Manager-led coaching Archives

Are you an Ultimate Sales Leader yet?

Deepti Sundareshan on March 1, 2018

As a sales manager, you have a big impact on the success of each member of your team, and your team knows it.

Research has shown that 69% of salespeople who exceed quota rate their sales manager as ‘excellent’ or ‘above average’. While it’s great to be recognized, ultimate sales leaders don’t do it for the glory, they live to inspire their team to achieve greatness and know how to push all the right buttons to help them succeed.

While most good sales leaders have high-achieving teams, they have a lot more in common. Here are some of the sales leader traits that make the difference between being good and being an ultimate sales leader.

Lead for the long-term

No sales team is successful based on one deal. A good sales team requires a long-term and strategic approach and it’s up to their sales leader to provide the big picture. Great sales leaders develop a sales playbook with vision and makes sure there team follows it to achieve their end goal. The playbook looks at every aspect of the sales process, from prospecting to closing and communicates a clear plan on how they will achieve it.

While any manager can write a playbook, what separates great leaders is their ability to set the vision, communicate it and follow through. They don’t chop and change their mind or confuse their team. They communicate the plan clearly and make sure everyone understands what it means for them and for their customers. They also define clear development plans for their people and deliver on them.

After all, sales are only successful if the customer wins, and ultimate sales leaders know this and make sure the customer is front and center of their vision.

Be motivated by the end goal

Sales is a numbers game and the best sales leaders never allow their team to take their eye off the prize – achieving target. To achieve the sales leader may have to put themselves in a position where they absorb any noise, distractions, and negativity that may bring their team down. They’re good listeners and know how to remove roadblocks or just lend an ear when a salesperson needs to vent.

What sets an ultimate sales leader apart is their ability to know when to step in and fix something, and when to let it go. This requires good judgment and an understanding of what things can actually make a difference to sales results, and what are just irritations that are having minimal impact.

Hire the right people

Nothing wastes more time than hiring the wrong salesperson.That’s why good sales leaders take the time to recruit the right people and onboard them properly. There’s no time for bad recruits or sales reps that are struggling to ramp up in a high-achieving sales organization.

Hiring the right people is a skill. You can’t just look at someone’s CV and know they’re perfect for the job. It takes good judgment and instinct to know whether someone has the skill to build strong relationships and help customers find the right solution. Great sales leaders know how to spot someone who can close a deal or know when to fold and move on to better opportunities.

They can also identify potential where others may not notice. This means they don’t spend countless hours, weeks and months trying to get a salesperson to quota when they just don’t have the capability to make it. They can then devote their energies to other tasks that will make a difference when it comes to helping their salespeople achieve success.

Coach with passion

Salespeople are hungry to sell and have a thirst for anything that will help them do it better. Ultimate sales leaders not only know this, but they know how to tap into this desire and help their salespeople channel it. One of the best ways to improve how reps sell is to take them on a journey of discovery and learning about their profession through mentoring and coaching. In fact, dynamic coaching can improve win rates by up to 27.6%.

Structured coaching helps salespeople improve how they approach customers, manage their sales funnel and close deals. But to really make a difference, sales leaders need to customize their coaching programs to meet the individual needs of each sales rep. After all, different reps need different types of coaching. An astute sales leader will determine the best approach for the individual and adapt their coaching plan for it, whether it’s going out to sales calls with them or scenario-based coaching.

Ultimate sales leaders know that coaching is good for their team, but they also are passionate about it. They embrace the opportunity to tap into the needs of each rep and build a cadence for sales coaching. This allows ultimate sales leaders to build momentum and ensure their sales team grows and prospers.

Empower everyone through accountability

75% of high-performing sales managers hold their salespeople accountable for their quota, compared to 58% of underperforming managers. But it takes a lot more than tracking your sales reps quotas to make them accountable.

Great sales leaders strive to achieve consistency in all aspects of the sales team, from following process to the message that customers hear. They do this by empowering their team through data and process.

Research shows that 43% of high-performing sales managers have a sales process that’s closely monitored, strictly enforced, or automated, compared to 29% of underperforming sales managers.

The key to keeping a sales team accountable is in the data. They set transparent performance criteria and use this to monitor and assess their team. There are no surprises, but there’s also no room for ambiguity.

Ultimate sales leaders don’t focus on lagging reports, they’re driven by data that shows them what their reps are doing today and how they can improve tomorrow. This information can then be used to both improve and inspire reps by identifying knowledge and skill gaps before they become problems and rewarding achievements straight away.

Empowering and rewarding reps is important for accountability. It keeps high performers accountable for their achievements, gives them control over their own development, and puts a fire in the belly of the laggards who also want their peers to see their name in lights.

Listen and communicate with care

Last but certainly not least, a true leader cares about the welfare of their charges. They don’t want to take the glory for themselves, they want each individual to learn, improve and for them to succeed together. By demonstrating that they care about their team, ultimate sales leaders gain the respect and trust of their reps. This helps them open up and be honest about their concerns and fears. With this knowledge, sales leaders can then help their reps become even better at selling.

The reality is that ultimate sales leaders don’t spend their time sitting behind a desk and watching the sales come in. They’re part of the team and in the trenches with their salespeople. Whenever a shot is fired they’re there – leading the way and giving them the support they need to win each and every battle.

It’s the Year of the Coach

Ryan Pimlott on February 28, 2018

Coaching is at the top of everyone’s minds at the moment – for good reason. A good coach can help more salespeople achieve quota by up to 10% and when you combine training and coaching, sales productivity also increases.

With these results, it’s no surprise that everyone is jumping on the coaching bandwagon, but not all coaching impactful.
According to the International Coaching Federation, coaching is:

“An interactive process to help individuals and organizations develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results; improving other’s ability to set goals, take action, make better decisions and make full use of their natural strengths.”

Impactful coaching focuses on the needs of your reps and helps them improve how they approach different parts of the sales process or their customers. The results from impactful coaching go straight to your topline revenue.

Managers that are not impactful fail to move the needle on reps’ behavior and/or their performance. They just don’t have the skills required of a coach – perhaps they’re doing less coaching and more telling or controlling. Reps’ learn little from being told what they’re doing wrong, impactful coaching is a collaborative way to help them learn how to improve how they sell. Sometimes coaching is ineffective because managers just aren’t doing it properly — perhaps they’re just ticking a box or scoring their team more favorably in coaching exercises due to bias or even apathy.

It is possible to turn ineffective coaches into impactful ones, but in order to do that, you need to identify who is actually ineffective. Every sales manager is different, and short of watching every coaching session, it can be difficult to objectively know whether they’re making a difference to their reps’ performance. To do this you require data – but not just any data – the right data.

Identifying whether sales coaches are ineffective or impactful

The Sales Capability Index™ (SCI) is an index that has been developed by Mindtickle, which provides a capabilities score that, for the first time in the industry, provides a holistic, quantified assessment of sales rep and team readiness while also producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.

Essentially, the SCI provides a holistic, quantified assessment of individual sales reps and a manager’s entire team’s sales readiness. This is then linked to their performance, producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.

The SCI combines not only coaching but also knowledge and skill, so you can see what’s really impacting performance and what’s not. For example, if you’ve just launched a new product, coaching program, competitor series or other sales enablement initiatives to your sales team, you can see what elements have had an impact and by looking at scores before and after.

The score gives you a high level of conviction about how prepared your sales teams are and identify what initiatives are making an impact and what aren’t. It will also give you an indication of whether coaching (or other initiatives) are likely to impact your sales results so you can predict revenue more accurately.

As the data can be broken down by individual and by team, you can also see whether individual sales managers are coaching effectively – are they making a difference to the sales outcomes or not. This brings issues with sales manager’s coaching abilities to the surface, so they can be addressed long before the quarter or year is lost.

Coaching is only effective if it drives a business outcome. There is no point having your management team spend hours each week coaching reps if your top line revenue doesn’t grow. By using this data, coaching can be directly linked to real outcomes.

The same data can be used for most sales enablement initiatives. So if you launch a new product you can also look at the curriculum that was delivered to reps and assess whether it’s helped them sell or not. This helps you measure your enablement initiatives and identify where they need to be adjusted to make a real impact on your sales teams.

Coaching needs to have specific criteria for maximum effectiveness

In order to be effective, sales managers also need to know what to coach. No rep needs to be developed in every aspect of the sales process, but trying to find what they need help with isn’t always clear-cut.

By breaking down down the entire sales process and connecting each step with the enablement data that you have, you can look at sales competencies across each stage. This shows you exactly where a rep or a sales manager may need help.

The chart below gives you an example that shows you a rep that is able to explore opportunities and manage objections well, but perhaps needs help upselling and in call scheduling. The data pinpoints exactly where opportunities fail and evaluates qualitatively and quantitatively what competencies are needed at that specific stage.

This level of granularity allows managers to do tactical coaching and allows you to identify whether sales managers have skewed competencies. It gets to the heart of the issue and allows you to hone in on what needs to be done.

When looking at your sales team as a whole, it means you can identify if there is consistency across how teams are coached or if managers are perhaps playing to their strengths to the detriment of their team’s performance.

This kind of data has the potential to be a game changer. It can help identify bias in coaching performance and gives you the opportunity to address it objectively.

Empowering end users

A final way to improve impactful coaching across your sales teams is to give users the ability to approve or disapprove coaching feedback. Rather than just letting the sales managers have a say about how a coaching session went, let the reps tell you if they felt the session made a difference to them. This data can also be telling, because if your reps don’t feel like they’re benefitting from their coaching sessions, then it may be symptomatic of a broader problem – either with your coaching program or with individual coaches.

We all have so many tools in our sales stack, each providing an array of data. While it’s nice to have these numbers at our fingertips, they’re irrelevant if they can’t tell you how to improve your sales outcomes. After all, who has time to look through every data point available to them and work out what they’re saying.

For the Year of the Coach to make a real difference to your sales outcomes, you need to ensure that you have access to data that clearly and succinctly helps you link your coaching plans to your sales outcomes like the SCI does.

Sales Managers’ Guide to Bridging the Training Gap between Mavens and Rookies

Deepti Sundareshan on February 7, 2018

As a sales manager, one of your many challenges is continuously developing different sales reps. The needs of reps who are relatively new to the job are very different to that of seasoned reps, as is their attitude to development. While your newbies may be thirsty for knowledge and ideas, it can be harder to bring a veteran salesperson along on the ride with you. And while an experienced rep may hit the ground running, but they may not be able to sustain improvement in their sales results over time unless they overcome their reluctance to change.

In the past, it may have been alright to leave veterans to their own devices, but now the velocity of change in products, consumer buying behaviors and industry dynamics are just too quick to leave development in reps’ own hands. Your rookies and mavens must both be constantly on the ball. To achieve this they must be open to learning, developing and changing their behavior. There are several things that you can do to help bridge the training gap between your mavens and rookies.

Understand who you’re working with

Before you can determine how to approach your reps, it’s essential to understand where they are on the development curve. While years of experience may be an indicator of expertize, it isn’t necessarily the best one.

The best way to tell a pro salesperson from a novice is through observation. Experienced reps know how to get under the skin of a customer’s problem and present them with solutions that best address their needs. They can create a strategy even for the most complex of sales processes, that will see them through preparing for customer meetings to the demonstration of closing the sale. At each stage in the process, a seasoned rep will know how to adjust their game plan, question the customer in more depth, envisage the result and nurture the opportunity to completion. This takes vision, preparation, and skill.

In comparison, a rookie may be uncertain or less organized in their approach. Their lack of experience may see them missing crucial opportunities to uncover customer pain points or suggest appropriate solutions. While newbies may be good at following a sales process, that doesn’t mean they can see the end point and adjust to new circumstances as they arise. Following a process is simple, preparing and reacting to the unknown takes experience.

As you observe your reps, note areas where they have skill gaps that require development. This will then form part of their development plan.

Tailor development plans to meet the needs of your reps

Once you know who you’re dealing with you can start putting together a development plan for them. The key to helping both mavens and rookies get to where you need them to be is to tailor development to meet their needs.

While your standard onboarding process may go through the basics of selling, this may bore and potentially make your seasoned reps tune out. As soon as someone tunes out of your training program it’s very hard to regain their attention, even if something is relevant to them later down the track. That’s why it’s important to tailor development and training from the get-go, starting with your onboarding program.

Newbies will need to cover everything, from your sales process to who everyone in the sales process is. But your new seasoned reps may already know the basics of selling so focus on showing them your points of difference. Highlight the aspects of your sales process that are unique to your business, provide them with training on how to use the tools in your stack that they’ve never seen before and of course focus in on the nitty-gritty of your product. Even if they’ve worked in the industry before, your product is unique and every new sales rep will need to learn the finer points of your solution to sell effectively.

A good place to start developing an ongoing individual training and coaching plan is the skill gaps you identified when you observed your reps in practice. Regardless of whether your reps are new to sales or have been selling for decades, it’s best to customize training to meet their individual needs. If your newbies need more help articulating your value proposition then focus on role plays to coach them. Whereas your seasoned reps may need more help moving prospects through the sales pipeline, so focus in on techniques like gathering case studies and success stories to help them get prospects closer to closing.

A common technique to support new hires is to provide them with a mentor. While this may be a great idea for a rookie, because they can learn from a more experienced rep, a maven may find it a tad condescending. Rather than giving them a mentor, offer your seasoned reps the opportunity to meet with the A players on your team and hear their thoughts on the business. They can then connect with peers on the same level.

Show benefits and gain buy-in

Any adult who is being trained needs to understand what’s in it for them before they will embrace change. Relatively new sales reps may be a little more open to training because they understand how they will benefit – if they’ve never done something before they know they have a lot to learn. But it’s important to still show them the benefits of what they’re learning.

For seasoned reps, it’s no different, they need to know what the benefits to them will be, and this may be harder to show them. But if you want them to accept your coaching then they need to understand how coaching them on using competitive insights will help them reach their quota.

One way to help someone overcome resistance to training is to understand why they’re reluctant to learn – perhaps they’ve done training sessions before and it didn’t help them. If that’s the case then you may need to understand what their past experiences were and how your proposed development plan is different.

Another way to bring people on board with your training program is to get their buy-in. This can be used for both rookies and mavens. Ask them what areas they would like to develop and how they believe it will benefit them. The training then becomes their idea, not yours, and will help them commit to it.

Make them accountable

There’s no point training anyone if you don’t clear expectations and defined goals. Everyone involved in the training should be held accountable for the outcomes, not just the reps. This creates a team environment – you’re all in it together – and makes it easier to have enforceable consequences if someone starts slipping into old habits. This approach works for everyone, seasoned reps, and newbies because everyone needs to know what they’re shooting for.

Where it may differ between the two groups of reps is in terms of how you monitor and enforce behaviors. Micro-managing isn’t all that effective for anyone, but a new rep may be more open to hand-holding through the training process than a pro rep. If they’ve never sold before then they may find it useful for you to break down their goals further – rather than just showing them their monthly quota show them what that means in terms of the number of calls, meetings, and demos.

It may be a lot more difficult to get your more experienced reps to put their new skills into practice. Even if you’ve shown them the benefits and gained their buy-in they may need more coaxing to truly see the value in the skills. If talking them through it doesn’t work, try showing them the value by giving them hard facts. Measure the difference in their performance before and after they use the skills to demonstrate how it will impact their performance. This will not only demonstrate the value of the learning but may also encourage them to adopt the new skills faster.

If this still doesn’t work, make them accountable by putting in place hard consequences if they don’t put their new skills into practice. This shows them that you’re serious about behavioral change and lets them choose between playing ball or facing the music. It will soon become clear whether they’re committed to their own development or want to stay stuck in the past.

The reality is that no two sales reps are the same, so it makes sense to tailor training programs to meet their needs. Thanks to new sales readiness tools, it’s easier to create customized training paths and help reps, regardless of their experience levels, to learn new tricks.

6 Ways Sales Managers can Make Time for Coaching

Deepti Sundareshan on February 1, 2018

As a manager, there is so much to do and never enough time. Research has found that sales managers spend just 32% of their time managing their team and only part of that is spent coaching.

To make the most of your time prioritization is key – and the top priority for any salesperson is their targets. So it follows that any task that helps your team reach its targets should be at the top of your list.
According to CSO Insights almost half of the businesses they studied left coaching up to sales managers. The same study found that quota attainment was only 53.4% when left up to managers, but this improved by over 10% when a dynamic approach to coaching was implemented and win rates increased by 27.9%. Coaching does make a significant difference in sales performance, so it’s imperative that you find time to do it.
So how do you find more time to coach when you’ve still got to do all this other work? Here are 6 ways that you can find more time in your week.

1. Look at what you’re reporting

We have access to so much data now that it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of metrics and reports. Take a look at the reports that you generate and review each week. How many actually give you or others information that can impact the performance of your sales team? If some of the reporting and analysis that you’re doing doesn’t have a direct link to meeting quotas, giving your reps more selling time or improving your ability to make decisions, then it may be time to stop doing it.

2. Give your meetings an overhaul

Meetings are a fact of life in any business, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be productive. Take an objective look at every regular meeting that you have scheduled in your diary and see if there are any that perhaps you don’t need to attend or can delegate. For those that are important and actually add some value to you or your team, consider whether they can be more efficient. Could you cut the meeting time in half with a clear agenda or pre-reading?

3. Control technology don’t let it control you

Many of us are slaves to technology. Every time we hear a ping we have to drop what we’re doing and check our email or pick up our phone. The reality is that most things aren’t urgent or don’t require our immediate attention but they are very distracting. Take back control of your time by turning off your phone or WiFi for blocks of time so you can concentrate on specific tasks. Alternatively, you could allocate a couple of times a day to check your emails and messages rather than having a look every time something new is in your inbox.
If your inbox is becoming quite overwhelming you can also use tools or apps to manage your messages. Color code your messages and move them to different mailboxes so that you can then look at them when you need to.

4. Use your calendar to your advantage

Do you schedule regular one-on-one’s with your team? Even if you manage a remote team, you can book in regular calls with each of your team members. This means your coaching sessions will be planned and become part of your daily or weekly routine. By having the time scheduled you also demonstrate to your team how important coaching is to you. A good tip is to set up coaching sessions first thing in the morning before you and your reps become distracted with other things.
Customer visits are another important task that you can schedule in each week. This not only ensures you get out and meet customers regularly but also gives you the opportunity to observe your sales reps in action so that you can give them immediate coaching and feedback.

5. Say no

Just because someone asks you to do something doesn’t mean that you have to do it. While saying “no” doesn’t come naturally to many people, it’s important to say it sometimes, particularly when you’re asked to do something that doesn’t add value or isn’t important. Otherwis, you may risk becoming overwhelmed by a growing to-do list that isn’t helping your team sell more.

6. Set achievable goals

Write to-do lists and actually set small goals to work through it. Perhaps allocate one crucial task that’s a priority each week. This means you can slowly chip away at your to-do list and actually get some of the most important tasks done slowly but surely.
If it helps you can use tools that list tasks, prioritize them for you or allocate them to days or weeks. Tools like Asana or Trello let you keep track of things that you want to do and allocate them into the future.
By following some or all of these tips you can take control over your to-do list and calendar and create time to coach your team. As coaching becomes an integral part of your schedule, you will also start to see a difference in the performance of your team.

[Podcast] How Focus can Increase Your Sales Team Performance – Episode 26

Shrimithran R on January 31, 2018

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>
In this 25 minute podcast Steve explains:

What makes a great sales team
How sales enablement needs differ within sales teams and how technology can help address this
How Kaizen can be applied to sales teams to improve their productivity

“Whatever type of sales team you have, the larger it gets the more important the sales enablement and sales operations role becomes. If you have 100 guys, and you save them all 5% of their time, that’s hiring five guys for free,” exclaims Steve Benson.
Steve began his career in software sales and has worked for IBM, HP, and Google. Now as CEO of Badger, he helps field salespeople focus on their best customers and optimize revenue opportunities by mapping out their territories.
The key to optimizing your sales team is a focus. “You have to study your sales team almost like an anthropologist or a sociologist would and use those stats. What people often find is that there’s a lot of value in a lack of focus on field sales teams. People are spending their time on the wrong leads. They’re not focusing on the highest probability deals to close, and making sure that they make it over the line. It’s the same for inside sales team, helping them focus on the right groups, with the right message, at the right time is really important,” explains Steve.
While the focus is important, it’s also essential that sales enablement, operations, marketing and other members of the team understand what each sales reps need when looking at ways to leverage technology.
“What the outside guys need is different to what the inside guys need. What the people who are selling to giant companies need is different than the people that are selling over the phones to small companies. There’s a variety of ways you can split up your sales team and different strategies to do that, but then I think it’s really important that one size does not fit all from your sales tech sack.”

Understanding the Importance of Coaching for Sales Managers

Deepti Sundareshan on January 30, 2018

Being a sales manager today is less about managing and more about developing, inspiring and growing the skills of your team. This is not easy and can leave a lot of sales managers chasing their tails trying to work out how to improve the performance of their team.
Some focus in on performance appraisals, which means that they’re only checking in on their reps’ performance once or twice a year. That isn’t often enough to build cadence or really help improve how they sell. Others use intimidation tactics or micro-manage which can leave their team feeling discouraged and uninspired.
While training is a useful way to teach new skills, it takes more than a training session or two to make sure it sticks. One of the most effective ways to reinforce, amplify and increase adoption of training is through coaching – in fact, CSO Insights found that implementing a formal or dynamic coaching process can help more salespeople achieve quota by up to 10%. The same research found that informal or ad hoc coaching didn’t achieve the same results.
No great sports person gets to be a world champion without a good coach by the side day-in-day-out, so why do you expect your salespeople to tough it out on their own? The answer may lie in the fact that coaching is hard, and it’s human nature to avoid doing the things that are really difficult. But coaching doesn’t just benefit your reps, it also benefits you which is an added incentive to put in place a formal coaching regime.

Coaching improves your skills

Being able to coach well is a skill that’s in high demand. By increasing your skill base you become more attractive to other employers both within and outside your company. This has the potential to open up new and exciting opportunities to develop yourself or possibly take on a more senior role. If you’ve got your eye on another role in the not so distant future, consider whether learning to coach effectively may help you get there.
Coaching also improves your skills as a manager. Coaching regularly gives you the cadence and insight to identify issues that may be impacting the performance of your team members. Rather than waiting for the annual performance review, you can nip them in the bud and then move onto the next issue. It can also help you put together a succession plan, thanks to the wealth of information that you learn about the strengths of each of your team members.
A flow on effect of developing your team is that they are likely to feel more valued and inspired. Feedback helps people know where and how to improve themselves, giving them a feeling of control over their own destiny and increases their trust in you.
This, in turn, has the potential to improve your retention rates. As you’re aware, recruiting new people is a costly and lengthy process, by improving retention you can improve the efficiency of running your team.
Last but not least, coaching will improve the results for your team, as the research from CSO Insights has found, and improve their productivity. While this won’t happen overnight, as it builds over time your team may meet or even exceed their performance objectives – a benefit that will directly be reflected in your own performance objectives.

So what does coaching really require?

There are several things that you can do that will help you be a good coach.
The most important is to focus on what your people need. This doesn’t mean just looking at what they need to develop but also understanding what they want to develop in themselves. One of the biggest ways to motivate someone to learn and adopt new skills is to do something that they want to do. The key is to set goals so that you can review their progress objectively together.
To build trust it’s important to be mindful, patient and truly listens. There’s no point trying to coach with one eye on your emails and the other on your watch. Show your team members how important their development is to you by giving them your full attention and allowing them to talk and work through an issue with your guidance.
Creating a safe environment is also important to build trust. No one will open up to a coach unless they feel secure, supported and know what they say is confidential. This includes following through on development opportunities or requests. Don’t leave it up them to ask you again – support them and give them the space to develop.
Another element of building trust is to keep your judgment at the door. If your people are worried about being critiqued, they’re less likely to open up and be willing to change. Let them vent their frustrations and work in different ways to find a solution that works for them. While not everyone can perfect everything, a good coach can identify the diamond in the rough and find a way to polish it.
One of the most valuable things a good coach can give is their strategic oversight. It’s difficult for an individual to step back and see how all the different moving parts work together, but a coach can help the individual pull everything together in a cohesive way. This gives them new insights that they can potentially use across different elements of their role. While coaching is about the individual, it’s really a partnership between you and your team member. Together you can both learn new skills and develop yourselves. If you approach coaching with this perspective in mind, it gives you more incentive to coach more often and to get better at it as well.

Is Your Sales Team Over-Managed and Under-led?

Deepti Sundareshan on January 9, 2018

It’s a common misconception that management and leadership are the same things but they’re not. Managing involves dealing with or controlling things – for a sales manager this could be anything from fighting fires to telling reps what they should be doing.

Whereas leadership is about leading people and guiding them to achieve. Both require different skill sets and have vastly different results when it comes to teams. According to author Tom Peters:

“Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”

While sales managers need both management and leadership skills, many tend to manage more than they lead. After all, it’s easy to monitor and react to statistics, processes, and deadlines. But it’s much more challenging to inspire and develop a team to achieve by developing and executing a clear strategy. When a sales team is over-managed and under-led it can lead to several problems that may impact your sales results, team turnover and the overall culture of your sales organization.

Managing is not motivating

One of the biggest issues with managing people rather than leading them is that it can be demotivating. Very few people are inspired to succeed when they’re told that they’re not meeting quota. By focusing in on the numbers or process constantly, sales managers risk alienating and demotivating the majority of their team and make them feel unappreciated.

According to CSO Insights

20% of salespeople turnover each year

– that’s a significant investment walking out the door. They also found that sales managers only spend about 20% of their time actually helping sales reps sell, something that’s unlikely to be a coincidence. Reps that feel supported are more likely to feel motivated and willing to stay. In fact,

87% of millennials and 69% of other employees

say that development opportunities are important to them in a role. That’s one area where leadership is particularly important.

Directing traffic serves a purpose but it’s far more exciting to take your team on a journey to get them to where they need to be. Rather than focusing in on what someone is doing, strong leadership can help guide salespeople on how they can improve and set a clear path to help them achieve it. This is particularly important in this day and age where buyers are well-informed and savvy. They require salespeople who are well-informed and adaptable, and reps need strong leadership to learn these skills.

Leadership is liberating

Sales teams that are truly led are liberated and unconstrained. They’re given wings to do their job well, rather than being bogged down in red tape and control. This doesn’t mean that leadership equates to anarchy, far from it. But a good leader knows how to influence behavior. They will help their team find a way through the necessary elements of their role so that they can focus on what’s really important – selling better and closing deals.

The numbers are of course important, but a good leader knows which numbers to focus on and how to use them to influence their team. That final step is what makes the difference between a manager and a leader. Numbers and processes are good, but ultimately they are just a tool to inform decisions. If you want a salesperson to perform their best, then you need to look at all the aspects of their role. The numbers can inform this, but they will rarely tell the whole story.

Bain & Co has conducted detailed research

over several years about what makes a leader. Their research has identified leadership attributes that focus in on the human aspects of performance and grouped them into four key areas:

Leadership is less about monitoring and more about creating an environment where people can thrive. This involves building trust, encouraging people to learn and inspiring them to achieve. It’s about building a sales culture that reaps dividends long into the future.

How to shift the balance from managing to leading

There are several things that you can do to focus on leading over managing. One of the most important is to set a strategy and be clear about its goals. It should set the stage for what they need to achieve and how they will go about doing this. This can then be constantly reiterated through communications, coaching sessions, rewards and KPIs. This gives them clarity and also creates a cadence for them to look forward, develop and strive for their goals.

By linking your team’s development, through training and coaching, they not only see that you’re investing in them but that there is a purpose to what they’re being asked to do. It is here where you can rely on management tools – track leading indicators to identify where to focus your energy. Use all the data available to identify the key areas of focus and inform coaching and training programs. While your reps don’t need to know the detail of the analysis, they should be able to see how the areas of focus link to the overall strategy.

Another important aspect of a sales manager’s role is to make it easier for their team to sell. Many sales roles inevitably come with a lot of non-selling tasks and there’s always room for improvement. This often provides a good opportunity for leaders to seek out feedback and suggestions from their team. By giving their team a forum to have their say, the can feel some ownership over the issues and feel like they are proactively involved in trying to address them.

The role of a sales manager certainly isn’t easy, but it can be far more effective by making a conscious effort to balance the need to manage with the importance of leading.

6 Signs Your Sales Managers are Under-Trained

Deepti Sundareshan on January 9, 2018

Research by the Sales Management Association has found that

41% of companies have no budget

to train their sales managers, and half of those that do have a training budget don’t offer any specific training to help them manage or lead a sales team. Yet sales managers are charged with the challenging task of motivating and leading their team to bring home the bacon.

The role of a sales manager is quite broad, so you can’t just look at their team’s quota to determine if they’re doing a good job. Here are six signs that may indicate that your sales managers are in dire need of some specific training.
1. They manage instead of leading

Many sales manager are promoted through the ranks, and while they may have been impressive salespeople, that doesn’t mean they know how to lead a team. Just like sales skills, leadership skills need to be learned either through experience or with specific training. Without these skills, many sales managers may naturally revert back to where they feel most comfortable.

This can manifest itself in several ways. Some may prefer to take over a deal and do the selling themselves. Others might spend all their time on their A players or C players, and leave the majority of their team floundering with no direction.
2. They see everything (or nothing) as a priority

You can’t do everything, that’s a simple fact of life, but it is something that a manager has to learn. Sales managers need to be able to differentiate between the tasks that are urgent and important and those that are not and prioritize them appropriately. The importance they place on particular tasks will be reflected in their team, which will rapidly magnify them. As leaders, sales managers must set the priorities for their team so they know where to spend their time.

Coaching is a classic example of something that is often overlooked even though it should be a priority on a sales managers to-do list. If a sales manager doesn’t know how to coach effectively they may de-prioritize it in favor of something they’re more comfortable with. So if some important things aren’t being prioritized, perhaps look into whether your sales manager has the skills to lead or coach their team effectively.
3. They can’t see beyond the horizon

It’s easy to get distracted fighting fires each day, but sales managers need to find the time to look beyond their immediate priorities and plan for the future. Developing a long-term strategy can be daunting even for experienced managers. It takes time, planning and discipline to develop a strategy that is clear, consistent and can be monitored. Without this, managers may find themselves directing their team aimlessly or, worse still, going around in circles. When you’re leading a team, this kind of ambling is inevitably reflected in how the team behaves – they have no purpose or direction.

If your sales manager can’t articulate exactly what they want their team to focus on in the next three, six or 12 months then they may need some help putting together a strategy that provides their team with clear direction and guides them on how to achieve it.
4. They don’t know how to identify performance issues in their team

Numbers, quotas and KPIs only tell part of the story when it comes to why someone is performing under par. Sales managers need to draw on a range of information and experience to really understand where their team’s skill gaps may be. Once an issue is diagnosed, the sales manager then needs to determine the best way to address the issue.

This can be quite challenging, particularly when some issues aren’t readily solved by training initiatives. For example, if a rep lacks motivation there may be many soft issues that need to be addressed to get their performance back on track – perhaps a good rep feels like they’re being underutilized. An experienced sales manager might bring them into the fold to help motivate other reps, but a less-experienced sales manager may not be able to identify and resolve these performance issues or tackle them in a way that is less than effective.
5. They let the loudest team members dictate the direction

The squeakiest wheel may get the oil but it isn’t always the one that needs the most attention and it’s the same when it comes to sales teams. Just because one person is complaining the loudest, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their issue is the direst or in need of attention. This is an issue that inexperienced sales managers may face the most, particularly if they’re lacking confidence. This can result in potential inequities in their team, misdirection of their energy or even alienate some team members.

Sales managers need to develop their softer skills so that they can manage different personalities effectively. These skills take a long time to develop unless specific training is provided.
6. They lack consistency

It’s not unusual for sales managers to develop their own processes and approach, but this lack of consistency, particularly in larger organizations can quickly become problematic. Sales managers need to be open to learning new things so they can all speak the same language, leverage the same information and embed consistency amongst their teams. This ensures that customer interactions are consistent, the messaging they hear is the same and also ensures that each sales team is on a level playing field.

From an organizational perspective, consistency enables sales teams to be compared accurately and reduces the possibility of confusion. But without sufficient training and guidance, it is almost impossible to achieve consistency across the entire sales organization. The best way to achieve this is for one area to have responsibility for ensuring processes, training, and the information is rolled out and monitored across the entire organization.

Striking a Balance between Proactive and In the Field Sales Coaching

Shankar Ganapathy on September 25, 2017

Marathon runners don’t go out on the field and keep running until they get an injury. They work with their coach to put in place a plan that makes them strong and keeps their muscles supple. All those hours in the gym and time spent with trainers is helping them to increase their chance of winning and reduce their chance of injury. This ensures they’re not worrying about it when they’re racing towards the finish line. But when they’re in the race they still need refreshments to keep them going and performing their best.

They need both proactive coaching and refreshments in the field.

It’s no different for sales reps. They need proactive sales coaching to help build and improve their sales skills for long-term benefit. But they also need on-the-field coaching so they’re refreshed and ready for their next customer meeting.

The benefits of sales coaching are well established, but coaching is often misunderstood.

While coaching on the pipeline and tactical sales activities is important, reps need more to be successful. They need a proactive approach that reinforces behaviors. And they need a cadence to this, it’s not enough to rely on coaching sessions at QBRs or sales kickoffs. That’s why managers and sales enablement teams need to find the right balance between the two.

Too little proactive coaching and your reps will be unprepared for the field. Not enough in-the-field coaching and they might find themselves struggling to close deals.

Proactive sales coaching is about prevention

Proactive coaching is about honing your rep’s skills, building their knowledge and ensuring they understand and can articulate the messaging. It focuses on product knowledge, competitive insights, and industry information.

Now I can hear sales managers starting to gasp. After all, you’ve got a lot on your plate – helping out with demos and objection handling – but your role as a sales manager is much bigger than that.

That’s why best practice sales organizations have a structured coaching program. It provides a framework to coach consistently and ensures reps are up to date and trained in the areas they need the most regularly. By leveraging technology, your reps can handle part of the process themselves. They can practice a demo and allow you to give them feedback without having to be in the same room.

If you are in a hyper-growth industry this type of coaching may occur quarterly, or even more frequently.

In-the-field coaching is about reinforcement

Traditionally, most managers have focused on in-the-field coaching. You sit through a meeting with a sales rep and, in the car ride back to the office, give them feedback and coach them on how they could improve their performance. This is trigger based coaching – you saw something that needed to be coached and reacted.

While this kind of tactical coaching has its place, it isn’t strategic. For in-the-field coaching to be strategic it requires managers to have the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture. What are your reps doing well and where do they need to improve?

For example, if a rep is struggling in three stages – demo, competitive objections and closing – how do you approach all three? This requires a structured approach – show, observe and remediate. You need to show them how to do their demo. This must be coupled with regular, on-field observation so you can monitor how they are performing. Then finally it requires remediation at each specific stage, not just a broad brush approach.

Their coaching strategy also needs to be aligned with the broader business objectives and identify what ongoing issues their individual team members need to have reinforced. This then sets the foundations of what to coach on.

To achieve this, the proactive coaching must be specific and well-structured.

Data holds the key to coaching

Traditionally, managers have had access to lagging indicators to help them identify what to coach on. But by the time you can see your win rates declining, it’s already too late to stop the losses from happening.

To stay ahead of the game, managers need to leverage data to identify what their reps need to be coached on and identify their gaps. This is important for both proactive coaching and structuring in-the-field coaching. That’s where data analytics comes in.

Thanks to the advent of sales readiness and enablement technology you now have access to a wide range of data that can help you identify where your reps might be struggling or where their knowledge or skill gaps are.

Structured coaching on baseline knowledge, new product updates and message articulation can be performed when it is convenient for reps using sales readiness technology like Mindtickle. Coaching is accessible anywhere and reps can complete role plays when it suits them. Feedback can be provided instantly, or reviewed by the rep when they have time.

Certifications and quizzes give managers information about who is up to speed and what areas your individual reps may require additional training or coaching on. When integrated with your SalesForce CRM you can also conduct analysis based on role, region, cohort, whatever way you want.

This data can also be used for in-the-field training. Analyze how your best reps use their sales readiness technology before meeting a prospect. This information can then be used to identify how to coach your B and C players before their next big meeting. Leverage quizzes to identify areas where your reps need to have their knowledge reinforced. When combined with structured activities, like specific objection handling exercises, managers can provide valuable in-the-field coaching based on what reps actually need, rather than their own intuition or observation.

With the power of data at your fingertips, you can make a fundamental shift in how you coach your reps, build their sales skills and resolving immediate issues. Rather than solving a problem once it’s come to your attention, you can proactively nip issues in the bud.

So rather than waiting to find out where your reps weak spots are, leverage tools that help you prevent issues becoming injuries that leave your sales reps sitting on the bench.

Sales Disrupted: A Framework to Deal with Disruptive Forces

Shankar Ganapathy on July 4, 2017

We live in an age of constant change. An age where disruption is the new normal. But there are some events that can jolt your sales organization into a new phase instantly. And in an instant, you have to rethink your approach and adapt.

The disruptions that impact our customer’s most often include:

Mergers and acquisitions
Preparing to IPO and beyond
A surprise new competitor
Regulatory changes that impact how you sell

Perhaps your business has been part of a merger or acquisition or is preparing to IPO, a new competitor strategy has taken you by surprise, or a regulatory change has completely changed how you can sell. These significant events can take the

sales readiness of your sales organization

back a step or two and it can take you weeks, months or even years to recover and adapt. But that doesn’t mean you need to recreate the wheel every single time. By following or framework you can identify how your business needs to adapt and get back on track quicker.

A framework for enabling sales disrupted

The key to recovering from a sales disruption is to be agile. Your reps need to be enabled so they can pick themselves up and get back out there quickly. But speed alone isn’t enough if your reps aren’t prepared with the right things to get them back on track.

Before reacting, take a step back and look at

what parts of your business

the disruption is impacting:

Resources: Do you have the right resources to take your business forward? This isn’t just about having enough salespeople, but also consider whether they’re all up to standard. Perhaps you need more support resources or different tools to help your sales organization be agiler.

Processes: Do your processes meet the needs of your sales organization now? Your processes need to be agile enough to adapt or at least be reviewed when a disruptive change occurs. It’s also important to look beyond your sales processes and to any other business process that may be impacted like customer success or logistics to ensure that they also meet the needs of your new world order. The more stable and adaptable your processes are, the easier it will be for your business to react quickly to disruption.

Values: Your corporate values flow through your entire organization, but how are they applied to your sales organization. Your sales reps need to have some autonomy to apply your values, but these need to first be communicated well so they are applied correctly. This can filter down to the type of business you wish to attract or how your reps react when faced with stiff price competition. Agile businesses empower their employees to act within their values.

Taking this approach one level down, you can then establish an enablement framework that considers the three areas where your reps may need support; Knowledge and Messaging, Sales Skills, and Execution Discipline.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help identify what enablement initiatives need to be in place.

What initiatives your sales organization needs the most will depend on what has caused the disruption to your business. For example:
Disruption #1: Mergers & Acquisitions:

The core objective here is to retain customers and maintain momentum through a period of internal change. Often knowledge and messaging is the most crucial focus area for enablement activities as reps require regular communication and the value proposition may need to be rebaselined.
Disruption #2: IPO:

As you prepare for IPO execution discipline is key, ensuring you have all your processes in place. Post-IPO this may shift to knowledge and messaging as communication becomes more important and the business’ messaging changes.
Disruption #3: Surprise competitor:

Knowledge and messaging are critical when going into battle with a new competitor. YYour value proposition needs to be sharp and your reps will need to be up-to-date with the competitive landscape and offerings.
Disruption #4: Regulatory changes:

– While knowledge and messaging is important, depending on the regulatory change, it may impact the sales process and the skills your reps require.

Put a plan in place

To drive your enablement program put in place milestones and a process to achieve these. For example, if you want to develop a consistent message across the organization, what’s the message? How will you communicate this? How will you know that it has been a success? Who will need to be involved in the process?

This plan will map not only what needs to be done, but also which stakeholders will be involved in each step and what other tools you need to achieve it.

Measure, measure, measure

Once you know what areas require focus you can then consider what insights you require. The closer you are able to monitor your reps progress, the quicker you will be able to identify any gaps in their knowledge or skills and plug them. This will keep any revenue leakage from the disruption to a minimum.

By focusing in on leading indicators of

sales effectiveness and efficiency

, rather than lagging indicators, the more control you will have over your revenue. For example, if your value proposition has changed then reviewing your reps’ elevator pitch will be important. Role plays can be used to provide coaching and feedback and certifications provide a mechanism to measure how prepared reps are for their customer conversations.

Dealing with disruption is never easy. Knee-jerk reactions are common, but they rarely have the desired effect. By following a structured approach you can ensure your sales reps are enabled to deal with the disruption quickly and confidently. Who knows, it may even put you in the position to outsmart the disruptive force.

Revenue Productivity Platform

Meet Copilot

For Revenue Enablement

For Revenue Operations

Sales Readiness Solutions

Our Customers

Sales Readiness Resources

About Mindtickle