Selling Power Blog

The Top Three Sales Coaching Challenges Facing Sales Managers Today (and How to Fix Them)

Today's post is by Brian Trautschold, co-founder and COO at Ambition, the leading sales coaching and gamification software used by in-house and remote sales teams across the globe.

 

You’ve heard it time and time again: Sales coaching is the number one thing sales managers can do to improve the performance of their reps.

But not all sales coaching programs are created equal – which is why we wanted to understand what’s happening in the real world, right now. What does sales coaching look like for a typical sales team, and, most importantly, is it actually making a difference?

We surveyed sales leaders and reps from mid-market and enterprise sales orgs, and our survey affirmed what we know to be true – that sales coaching matters (a lot). But many managers are struggling to run sales coaching programs that directly impact performance, due primarily to common challenges sales managers face.

Here are the top three problems that contribute to ineffective sales coaching, plus some actionable tactics sales managers can use to improve their programs.

Challenge #1: Lack of Manager Training

According to our survey, 98% of managers said they were in a front-line selling role before moving up to a sales manager role. It’s a big percentage, but it’s not surprising: The sales management world is full of former all-star sellers – many of whom, unfortunately, get their big promotion, a pat on the back...and that’s about it. 

This begs the question: Who’s managing the managers?

The bottom line is that sales management isn’t the same as selling. It’s a different role with completely different responsibilities, skill requirements, and measures of success. Through no fault of their own, managers often lack the training required to coach, motivate, and pull the levers that lead to positive, lasting behavior change in their reps. 

When managers don’t know how or when to coach, it either doesn’t happen effectively or it doesn’t happen at all. If this sounds familiar, take heart: There are ways you can take charge and hone your sales coaching skills – or at least get the ball rolling.

The Solution

• Start a dialogue: Communicate with your supervisor or leadership team about where you’d like to grow as a sales coach. Sure, it may be intimidating or feel like you’re admitting a weakness – but consider what it would be like if the tables were turned and one of your reps approached you seeking opportunities to improve in their role. It actually shows commitment to your team, your desire to be successful as a sales manager, and a high level of self-awareness. If you’re having that conversation, know what you’re asking for ahead of time: Are there specific resources you need? Is there a course you’d like to take? Be specific and solution oriented.
• Identify professional development opportunities: The sales world loves an event – and sales coaching is always a hot topic. From Webinars and seminars to conferences and retreats, there’s something out there for everyone. Also: Don’t underestimate the power of community. Seek out sales associations or LinkedIn groups, jump into Reddit or Quora – you’ll find a lot of people asking and answering the same sales coaching questions you have.
• Request feedback: Surveying your employees can be a humbling exercise but, if you do it right, it’s worth it. No matter how green or seasoned you are, seeking out regular feedback from your team can take the guesswork out of what’s going well and where you can do better. Be sure you do this in a variety of formats: Of course, people may feel more comfortable responding anonymously – and you may get some very honest answers – but be sure to provide opportunities for open dialogue, too.

Challenge #2: Lack of Performance Visibility

The best kind of sales coaching is data-driven sales coaching. According to our survey, however, only 27% of managers have excellent visibility into their reps’ progress against goals.

It’s hard to coach if you don’t know how your reps are performing, what they’re struggling with, or where their skill gaps lie – and that story needs to be told by data, not just by feelings, hunches, and anecdotes. When sales coaching sessions aren’t structured around data, they’re at best fluffy, and, at worst, emotional or even confrontational.

When managers don’t have accurate, accessible data, it’s often because they’re using a CRM, spreadsheets, or even whiteboards to keep track of their team’s performance – all of which become a hassle and a time suck for managers who just want to know where their team stands.

It’s also a problem when reps lack visibility into individual or team performance. That’s because they don’t have the opportunity to develop any kind of self-awareness around their progress, strengths, or weaknesses. If they can’t evaluate how they’re doing, they can’t prepare for their one-on-ones or proactively contribute to their own development.

The Solution

• Track the right KPIs: Having visibility into data is helpful only if it’s meaningful data. Be sure you’re tracking the right metrics for your team. It’s not just about the Big Number; you should have insight into the daily sales activities that drive deals down the funnel and the weekly or monthly sales objectives that will ultimately lead to your team hitting (or exceeding) quota.

• Go real time: Real-time insights are valuable for your weekly one-on-ones because you’ll know you’re working with very current numbers and not just a snapshot of what happened last week, month, or quarter. But real time is also important because it allows you to coach beyond your sessions, so you can step in and recognize wins the second they happen or offer support before your reps veer too far off track.
  
  
• Provide teamwide visibility: Again, your reps need performance insight just as much as you do. Whether your team is in the office or remote these days, you can leverage a sales leaderboard as well as real-time alerts and triggers to keep progress against goals front and center.

Challenge #3: Lack of Structure

Structure and consistency are critical to coaching effectiveness, but many managers struggle to launch or maintain a program that checks either of those boxes.

It comes down to bandwidth: According to our survey, more than half of managers said time was a key resource they needed to effectively coach and manage reps. 

Where do the hours go? Many managers spend significant chunks of their days in leadership and department meetings or handling administrative tasks (like running reports) – or they find themselves sucked back into a selling capacity.

It’s no wonder there’s little time for meaningful coaching: Whereas one-on-ones ideally would happen on a weekly basis, both managers and reps report getting far fewer coaching opportunities than they actually need.

It’s not just frequency that’s a problem, either. When a one-on-one does happen, it’s often focused heavily on pipeline and deal review. Those are important items, for sure, but they don’t make for a true coaching session.

The Solution:

• Get automated: Leverage sales coaching software that will help you cut out the sales coaching tasks that can be put on autopilot – like tying sessions to KPI data, sending questions ahead of time, and recording notes and action plans. 

• Pick a format: Don’t reinvent the wheel every week; it’s fine to have a similar format for all your reps. The key is to ask the right questions and make sure you give your reps a chance to reflect on and answer them before your session. There are countless sales coaching methodologies you can tap into or sales coaching templates you can use to get started. 

Despite its potential value, sales coaching can become an afterthought – and it’s often because of the challenges sales managers inherently face. If you’re not seeing results from your sessions, it’s not because sales coaching doesn’t work; maybe your strategy just needs some attention. 

By putting in the time, effort, and resources to develop your own coaching skills and launch a program the right way, you can expect to see meaningful, measurable, and ongoing ROI. Download the full Sales Coaching Challenges report.

When Sales Are Slow, Use the Time to Talk With Your Customers

Today's post is by Austin Ries, a content marketing manager for Zoho. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. 

 

 

Analysts have long sounded the alarm about the inevitable market transformations and crises that all businesses will face. Enterprises that survive transform themselves into organizations that innovate quickly during times of change and disruption.

A global pandemic and economic fallout twice as big as the Great Recession may not have been the crisis they had in mind, but here we are, two-thirds of the way through 2020, and nothing is business as usual. It was a historically bad second quarter in the United States. Consumers halted spending and businesses cut investments resulting in a 9.5% reduction in GDP, 19 straight weeks of more than a million unemployment benefit filings, and the temporary and permanent closures of millions of small businesses.

The impact has been especially acute for salespeople who have had to pivot their approach now that trade shows, customer visits, and in-person meetings are no longer an option. We are in a moment when, according to McKinsey & Company, a reported 90% of sales happen remotely, and sales leaders are desperate for new ways to connect with customers and define success across their department.

This is an important and necessary response to the current moment, and for a future that no one predicted at the beginning of the year. The warnings are now a reality. Survival depends on making adjustments and embracing new ways of caring for customers, primarily through listening and sharing feedback.

Listen to your customers

Listening to your customers has always been a fundamental part of sales, but it's especially important now when businesses are rethinking expenses and looking for new ways to save. Salespeople can proactively reach out to customers to hear how they're handling the current climate and its impact on their day-to-day operations.

One of the most effective ways you can build loyal and long-term customer relationships is through routine customer surveys. By connecting your online survey builder with your CRM or email marketing platform, you can combine NPS and CSAT survey responses with the respondent's data inside your CRM to get a complete picture of your customer's current mindset, and respond accordingly.

And because you sent the surveys from the CRM, the responses are automatically synced and stored inside the customer contact, so sales, marketing, and support can view all the responses and be aligned. This unified approach to customer experience is no longer a differentiator. The modern customer expects it.

Remember, these are not surveys to sell upgrades or extend contracts. Leaders and reps have to approach clients during this time without an agenda and with the simple intention of listening. It's about making a human connection where you understand their hardships and goals, and how they're approaching an uncertain future.

Spread the word

The insights you gain after client conversations and interactions shouldn't end when your meeting does. That's when you share the information with your sales teams and begin brainstorming creative and strategic ways to respond.

Some companies are doing this through daily team stand-ups or video calls to relay feedback to customer-facing teams and top leadership. Openly sharing customer mindsets and perspectives across the organization unites the team around a common goal of supporting the customer with creativity and empathy. From there, everyone can rally to address challenges innovatively, such as creating new content—live and recorded webinars, podcasts, and interactive infographics—about the new ways of working and sharing it through personalized emails or on social media.

Ultimately, this is a moment for practicing empathy. It's a moment for using the time you would have spent traveling or meeting prospects in person to put yourself in your customer's shoes and work to make their lives easier so they stay your customer for a long time.

Current events are impacting everyone differently. Many companies are treading water, slashing budgets, and doing everything possible to survive. Others may be moving ahead like nothing has changed and need a new solution to achieve their business goals.

But in a time when nothing is certain, one thing is: You won't know the answer unless you ask.

A full view of a customer's needs is only possible when customer-facing teams work from the same platform. Sign up for a free trial of Zoho CRM Plus, Zoho's customer experience platform, and learn how a unified technology stack can accelerate your upmarket growth.

How to Reach Your Sales Quota in a Year of Uncertainty

Today's post is by Julie Thomas, president and CEO of ValueSelling Associates. She is a noted speaker, author, and consultant. In a career spanning over 24 years, she credits her mastery of the ValueSelling Framework® for her own meteoric rise through the ranks of sales, sales management, and corporate leadership positions. Connect with Julie on LinkedIn.

 

Mid-year is an ideal time to reflect, recalibrate, and re-energize. Many people are feeling worn out by the first half of 2020, and the uncertainty of the future exacerbates the fatigue. As a sales professional, your livelihood anchors on achieving quota, so now is the time to refocus. With the right approach and mindset, you can put yourself on track to meet – and even exceed –  quota by the year’s end.

Selling Power and ValueSelling Associates partnered to survey more than 300 B2B sales professionals about their quotas. Specifically, we wanted to learn about the key elements that contribute to a salesperson’s ability to consistently achieve sales quota. Here’s what we learned and how you can leverage this information for your benefit.

Why are sales teams missing quota?

Our survey clearly shows that salespeople who aren’t coached or trained properly tend to fall off the quota attainment track. When looking specifically at the data from salespeople who said they were likely to miss quota, 89% said they lack a formal coaching program, and 62% said they lack formal training on how to communicate value to customers.

This data reinforces the importance of training sales reps on how to sell value, not just products and features. If they felt comfortable with this skill, they’d likely be closer to achieving quota. When it comes to sales leaders, survey responses suggest a few key approaches that help their reps reach quota: prospecting to keep a full sales pipeline, having a defined sales process, and communicating value when speaking with prospects and customers. We’ll explore these factors in more detail below.

1) Keep the sales pipeline full

When we asked sales reps – who were not on track to make quota – if they had enough leads in their pipeline, 69% said no. This is a sales leader’s perpetual quandary: To keep the sales pipeline full, they must establish a common goal for lead generation and create a disciplined approach to prospecting. Our survey results also show that many sales leaders believe reps neglect their prospecting efforts. To address this issue, there needs to be a consistent framework – and sales reps must have patience and discipline in the prospecting process.

2) Create a simple sales process

Once the pipeline is solid, salespeople need a simple, repeatable process to close the deal. This is easier said than done. Many sales teams make the mistake of creating a process that has too many steps or inadvertently causes their reps to devote time to non-selling activities. If a sales process isn’t easy to follow, it won’t be followed at all – and reps will forfeit winning results. A simple process lets you get your foot in the door and be on the way to a successful sale.

3) Help reps communicate value

Sales professionals who are on track to attain quota say their ability to communicate value is a major contributing factor to their sales success. And, although 72% of sales leaders report they teach reps how to communicate value, most salespeople identify a need to work on their ability to communicate value to prospective buyers.

This is particularly true for reps calling on executive buyers who have less time and patience for reps who don’t yet share their level of business experience and acumen. Sales reps need to know how to speak the language of business and not just rely on talking about product features and benefits.

When sales leaders empower salespeople with the ability to communicate business value to the prospect, reps can gain more traction. Those efforts typically result in higher levels of motivation to prospect more frequently and routinely – resulting in an uptick in sales results overall.

Summary

Meeting and surpassing quota is all about selling behaviors. Our research demonstrates that salespeople who do not receive the proper training or coaching tend to underperform and miss their quotas. It’s easy to point to a lack of pipeline, process, or training. What’s more helpful is a positive mindset, persistence in prospecting, and a willingness to learn and gain new skills.

To learn more about our research, download the ValueSelling Associates e-book: The Three Keys to Sales Quota Attainment along with the accompanying infographic.

5 Pandemic-Proof Sales Skills

Today’s post is by Brett Keirstead, CRO of GlobalVetLink and author of We Are All Sales, People. His book is written to celebrate what makes salespeople great throughout their lives at home, work, school, and in the community. Connect with Brett on LinkedIn and follow him on his blog, We’re All Sales People.

 

The headlines are everywhere:

“How to sell in a pandemic”

“Selling will never be the same”

“What lies ahead for sales?”

“Is traditional selling dead?”

Throughout my 30 years in sales, one thing has remained constant: The more complex the situation, the more important it is to focus on the fundamentals. I have observed 5 key attributes that help salespeople succeed in any situation – good or bad. These skills are especially important for the next generation of remote salespeople, who may not have access to the watercooler advice that influenced many of us at the beginning of our careers.

1. Know yourself

All great sales professionals know their product – its features and benefits, its value to customers, and the problems it solves – inside and out. But the best salespeople know themselves equally as well as they know their product. Are we aware of how we communicate and make others feel? Do we know our strengths, weaknesses, biases, and blind spots? Are we open and honest in our disclosures? Taking great care to present yourself in the most professional manner is the key to earning trust and achieving success when times are tough.

2. Sincerely understand others

The ability to truly understand your customer increases the odds of a successful sale. The world’s most delicious bread won’t sell if it’s pitched to someone who is gluten intolerant. Great salespeople use their natural curiosity and interest in others to ask the questions that help their clients achieve their goals and solve their problems. When times get tough, many people shift their focus inward. Salespeople can’t afford to make this mistake. They must take the time to meet their customers where they are – not where the salesperson wants them to be. Showing a genuine interest and curiosity in others is foundational to sales excellence.

3. Sell win-win deals

One-sided deals don’t make good salespeople. Instead, successful professionals look for mutually beneficial outcomes – a win-win for the customer and themselves. In uncertain times, it’s easy to lose this perspective and focus more on your own self-interest. Take extra time to review each proposal and request and examine whether they are truly mutually beneficial. Are you being reasonable? Is your customer also getting a fair deal? You may selfishly win a short-term proposal in a one-sided deal, but you will miss out on a potential lifetime relationship.

4. Negotiate

Even in the best of times, salespeople lose a deal 75% of the time and suffer rejection 10 times that throughout the process. Crisis situations can make customers seem even more inflexible and dogmatic. When they encounter pushback on their perspective, they might become upset or angry. Now is the time to de-escalate tension through greater flexibility. Winning a deal often means compromising on price and terms, and it’s important to accept that as a natural course of business. You must be graceful, learn from each experience, adjust your strategy, seek common ground, and push forward. People have fluid circumstances in their life and the willingness to give a little will be a refreshing experience that will help win a customer’s respect and business.

5. Persist through close 

A deal is not done until it closes. Verbal commitments, handshake agreements, or spoken promises do not count. In good times, when people are more apt to take risks and the buy cycles are more stable, you can have a greater confidence in a prospect’s words. But in uncertain and volatile times, sellers must stay vigilant. Circumstances can change on a moment’s notice. Stay connected with your client, reaffirm your value proposition, and follow your close plan. Assume nothing and keep following up until the deal is done.

In hectic times, I have always found that a renewed focus on these 5 basic principles will steady the ship for you. Be self-aware, understand your clients’ needs, find mutually beneficial outcomes, be flexible, and remain vigilant until the close. If you execute these core ideas, you can weather any sales storm you encounter. Good selling everyone!

You can purchase Brett’s book “We Are All Sales, People” on Amazon.