Sales Coaching

"When I went to Seattle (Seahawks) from college, I assumed, not having been in the league, that players were coached and ready to go." "But as I found out, they've got to be coached just like college players, just like high school players." "You've got to coach them all the time, make sure they're doing the right things." Coach Dennis Erickson, former head coach of San Francisco 49ers.

Major focus:

• Recognize and leverage the business challenges of: time and uncertainty

• Establish credibility with your team

• Give and receive postive feedback

• Communicate expectations

• Break through the ego-driven mental shell with care-fronting

• Suggest areas of improvement and model the desired behavior

• Deal with resistance

Chances are your team is comprised of a combination of seasoned professionals, new hires, high performers, low performers and the fact is they all need to be coached. As a result, you need to employ professional situational coaching to maximize the potential of all team members. And seasoned sales professionals can be the most difficult people to coach. The traits that make them producers: independent, sizable ego, action oriented also cause them to resist doing something different which they are not confident will get them good results. Unfortunately, in many cases what they are doing is not getting results and they think if they just do more they will get better results. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As a sales manager coaching a high performance team your challenge is to motivate them to reflect on their behaviors; a difficult challenge but we will reinforce what you have been doing and give you some new skills and ideas to create the environment where they will try something different.