.  What does this mean for a salesperson and activity management.  What does this mean for money management or goal achievement?

Salespeople work to achieve sales goals - personal goals - for income needs.  Some days, weeks, and months are better than others.  Like the ant, the math in our closing rates works out over time if we stay consistent in our work ethic - in our sales activities.  This is where the ant’s story fits in ...

The ant just continues to work.  It really isn’t affected by moods or a lack of caffeine or even bank rates. Ants manage their activities as if their survival was in danger.

A wise man once said, “ Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!  It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.”

Ants don’t need managers.  They gather food when they need to gather food.  All other activities make way for harvesting the food and storing it as provisions for winter.  What if we worked in that way? What % of a sales team’s weekly work hours would be spent face-to-face with a prospect or fighting to get in front of a prospect - 50 - 60 - 75%?  For many sales teams, it’s 10% or less!

And, what happens when a sales team or salesperson gets ahead of goal?  Many slow down.  Yes.  They slow down.  Very few continue to work just as hard in the time remaining.  Most ease up away from making additional sales and storing their extra commissions in a savings account.

So, consider the ant the next time you see sales declining or inclining ... and keep on keepin on.  If you think about it, with the right salespeople, sales managers are only needed to help them work smart ... not to help them work. Be better.  You can.  Lance.

Personal Responsibility - A Crucial Character Trait

What does it mean to be a ‘good’ salesperson?  How do you find one?  What do you look for?  Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, says that his team’s research found that great companies recruit character first - before skills.

After twenty years of mistakes and successes, and after helping recruit and coach thousands of salespeople, we have discovered personal responsibility to be a crucial character trait to hire for ... along with honesty and hard work ethic.  Doing this improves efficiency and the culture. Salespeople with this character trait require less maintenance and management time.

If we can teach you to recruit someone who behaves in a personally responsible way, then you will find a salesperson who feels an obligation (in life) to act correctly - with or without oversight.  You will find their past to be a mirror of independent and accountable behavior.  When doing sales work, and left to themselves, a personally responsible salesperson remains dutiful and protective of what is expected.  They do their job.

Whatever you are, be a good one.  Abraham Lincoln

‘Personal’ responsibility also means that a salesperson respects and acts on obligations.  It’s kind of like honesty applied to duties. Responsible performance is held close to the heart.  That’s why it’s personal.  A salesperson with a responsible nature highly values commitments.  It’s actually a part of their makeup as a person. 

To employ salespeople, who live out this trait as a part of their core values, impacts the peace of mind of a sales manager.  That’s because, with or without management presence, a salesperson will do their best to do the work that is placed in their care.

Great salespeople work in a reliable and dependable manner.  They keep on keeping on with doing what their role demands of them. Sales managers who recruit for personal responsibility build strength into their culture - strength displayed in customer service, follow up, and promises kept, internally and externally to the company.

How does this trait affect failure and low performance?  How do the best salespeople react to low numbers?  Responsible salespeople accept blame for less that stellar activity, behavior, or sales results. They accept coaching. They may have to be convinced of their culpability, but when persuaded, they take ownership and work hard to correct themselves and the situation.

Here’s a good structured question to ask. “What are the top three things that motivate you in order of priority?” (Award 3 points if people or a person or a personal motivation is somewhere in the top three.  Award 0 points if they do not have any motivation toward helping or benefitting another person.)

Honesty, hard work ethic, and personal responsibility - crucial character traits.  Learn to screen and interview well for these traits.  Pass and do not hire someone when your intuition warns you - even if the skills are present. Your focus on the mature aspects of a person will mean much to the future of your sales organization, your company, and its customers.  Do great.  Recruit and coach well.  Lance.

Honesty - A Crucial Character Trait

When recruiting great salespeople, hire character first.  And, do you know what character trait is more important than all the others?  Honesty. Yes, honesty. The number one character trait to recruit for is honesty followed by hard work and personal responsibility. 

Honesty is nonnegotiable and must be present for you, the coach, to turn your back and leave things unattended.  It is difficult and just about impossible to coach this trait.  Recruit for it.

The degree of honesty impacts reporting accuracy.  A salesperson who embraces the facts, despite the brutality of them, willingly faces the truth.  This person wants to know their progress numbers toward personal goal achievement.  They do not want to kid themselves or their coaches or managers.  They must know where they are relative to where they need to be and they do not mind if others know.

Honesty brings clarity into a salesperson’s goals and progress toward them.  It keeps what’s important ... important.  It increases the emotional attachment to motivating circumstances.  With reality brightly shining on skills, habits, goal achievement progress, and past behaviors, the ease of future adjustments increase.  A person grows stronger - gets better.

Honest words are sometimes painful, but said kindly and with concern, they free a person for greater improvement.  Honest discussions pave the way for sales training and a more peaceful future.

A very wise man once said, “An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips.”

Obviously, honesty impacts customer satisfaction during a face-to-face sales call.  Does the customer discover that a salesperson behaves with honest intent?  Is the sale made with truthful evidence and testimony?  Will the salesperson protect a company’s branded image by steering away from fraud or deceit? These are crucial questions and the impact of handling a customer’s trust will have lasting impressions upon corporate profit.

Honesty sewn within a person’s makeup also makes a statement during normal day-to-day coworker interactions.  An honest salesperson shows up for work on time.  Service personnel can count on the promises that the salesperson makes.

With honor present, salespeople trust each other.  Management can count on sincerity being present in exchanges in communication.  Everyone can operate in a well lit operation of straightforward talk. And, of course, all money is accounted for and in the right places.

One question that’s interesting to ask in a structured interview is, “ Which of these traits is the most important one for the type of sales we do?  Persistence, Self-Discipline, Honesty, or Hard Worth Ethic?  (Award 5 points only if the candidate says that Honesty is most important.  Award 0 points for any other answer.)

How would you respond? 

Honesty, hard work ethic, and personal responsibility.  These are important and related character traits.  Recruit for them first and personality traits (goal-orientation, social confidence, etc.) last.  The culture you build by recruiting with this focus will make all the difference.  Now, go and get better.  You can.  Lance.

Hard Work - A Crucial Character Trait

Great salespeople work hard.  And, along with honesty and personal responsibility toward others, hard work is an essential character trait found in top sales performers.  When we recruit well, background checks, resumes, and other screening and interviewing skills focus on the discovery of this trait.

All hard work provides a profit to a salesperson. Why? ... sometimes work doesn’t produce a sale.  Even so, continuing to work hard strengthens approach methods, presentation skills, and other types of sales muscle.  It also keeps people ‘alive’ and connected to hope as the perseverance they show improves their character.

A salesperson who slows down their work over any time period will see decreases in sales and sales strength.  First, the number of prospects and opportunities they find begin to lessen, then the number of appointments decrease.  This decreases the number of presentations and quotes and finally it impacts sales revenue.  This low activity begins to erode their sales skills and instincts as the number of sales opportunities decrease.  Just like a ship that stays at harbor, the barnacles of misuse corrode their skills.  They rust.

When someone slows down or changes into a “slacker,” they often become a brother to someone who tears down a sales team.  Unproductive people look for something to take the place of their idle hands.  When they stop working, one behavior they turn to is gossip.  Slackers talk about how bad things are and about the faults of their leaders.  Their words and their sluggard work demeanor influence those around them.  So, whether they realize it or not, they begin the work of tearing down what’s around them instead of building it up.

We’ve all seen the effects of lazy salespeople - low sales, bad morale, etc.  Recently, a sales team described a lack of hard work as ... misuse of time leading to poor time management, less energy, lack of passion, gossip, excuses, pity parties, and an inability to find or get results out of opportunities.  They actually refuse to work hard.

(Note: There is nothing better than to find satisfaction in your work - to strive against the grain of mediocre production - to enjoy your work and to fight for the benefit of others.  My dad many times while we were growing up said, “I don’t care what you do ... I don’t care if you’re a ditch digger, just be the best ______ditch digger you can be.”)

When screening candidates, look for ‘hard work’ evidence in their background and resumes.

For example, if you looked into the background of my oldest son, you would find that for eight years he got up at four in the morning to develop his swimming abilities.  Or, if you talked with my business partner, you would find that he picked potatoes for years prior to college.  In other words, look for periods of time where the candidate had to sacrifice something for long periods of time in order to provide for or better themselves.  There can also be instances where this trait is learned through the expectations of the candidate’s family growing up.

Here’s one question to ask during a structured interview, “Please tell me about a time in your life when you had to sacrifice in order to achieve something important.  What did you sacrifice?  Why? (Award maximum of 5 points only if candidate mentions something notable, and that time was sacrificed and work effort was expended, and if the candidate explains the motivation as the need to achieve, win, provide for others, or reach a goal.) x no. of pts

Find salespeople who want to work hard - who want to be productive.  If you do, coaching their success becomes easier, and you, as a manager, look smart.  Finally, make sure that they are people who are honest and take personal responsibility for their actions and obligations.  Lance.