To get the biggest impact out of every coaching session you must commit yourself to reinforcing progress. Doing so will accelerate your salespeople’s development and increase sales.

You can’t fully measure the impact of a coaching session until the actions and commitments made during the session become a reality. Your job is to make sure that the skills and practices you discuss during the coaching sessions become a part of how your salespeople do their job. If you find your coaching sessions are return trips to the same problems, you are probably making one of five basic mistakes.

1. Failure to set up clear and specific expectations or not letting the salesperson know exactly what you want done differently.

2. Giving the salesperson too much to work on that he/she become overwhelmed.

3. Failing to develop the salesperson’s skills to perform the assigned tasks or responsibilities.

4. Failing to give a reward for doing the new behavior.

5. Failing to provide negative consequences for continuing to use the old behavior.

Helping salespeople learn and apply new skills requires regular and specific monitoring and reinforcement. To get what you expect you must inspect and reward the behavior you want. This requires a discipline and commitment to identifying the key behaviors that have the biggest impact on your people’s performance.

One point to keep in mind is that salespeople can’t develop a new behavior until they have performed it successfully and are rewarded for doing so. Major behavior changes require frequent successes and considerable rewards.

Effective managers know that it is important to reward progress as well as absolute attainment of a goal. Recognition for making progress reinforces the change that has occurred and keeps the salesperson focused and motivated to continue changing.

Trainers of killer whales start training the whales to jump out of the water by first teaching them how to cross over a bar at the bottom of the pool. As the whale becomes more confident and trusting of the trainer, the bar gets raised higher. First, they learn to cross the bar under the water, and then above it. After each successful attempt the whale receives a reward.

A manager once asked me, “Is it really necessary for me to make a big deal when my salespeople make progress?” I answered him by saying, “Only if you want them to fully succeed.”

To increase sales you must have salespeople who are well-trained and perform at a high level. Your job as a sales manager is to train, develop and coach them until they perform at the highest level possible. Reinforcing progress along the way is essential for making sure the salespeople achieve their full potential.

To learn more about increasing sales through sales coaching go to: philfaris.com

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Phil_Faris/1116556

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6425407

The good news is a lot of your competitors seem to be looking at the sidelines – that is good for you and bad for them. Next, even though historically on-boarding has been understudied, in the last several years enough has long been completed to provide a starting list of best practices to get the job done – and getting it right.

Today a sales force must not simply be in the position to sell an aggressive advantage; they have to be considered a competitive advantage. In most companies, it is significantly difficult to sustain a competitive edge by conventional means. Traditional factors like: superior products, scale, and innovative manufacturing technology may possibly give temporary benefits, but unfortunately they could be duplicated in relatively small order by an increasing number of agile and aggressive domestic and international rivals.

Although an excellent sales staff is difficult to build, they have the potential to provide a significant competitive advantage and, maybe more excitingly, one that’s difficult for competition to easily copy. So refining sales performance matters a lot more these days compare to what it did yesterday and it will make a difference more the next day compared to what it does today. A significant length of time is spent in most sales calls asking questions about simple background information – and rightly so. Today, however, there’s a much better way. Sales people can and should obtain nearly all of that basic information by using the Internet. Clients anticipate sales agents to provide value – however they can’t add value if they’re spending their time having basic information that may have and should have been obtained prior to the call ever started. You’re basically squandering your time budget with the physician, nurse, or administrator.

Today, if you want a world-class sales force, you have to specify on boarding as an on-going training process, not as a one-time event. Sales training programs are needed not only for on-boarding new hires for the company but also for on-boarding your existing sales team to handle an extremely changing buying environment. As your company enters new markets, launches new products, deals with keener competitors, as well as deals with ever changing demands within customer organizations, sales training is among the answers for executing an excellent response to these changes. You just cannot sustain superior sales force overtime, if you don’t invest in skill development overtime.

Sales Coaching could open up your eyes to assist you to meet your sales goals. In the past, sales training had a questionable report card. That was then and this is now. Today, leading edge sales training companies have crafted a new generation of sales training – they work, they make a difference, plus they are affordable.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6130000

One of the keys to increasing sales is to control and reduce the turnover of sales staff and management. It is not only very costly turnover in terms of recruitment, training and end costs, but also very counterproductive when growing sales revenue. Sales are most important for every business. Your business may be some small or some large, but you cannot think of amplifying it without getting a growing number or quality of sales. It is essential that your representatives are smart enough to deal your customers and make them purchase their products over other firms or companies. Competition among marketers is increasing day by day, so even if you have the right kind of products cannot be sold. The main thing to focus on to grow your business is to increase the number of sales you make. This is where the sales of coaching play a major role. A company that provides sales management coaching to its employees is able to attract more customers, and get better income. In a sales coaching program, an employee learns the right direction to interact with customers. They understand how to deal with sales objections, and persuade prospects to buy a product the company. A sales coaching makes an employee to answer the question why an important perspective to choose their products over others.

Without the ability to communicate effectively, not present products or services to your customers. When clients read or hear about the product and its advantages, this creates a positive effect on the client and provides a way in which to solve all your queries. A person can go for training sales to get a better job in the marketing industry, or a company can use this to help their employees improve enterprise growth. Choose a company which provides coaching in advanced sales proven methods is essential. Be Relevant creates sales optimization solutions that boost the efficiency & effectiveness of your sales force. A person who can answer customer questions without searching is able to create a lasting impression and thus increases the value of his product of company in their eyes. A company dedicated to teaching proper management techniques to help clients create success.

There are several courses offered by the sales coaching companies improve employee performance. It is important that the sales company you choose to get the coaching of sufficient experience in the same field. It should have certified personal trainers with degrees to teach essential sales skills for their students. Every company today has a service centre to resolve queries from new and existing customers. Call centre training for employees to greet and talk to their customers in a desired way help to improve their levels of company customer satisfaction. With higher levels of satisfaction, you will get more sales and will be able to generate more revenue from business. Market research carefully and choose the company that matches your needs the best with sufficient experience in the type of sales coaching you’re looking for you or your firm or company.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4248805

“We do that” said Tim, “that’s part of the sales managers’ role”. I was going through a checklist of effective performance drivers with a client, a senior sales VP of a financial software vendor. We came to coaching the sales people.

Tim and his sales managers sincerely believed that they coached their sales people. I don’t think you would get a very different response from sales chiefs in most IT companies. In our experience, however, the reality is that sales management doesn’t coach their salespeople effectively. There’s a lot of vague thinking about coaching.

Depends What You Mean by Coaching – People tend to associate coaching with sport. The majority of the top professional golf and tennis stars have a coach. Occasionally, they fire the coach and go it alone. Generally coaches are credited with helping the sportsperson to improve their performance – in the fastest way possible. The hallmark of a successful sports coach is a one-on-one relationship, built on trust and dedicated to improving the “coachee’s” performance. A coach has the advantage of objectivity – being able to see and show exactly where the coachee can improve. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that coaching sales people, if done properly, really does produce improved sales performance. Some US research identified a 35% increase in sales just by coaching. Neil Rackham, founder of Huthwaite Research (the people who invented SPIN) says “no other activity has so positive an impact on the success of consultative selling… a strong coaching culture is the hallmark of success”

Sales Coaching – the Wasteland of Corporate America? Linda Richardson, President of the Richardson Company and a lecturer at Wharton Business School argues “Every organisation and every person has blind spots. The power of coaching lies in turning those blind spots into perspective”. She goes on to say: “The critical importance of coaching a sales force is universally acknowledged – as is its almost total absence. Sales coaching is the wasteland of corporate America”.

Lip Service to Coaching Working one-to-one with a salesperson is generally considered coaching. An example of this – reviewing the salesperson’s pipeline or progress with a particular opportunity. Let’s look at a typical example of what all too often passes for coaching. Suppose a salesperson requests help from his/her sales manager because they feel that they need some assistance with a big deal. They may have set up a meeting with a more senior person and want the manager along. Maybe I’m being too cynical but perhaps the salesperson feels that by involving the sales manager they are covering their backside. That way they can spread the blame if anything goes wrong! Who handles the call? The sales manager. How much learning takes place? Some – the ‘watch- how- I- do- it’ method of training has its place. This is thought of as coaching. But is it? According to Neil Rackham, there are two types of sales coaching – strategy coaching and skills coaching. Strategy coaching is a bit like the coach and the player poring over a map of the course in the club house discussing the way the golfer might play the course. Tactics could be likened to the coach observing play – perhaps noting the way the player positions his feet and suggesting a better stance. Similarly, sales strategy coaching might take place in the office – discussing what needs to happen to win a deal. Using something like Target Account Selling or Miller Heiman’s blue sheets is a form of strategic coaching. Even if the salesman sometimes feels that it’s a way of catching them out, this coaching is very valuable. What is largely missing, in our experience, is skills or tactics coaching. This may be because there’s never enough time. Or perhaps because sales managers like to think that they have hired salespeople who know how to sell.

What Happens Typically on Call Accompaniment Let’s revisit the sales manager out on a call with one of his sales people. More often than not little or no preparation gets done. A few words may be exchanged over coffee in the local Starbucks or driving to the call. Worse, (and I’ve done it) a few words are exchanged in the lift on the way up to the meeting!

Next, how often does the sales manager assume the running of the call? 95% of the time? Why does this happen? The sales manager is there for a purpose. He or she is there to help close the deal perhaps – and that generally involves, as they see it, controlling the meeting. If it’s an important deal the manager doesn’t want to see the call go wrong. Once the sales manager takes over the conversation, the prospect’s focus switches away from the salesperson. Result? The salesperson is sidelined; their authority shot to pieces. But our sales manager fondly imagines that he has coached the salesperson in how to do it. Whatever the outcome of the meeting, doing the call for the salesman isn’t developmental coaching any more than the tennis coach playing a shot for the player in a match would be coaching.

What Should be Happening? Sitting down with the salesperson to plan the call. Careful preparation is never time wasted. Question the salesperson about their objectives for the call. How is he/she going to handle it? What issues is the prospect likely to have? Is there any skill that the salesperson wants to improve and practise in the call?

The meeting should ideally be run by the salesperson with the manager saying as little as possible. (A useful accessory might be a large piece of sticking plaster for this to happen!) After the call, a formal de-brief should happen. The manager asks the salesperson about the extent that the call objectives have been achieved and listens to the salesperson’s answers. What does the salesperson think could have been done better? The manager should went wrong!

Ok, I know life isn’t like that and the relentless pressure to make the numbers can militate against doing coaching properly. But no sales manager can sell everything personally. The more he can develop and enhance the skill sets of his sales team the greater will be the improvement in their performance overall. The immediate sales manager is THE best placed person to improve selling effectiveness. Personal coaching is increasingly recognised as the best vehicle for him or her to accomplish this.

Tim and his sales managers plan to devote a proportion of their time to real coaching and not playing the shots themselves. They are developing some KPIs to allow them to measure individual performance improvement. Linda Richardson again: “The sales manager role is re-emerging into a new and vital role – from evaluator to developer, from expert to resource, from teller to questioner… it is a 180 degree shift from how most sales managers manage”

Author: Graham French, gfa Sales Improvement.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Graham_J_French/526715

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3763047

As a sales professional, entrepreneur or business owner, being able to effectively establish new client partnerships and increase sales results quickly is vitally important. When sales are going great it can be very exciting! When you have a great month you are filled with sales motivation!

But, after a while, things slow down and you hit a wall. You find yourself chasing after prospects and wondering why it is taking so long to convert prospects into clients.

You’re stumped!

You start exploring different techniques and try to find a solution. But, no matter what you try, the results are the same and the sales cycle is a much longer process than what you would like.

So where do you turn when you are stuck in sales quicksand and can’t get your prospects to move forward?

Here’s How You Can Shorten The Sales Cycle and Win More Clients, Increase Sales and Profits with 2 Simple Strategies:

1. Determine, Uncover & Clarify Challenges
If a prospect is not clear about their challenges and the impact of these challenges, this will greatly slow down the entire sales cycle. This is because the client does not yet believe their challenge is significant enough to take action, and guess what, because of this, they won’t take action! It is a waste of time for you to give information before understanding their needs, goals, challenges and problems. You are presenting a “solution” to someone who doesn’t believe they have a “problem.”

So, what do you do about this? Ask a lot of questions! Ask open ended questions. Get curious and don’t assume you understand their problem or challenge no matter how long you have been in the industry. Dig in and really find out what is going on, and ask follow up questions that focus in on the greater impact of their challenges. Uncover the impact of the current challenges on both the organization and the individuals or groups you are selling to. Your questions will help them understand and verbalize that they have a challenge or problem. Now you have the information you need to explain how you can help solve their challenge.

If you find yourself talking more than 20% of the time during your sales meetings with prospects, stop yourself, and ask a question!

2. Always Set A Clear Next Step
Have you ever heard this before? “Thanks for your time today, your product looks great and we will get back to you soon.” Yet, you never hear back, and end up having to chase, follow up, and make multiple calls, send multiple emails to no avail. That is not fun for you, nor is it fun for the prospective client.

How do you solve this?

Well, if you are a great salesperson or great sales minded business owner, you don’t need to chase. You don’t need to pressure. You don’t need to persuade. Really. You need to set up a clear next step, and if your prospect is not ready to take the next step, they will tell you, and you will determine if they are a serious prospect or not, on the spot.

Remember, give your prospects an option to say, “No.” When you do this, all the pressure is taken off of you, and more importantly off of your prospect. That way, they do not feel like they are being “sold,” nor do they feel any pressure from you. Many of the sales coaching programs and sales coaches still are teaching the same old techniques developed decades ago that involve pressure and persuading. You do not need to do that anymore and it does not work.

Simply set up the next step at the end of your meetings. The next step could be a follow-up face to face meeting or a scheduled phone call for example. However, make sure the next step is moving the sales cycle forward and has a scheduled date, time, and location.

Map out your sales cycle and know what steps need to take place. Here is an example of a 5 step sales cycle: 1. Initial appointment, qualification, discovery, 2. Agreement to conduct an in-depth analysis, 3. Demonstration of service or product, 4. Contract review meeting, 5. Signed agreement.

At the end of each meeting, you should be setting up the next meeting and next actions. Explain the next steps you both will need to take to start working together. Map it out for them and provide them with a simple document that explains the next steps with clear time lines. Ask them to commit to the next steps along the way. Guess what happens if you do this effectively? You don’t need to “close” or persuade, the sale will be made, faster, naturally, and more effectively.

These 2 Sales Coaching tips will help you shorten your sales cycle and experience dramatically improved sales results. Don’t wait to make these changes, take action now, and make a commitment to yourself.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3425460

Are you as a Sales Leader or Manager facing any of these issues with your team?

Sales training often isn’t enough to produce long term change in your sales team.

Read this list to see if you might benefit from a sales coach:

Having trouble with:

• Generating new customers
• Increasing returns on marketing campaigns
• Failure to consistently achieve sales revenue goals
• Reduce ever-lengthening sales cycles
• Increasing costs of maintaining an effective and productive sales team
• Keeping the sales team motivated
• Shrinking margins – mounting pressure to discount
• Protecting and developing dwindling key accounts
• Increasing erosion of market share
• Increased failure to forecast revenue with any degree of accuracy
• Increased quantity and ferocity of competition and being outsold by competitors
• Limited product knowledge in the field
• Declining customer satisfaction and increasing customer expectation
• Global market rationalization Increasing number of stalled sales opportunities
• Finding and keeping good people
• Managing salespeople who plan and manage their time and territory by the seat of their pants – they don’t seem to have a game plan or a strategy as to how they are going to win
• Reducing the “last three weeks of a sales quarter” syndrome where everyone scrambles to try and pull in as much as they can to hit sales targets and we end up giving away our margin
• The current economic crises are impacting on sales team’s ability to consistently achieve their sales quotas
• Operating in markets where there seems to be more and more “gatekeepers”, buying committees, tendering processes, RFPs, etc., all of which prevent the sales team from gaining access to decision makers
• It is becoming increasingly tough to get to talk to the people who matter about what they really need and want when it comes to buying our services
• We struggle to speed up the buying process and close more deals more often
• Sales teams that needs constant motivating. They seem to lack passion, focus and commitment
• “Give us a quote” is a common response my salespeople are hearing. So what I find is that my salespeople often invest large chunks of their time putting together proposals for prospective clients that have no real intention of buying from them
• The message we hear from our customers over and over is, “Your competitor can do it faster and cheaper.” And they are right! How do we sell against that?
• No predictable and accountable selling process that moves the sale forward smoothly
• Constantly grappling with costly, wasteful, and ineffective sales practices (e.g., low yield on direct marketing, low close ratios, high costs for branding, tradeshows, or product development)
• I don’t have a clue where to start to get sales back on track!

If you or your sales team are facing any of these common issues, you should consider getting coached!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2231945