Coaching

The Greatest Sales Managers Coach the Best…

Coaching ranks next in the development and production of a great sales team. Today, for various reasons, the character strengths of most salespeople develop in their late twenties if they develop at all. This partially stems from a loss in the family structure in America. As a result, necessary character strengths have not fully developed in new recruits. Some of these are commitment through adversity, hard work ethic, service attitudes, and team orientation. Many young people today lose hope easily, do not work toward dreams, quit when it’s not easy going, etc. Also, even talented people can get off track and lose focus. Consequently, while coaching has always been important, it now takes on a closer and more personal dimension.

Coach the Best Philosophy

In our study of coaches with three world championships or more, a common set of attitudes and beliefs surrounded successful coaching. When applied to sales, they are as follows. We believe that success is taught as giving your best for the benefit of others and striving to do better every day. We believe that our salespeople have what it takes. When we stop believing this we part ways with them – kindly and directly.

We believe that a salesperson must know that a sales manager cares about him as a person. And, we believe that while goals are important – what’s more important is knowing that you gave everything to the day-to-day struggle in pursuit of them.

Coach the Best System: Process, Tools, and Skills

The best coaches in American pay attention to three important areas that interact with each other. Within these areas, they use a set of tools and skills that make their coaching more effective. This system, driven by the attitudes and belief shown above, build a high-performance sales team.

The Process Areas

Knowing each of your salespeople well begins in the recruiting process as you learn about their motivators and personalities. It continues as you meet with them one-on-one and work on their goals and sales plan. Great sales managers manage their unique salespeople within the following processes: sales planning for goal achievement, day-to-day activity management, and face-to-face prospect interactions. And, teams form and keep individuals on track as sales managers work to strengthen alliances and conduct high-performance weekly sales meetings.

The Tools

What set of tools will help a good sales manager become great? Here are a few of them … Coaching Information Sheets, Coaching Profiles, Online Sales Activity Funnel (see Salesactivities.com), Sales Boards, Face-to-Face Sales Process, and High-Performance Sales Meetings.

The Skills

Great sales managers learn how to read the unique traits and needs of each person they coach. This knowledge grows as they work with a person. They acquire part of this knowledge during the recruiting process through personality profiles and indepth interviews. Consequently, they customize their coaching approach to each person.

Other skills within a great coaching system include:

• Coaching the development of goal achievement plans
• Developing and managing an activity management process
• Creating and teaching the skills within a face-to-face sales process
• Brainstorming strategies for major account sales
• Analyzing activities and developing sales boards
• Leading high-performance sales meetings
• Teaching skills within a face-to-face sales process
• Developing presentation templates
• Counseling people one-on-one
• Developing teamwork
• Inspiring people

Coach the Best Installation

We want to help you create a coaching culture - the philosophy and system that leads to building a great sales culture. We want to help you establish a tradition of excellent incomes for your salespeople. We want to help you reach great levels of sales production. We want to help you build a team that leaves a legacy for future generations. We install our philosophy and system in three stages:

1. Preparation
2. Delivery
3. Follow Up

Each stage builds on the progress of the previous stage. The stages provide for an overall strategy to achieve better coaching results.

We prepare for delivery by providing a coaching questionnaire to each sales manager. We also help sales managers identify areas for development with the use of self-assessments and sales management testing profiles.. Then, we profile existing salespeople. With this information, we customize a company’s Coach the Best system and the delivery process.

In two days, we train managers and in-house trainers to understand and practice the Coach the Best system (see the above sections). Everyone learns how to utilize a coaching system - its processes, tools, and skills - to coach salespeople into better teamwork and improved production.

To insure that sales managers grow into new and better habits, we design and install a follow up process that lasts from 4 weeks to 6 months. We determine the length and breadth of this follow up process based on a company’s size and its coaching challenges. During this time and afterwards, everyone measures the productivity and retention impact of improved coaching.

We want you to contact us for further information. Please go to the contact portion of our site and send us information about your coaching challenges. We will read these and schedule a time to discuss them with you. Thank you.