Well-intentioned sales managers conduct weekly one-on-one coaching sessions. They don’t cancel these important meetings in order to handle the latest sales fire or for other reasons. They prepare for the coaching sessions armed with data and analytics.
So why are sales managers holding so many ineffective sales coaching sessions? The answer:
Sales managers confuse deal review with deal coaching.
Sales managers continue to conduct “roll call” coaching sessions because their focus is on analyzing the sales data, not on better training of their salespeople. They review deals by asking these questions:
What are the dollars at the top of the sales funnel?
What is the salesperson’s deal velocity?
What is the salesperson’s average deal size?
What are the salesperson conversation rates at each selling stage?
This is great information to know. But even more important is what you do with the data.
Here’s a reality check:
Any sales manager can read reports.
But not every sales manager knows how to coach based on the data.
The key to effective sales management is knowing how to improve the sales numbers you are analyzing.
For example, a salesperson doesn’t have enough opportunities at the top of the sales funnel. So does this salesperson have a targeting issue? The best sales professional in the world can’t close business if they keep pursuing prospects that don’t match their ideal client profile.
Maybe the salesperson has a messaging blind spot. She is hitting all the agreed upon sales activity metrics, however, still not achieving sales results. Perhaps it’s because she is delivering a one-size-fits-all generic value proposition in prospecting outreaches.
You might have a salesperson that is great at moving deals from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel, where they get stuck.
Are deals getting held up because the salesperson doesn’t know how to dollarize the cost of the prospect’s problem? Or does the salesperson lack the assertiveness to ask for meetings with all the buying influences in order to create better recommendations?
Effective sales management is a combination of deal review and deal coaching. Engage in deal review by looking and evaluating the data from your CRM system. That’s deal review.
But don’t confuse the evaluation of data with deal coaching.
Deal coaching is working with your salesperson on the emotional intelligence skills and the consultative selling skills that change sales numbers. Win more deals by increasing your deal coaching sessions.
Good Selling!
