Sales Coaching

Sales coaching is an essential need when it comes to impacting sales results.

Sales coaching for elite thinkers and top performers.

Sales coaching is not sales management.  Great sales managers know how to coach.  Great sales people generally don’t like to be managed.  They love to be coached.  All top performers regardless of their professional work with a professional coach.  Long-term success is built mostly on having a team of highly competent sales coaching and other pros on your team.

I recently worked with a technology company with the goal of impacting new sales results in 90 days or less.  Working with the owner of the company we determined that the best place to start was to write a simple, one to two page plan of action.  The who, what, when and where of our new partnership to generate more business.

We cleaned up the database, called and emailed everyone directly, qualified everyone, added three thousand new business owner profiles, and implemented a 14,000 sales call campaign to be done in 90 days from start to finish.  At least that was the plan.  The reality was it took us 2 months to clean up the database.  It took us another month to dial in the outbound telemarketing campaign after building a new list to call.

Here’s what sales coaching and developing a plan enabled us to achieve in less than 90 days.

1. Cleaned up the entire database and decided to keep their CRM system in place.

2. Called and emailed every single person in the database.

3. Assigned an activity date for follow up,  if they qualified for one.

4. Segmented every person into the appropriate group for follow up marketing.

5. Launched a 14,000 sales call telemarketing campaign.

6. Talked with 1,400 plus business owners.

7. Got 25 really solid sales appointments by conference call.

8. Added one new client, with several more moving through the pipeline toward closing.

Although the client and I didn’t ultimately agree on what a successful outcome should look like, we did agree that the plan we crafted together did what it was supposed to do.  There were some bumps along the way.  And we made some misfires with regard to not controlling the script tightly enough.  In the end, we supercharged a pipeline in 90 days or less.

Every business has it’s own sales funnel, sales process, sales culture, sales people, partners, and sales system.  Sales coaching is what brings it all together.  The professional sales coach bridges the business strategic vision with the tactical elements of execution.  Unlike event based and “entertrainment” oriented sales training, sales coaching conversations are structured to take place each week.  A solid structure, accountability and sales planning process is set in motion once people commit to working with a professional sales coaching program.

Tell us about your sales coaching plan?  Have any questions or comments to share with the community of fellow business owners?