Coaching Drives Candor

Many organizations are investing in improving the way their sales managers coach. There are many benefits to this focus, but one solid outcome is creating a more candid environment. Why is this important? Think about how important forecasting is right now and the amount of pressure that comes down to achieve the targets that have been assigned.

Without a coaching oriented leadership team, you will see overcommitted forecasts, opportunity pursuit plans with missing risks and a burned out sales manager coming up short trying to save the day on every deal. Top organizations are focusing their coaching efforts around accounts and opportunities to keep it centered on results.

Invest in Viable Deals

When resources are scarce, it is important to invest in viable deals. When sales are down, salespeople tend to hold on to opportunities longer than usual. World-Class sales organizations are more than three times more likely to have an established process to know when to stop investing in a large deal.

One coaching tip is to find out if the key contact in each opportunity is willing to provide access to others in their organization. Not getting this access is a highly accurate warning sign that something needs to change in the pursuit plan, including a decision to stop pursuit.

Solve Your Prospects Challenges

Prospects, like your current customers, have new challenges they are trying to solve. Salespeople who can articulate how they can help solve these issues are much more likely to get their calls and voicemails returned.

Learn what your salespeople are saying when trying to secure time with prospects. Which salespeople are getting the best return rate on calls? As a manager, you should be leveraging these best practices for the benefit of the rest of the team. This is a scalable activity.

Invest Time With your Customers

There is no better place to invest time in current market conditions than with your current customers. But the most common mistake made when trying to secure this time with customers is that salespeople lack a valid business reason.

Your customers are facing new challenges. The reasons they started doing business with you may have changed in recent months. It is important to learn what’s changed,but salespeople must be prepared to bring value to the conversation. Trying to schedule time to “catch up” is not likely to produce results.

What's In it For Me?

Stressing Image Over Substance

Image advertising is all about you and your business. How great you are, your qualifications, years in business, full-service product line, etc.. But your prospects don't care about you, they care about themselves. Anyone reading or listening to your ad has one question in mind: "What's in it for me?"

Simply put, an image ad has no way to track results. Its goal is to keep the company name in front of the public and often tries very hard to be clever. Watch any beer and soft drink commercials and you'll know what I mean. By contrast, a direct response ad is trackable using "coded" responses. Your business knows exactly which ads their prospects are responding to. This helps you measure the effectiveness of each ad.