Finance and Business

Great Sales Force Coaching

Since coaching sales reps can be stressful and difficult, let’s take a close loot at what for a great coach, and what constitutes excellent coaching. Successful field coaching of reps requires that sales managers recognize three preconditions.

• First, the manager must set aside time for coaching. Some expert believe that in typical sales management position, 75% of the manager’s time should be spent in the field coaching reps.
• Second, to be truly effective, most coaching must be done individually with reps, in sessions that last from thirty-five to forty-five minutes and take place immediately prior to or following rep activities minutes and take place immediately prior to or following rep activities with customers. This make the coaching more relevant and timely.

Coaching that is delayed or out of sync with applicable situation is not nearly so effective. Although certain amount of coaching of sales reps in a group setting is possible, most coaching of reps should be tailored to the individual to reflect the operating realities of different reps, customer sets, and distributors in a territory.

Third, the benefits of coaching are not truly realized until trust has been established between sales manager and rep. coaching involves confronting problems. Unless trust is present, the rep being coached may not feel the manager has earned the right to be as firm and direct as the situation requires. The manager’s authority is not sufficient in itself to ensure that genuine coaching session will occur.

The sales manager shouldn’t dominate a coaching session. Yet this frequently occurs in the absence of trust. Because trust involves shared values and experiences, developing a relationship takes time. Sales managers must recognize the time-consuming nature of trust building.
A great coach performs several key roles for sales reps :
The instructor-teacher role. Sales managers should help reps integrate what they learned in the classroom about products or selling skills with what their experience is teaching the “in the street.” A sales manager can provide quality instruction to reps, on the spot, before o after sales calls about :
- How to probe for genuine customer needs.
- How to categorize customers by sales potential, in ways that make the rep smarter  in qualifying business prospects or more able to typify the key buying influences in an account. Customer categorization help reps stay organized. They can more readily use their accumulated knowledge of what works for customers.
- How to study and categorize competitors. Sales managers who teach reps to better understand competitors are providing them with information useful in setting sales goals in the midst of changing competition in the local territory. Reps covering key urban territories are often subject to more aggressive and numerous competitive maneuvers than are reps in larger, rural territories.
- How to optimally lay out routing plans for customer call cycles, depeding on various accounts’ sales volumes and territory. The manager can guide reps in defining “A.” “B” or “C” target accounts, then help the rep determine feasible call schedules.
- Sales managers can provide quality instruction on what the rep can do to achieve desirable outcomes. Managers can be dispassionate about which approaches work best and/or how these can be finetuned. This improves a sales rep’s adaptive selling skills. Often a manager accompanying a rep can see ways for the rep to improve his of her handling of customer objections of to improve closing techniques. Teaching reps self-assessment skills is a vital part of a coach’s role.

Sales Rep Peformance Appraisals #2

To get maximum benefits from the aprraisal process, managers need to be very specific about their goals and how these goals are to be measured. Managers who are very specific about their goals before an appraisal avoid surprising reps during appraisal about what their objectives are supposed to be. Second, indentifying what measurement will be used against these goals clarifies how performance will be determined against goals. Rating won`t be incongruous with performance because both rep and manager will have been looking at identical measures.

But measuring specific goals against actual performace ratings is just a start. Reps also need to know how to improve, from the manager`s perspective. Do they need more training in a specific skill? Do they need to learn by immersion in some specialized assignment? Does the rep need to put out more effort in terms of calls per day or new account calls? Does the rep need more product training on new products in order to speed up sales of the new lines? Does the rep become more organized, more focused?

Reps need feedback on how to improve in as specific a form as it is possible to provide. This is the only way for them to try to neutralize any negatives in their abilities, or to boost the application of any underutilized strengths they may possess.

One way to get reps more actively involved in the appraisal process is to ask them to do a self-appraisal prior to the appraisal meeting. This could include self-assessments of results, skills, and attributes, as well as training needs. The self-assessment can them form the basis of a two-way instructive dialogue between the manager and rep. If the rep`s self-assessment is close to that done by the manager, the two are in lock-step agreement about rep develop needs, shortfalls, and strengths.

If the rep self-assessment is far apart from that of the manager, either the rep is quite out of touch with how he or she is performing or the manager and rep have developed a real communication problem about the manager`s goals and ratings measurements. If, however, the gap cannot be explained by one of these two scenarios, then it can only have results from an unfair out-of-touch appraiser. The manager is then in deep trouble because he/she obviously doesn`t know his or people (and is unfit to lead them).

Peter Drucker maintains that the new managers must lead specialists just as an orchestra leader does, teaching people who all play to a different score how to harmonize. One of the management`s key challenges is to find such a way that the specialist is involved in the appraisal, is clear about the goals for his or her specialty, and knows exactly how the orchestra leader believes he/she can improve individual performance to the assigned score.

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This is second series from previous Sales Rep Peformance Appraisals

Sales Rep Peformance Appraisals

Sales reps in the 1990s are becoming more professional, more service-oriented toward customers, and more self-managed. Many are specialists, better-trained and more targeted. As such they expect to be appraised on their performance in objective, professional, and constructive ways. And they expect to be active “partners” in this appraisal process -involved in rating themselves and providing their opinions on where they need to improve, alongside those of the manager.  After all, sales people are very much like professional contractors: They work for the customer.

The reps take feedback from customers about what is satisfying their needs and then adapt sales solutions accordingly. The manager becomes less of an “authority” figure than the person working alongside the rep to help him or her develop and do the very best possible job to keep customers happy.

Many formal appraisals rate reps on a series of proficiencies, both quantitative and qualitative. These include skills in such areas as time management, paperwork handling, customer relations, expense control, holding onto customers and avoiding customer turnober, growing new account, and hitting salse forecasts.

These “laundry list” type appraisals fall down on two counts. First, they assume that reps with all of these well-rounded skills will succeed, which is not always the case in an age of narrower rep specialization. And second, they don`t tie ratings specifically enough back to the manager`s stated goals. Rep proficiency levels are only relevant if the are goal-directed.

For instance, if a sales manager`s goals are to grow sales to new accounts, the proficiencies necessary to produce this result among reps differ markedly from those necessary to hold onto and grow sales via “old line” existing accounts. Each goal requires different kinds of training and daily call effort. Each would emphasize different field-level spending priorities in expense budgets. And each requires different skills in sales technique and paperwork handling.