The third foundation of good sales management, of course, is coaching your people to success. There’s all sorts of schools of thoughts out there about how to best work with people but in this day and age, which is one of empowerment, people want to feel like they’re involved in the decision making processes of their job. They want to feel like their opinion is heard by management. So a more enlightened approach to coaching your people today in today’s management environment is really working with sales people to help them to understand and reach their own conclusions about how they can improve their sales performance.
Coaching requires active engagement which requires in turn, time spent seriously involved in a salesperson’s day to day, week to week routine activities. There’s a number of different ways to do this, of course. The most effective way is spending one on one time with your salespeople in the field actually visiting accounts, strategizing them, talking about and preparing for sales calls, going on those sales calls and then debriefing after those sales calls to talk about what happened, what was learned and how could the sales call have been improved. Most salespeople learn by doing, and so the active coaching is the art of getting out with your people into the field and then actually working with them to help them to understand how they can enhance their sales performance and their sales technique.