I was working with one of my client’s leadership team last Monday. We were in a planning session for the next 12 months of sales and sales management training that I’m doing for their group. When discussing sales management, the topic of “motivating and coaching” came up. That made my week – it really did. Nobody wants to talk about developing sales people anymore.
We discussed the erosion of the time most sales managers spend coaching their sales people and their lack of process in motivating them. Many sales managers today have been relegated to spreadsheet masters and know more about general accounting principles than they know about the skill sets of their sales people. Forget about motivating them… “Ok … let’s make sure you get those numbers up next month. You’re tracking at 70% and need to turn it around.” Yeah, no kidding. If your sales person doesn’t realize this already, then you have a hiring problem and not a sales problem. Why are they tracking at 70%? Have you been in the field with them? What are you going to do to get them to 100%? Where is the bottleneck in their cycle – is it a prospecting problem, a presentation problem, a proposing problem? What’s happening? Do you know, or do you think making them worry about not “turning it around next month” is going to do anything besides motivating them to update their resume?
Start coaching. Start developing your sales people. The rookies, the studs, the poor performers … all of them. Don’t be afraid of motivating them either. You don’t have to be Tony Robbins or Vince Lombardi – just take a sincere interest in their success and say these simple words “we’re going to make this work together”.
