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Coaching Help
- Accountability - Take It On!
- Bringing Out the Best in Your People
- Coach for Customer Interaction Excellence
- Coaching or Performance Coaching
- Coaching – Making Hard Easier
- Four Keys to Turn Your Sales Data into Action
- Great Sales Coaching Thoughts
- How Am I Supposed to Find the Time to Coach?
- It’s About Timing, Not Time
- It’s All About Them – Five Fundamentals to Help Others Achieve Results
- Just Do It!
- Leveraging Personal Motivators for Success
- Meaningful Moments
- Practice Makes Perfect
- Stay With It – A Secret to Improved Performance
- The Challenge of Holding People Accountable
- Tired of Poor Sales Execution?
- What Does It Take to be a Great Coach?
Meaningful Moments
Improving the quality of a sales manager's individualized coaching is a critical success factor. Business Efficacy's experience with managers leads to the conclusion that it doesn't have to take significantly more time to do this. Unfortunately, when most sales organizations attempt to improve their sales management effectiveness, it is often done by mandating traditional, time-consuming management activities. An example is the insistence of a weekly sales team meeting. Sales meetings are wonderful for communicating expectations, information, and developing skills and knowledge that apply to all salespeople. This often results in early improvement, but seldom sustained performance. Managers struggle for timely topics. Meetings soon become perceived as time wasters. Sales employees want to miss meetings because their time is better spent selling. It is important to communicate expectations on a frequent basis. However, if that is what ends up happening continuously during weekly meetings, the manager is perceived as a preacher, not a teacher. The cause is that salespeople seldom have the same development needs at the same time. The result is that sales managers end up doing a low-impact, time-consuming activity.
Effective sales management is done when sales managers coach salespeople through meaningful moments. Sales managers who productively use these moments develop individual and team-sustainable sales performances in today's work environment. Natural sales managers employ this tactic, almost unconsciously, to achieve sustainable sales improvement year after year, salesperson after salesperson.
Business Efficacy coaches have helped countless sales managers, at all levels, utilize this "meaningful moments" approach with every salesperson, dramatically improving sales. This approach works and it takes minimal time. One can provide expectation setting, result reviews, pipeline updates, non-performance challenges, recognition, skill and knowledge building, pre and post call debriefing, and much more through meaningful coaching moments. The key is to use "managing by wandering around" with purpose. Office and remote work situations, through the wonders of technology, provide a sales manager with ample opportunity to interact with salespeople. Each encounter is an opportunity to quickly advance a salesperson's development. The key is to always have in mind what needs to be developed in each salesperson. The other key is to never let a communication opportunity go by without advancing that individual's improvement. Each encounter needs to last no more than a couple of minutes.
Let's take a sales manager who is trying to develop better pre-call preparation in a salesperson. Monday the salesperson calls in with his weekly schedule. On the call the sales manager asks the salesperson to summarize the call objective for his first call that day. Depending on the answer, the manager is in a position to quickly praise, challenge, or develop. In less than two minutes, the manager can reinforce the expectation, gather critical performance information, and provide appropriate feedback and assistance. On Wednesday, the salesperson calls in the results of his Tuesday appointments and asks for help with an order. Upon conclusion of that subject, the sales manager asks about the pre-call objective for Thursday's sales calls. Again in a brief moment, the manager can reinforce the expectation, gather critical performance information, and provide appropriate feedback and assistance. Dramatic sales improvement takes place when sales managers consistently provide meaningful coaching moments with each salesperson at least twice a week. We have seen even more improvement when coaching moments are provided daily.
Quantity of coaching alone does not result in dramatic sales improvement. The equation is Quantity Coaching x Quality Coaching = Meaningful Coaching Moments + Results. The degree to which coaching moments are meaningful is dependent upon a sales coach's knowledge of what a salesperson needs to develop for high-impact sales growth and how best to do it.
Sales managers who gather essential performance information quickly and continuously, analyze it, determine possible ways to drive salesperson change, and then decide on the highest impact approach followed by relentless implementation are great at coaching. Those who do this efficiently are superb at providing meaningful coaching moments. They prefer this type of coaching because it works. All of this is skill-based and can be developed by most managers, but their managers must take the same approach. Managers must help other managers drive behavior change and then engage in high-impact coaching moments a minimum of two times per week with each salesperson. Managers must then do the same with their managers. They must check on the amount and consistency of coaching that is being provided and why. Business Efficacy recommends a 70:30 ratio of coaching moments to formalized group and individual sales meeting time to improve results. This gets managers doing a high-impact activity that saves time and accomplishes more. That is sales management productivity.