How to Be a Great Sales Manager [“Sales Shot” Workshop Recording]
How to Be a Great Sales Manager
[“Sales Shot” Workshop Recording]
[“Sales Shot” Workshop Recording]
Whether you’re a current sales manager craving more training, a sales rep who aspires to lead, or a leader who wants to know the secret to turning their best reps into great managers, watch this informative workshop to learn:
Plus, many more tips straight out of our Sales Bar. There’s a management tip or two for everyone!
Whether you’re a current sales manager craving more training, a sales rep who aspires to lead, or a leader who wants to know the secret to turning their best reps into great managers, watch this informative workshop to learn:
Plus, many more tips straight out of our Sales Bar. There’s a management tip or two for everyone!
Lauren Bailey Coaching, Sales Manager Life Savers
In all my years of sales leadership, there has never been a sales coaching emergency. You? Ever gotten a call after hours along the lines of:
“Panic! They don’t know how to…!! Help!?”
Exactly. And this is actually why, despite all our good intentions, there are precious few true coaching cultures in sales organizations. Even though we know the benefits – coaching skills that exceed expectations result in 94.8% of reps meeting quota and a top demand from the millennial and gen Z’s you’re trying to hire (source: like every study published in the past five years).
Since there ARE sales emergencies, customer emergencies, product emergencies, and political emergencies every single day (and the non-emergent intentions), it’s no surprise that meetings get pushed to the bottom.
Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of partnering with many organizations to establish or turn around their development cultures and we have lots of resources to help you after you finish this blog. Check out our top 20 actions download to help increase coaching frequency, our recent webinar on establishing a coaching culture, as well this fun quiz to determine whether or not your organization has a coaching culture.
If you’re a sales leader, the most important place you can start is by assessing your current culture of development and sales coaching importance. Here are a few questions to get you started:
The goal here is to determine if you have enough coaching, the right kind of coaching, and the kind of culture that supports it.
Starting with question 1, you may be surprised to learn that nearly 50% of reps disagree that they’re getting as much coaching as their managers state. Some of this is due to canceled or pushed coaching when fires happen (and let’s be honest, they happen daily in sales). I think the root of the problem here is how we define coaching. Most managers believe they’re coaching during a 1:1 meeting, a “how’s it going” chat, or a pipeline/deal conversation. Sorry,
“That’s NOT coaching!”
Our definition of best-in-class coaching is:
Sadly, this means that if you’re playing a call at a team meeting (great job by the way), this is sales training, not sales coaching. At most, you can provide custom feedback on a rep’s skills for about 3 people and 3 short call recordings in an hour. Yes, it also means that giving someone a laundry list of what to improve also doesn’t count as coaching. That’s just bullying. Inspect some sessions. You’ll be surprised – and you’ll be showing coaching’s importance with your presence.
Sales Executive Council also tells us that call coaching (aka skill coaching) is sales managers’ #1 worst skill. I’ve been hiring and training sales managers for 20 years and I wholeheartedly agree. And the hardest skill to shift is the laundry list of improvement items. It’s so easy for us to hear the challenges, and so hard for us to resist giving just one more idea for improvement. 90% of sessions during role plays come off negative at first, and it takes us at LEAST three training and practice sessions to start to even this out.
Like most leaders who came up through sales, I’m 100% guilty of the coaching bully myself. In fact, as we train sales managers how to coach at Factor 8, I modeled the curriculum after all my own personal atrocities. “Be like me…I do all the talking…Debbie Downer…” you get the picture. If you relate to this, you’ve probably also taken over a call or two you were meant to be silently observing.
That’s why I only coach recordings now. I just can’t be trusted during a live call. It’s also led to my #1 tip for antsy sales coaches:
“Coach the rep, not the deal.”
When we approach coaching with the intent of building confidence and skill vs. saving the deal, everything changes. Imagine the deal already lost. Resist the temptation to even ask about the outcome. Focus instead on engaging this seller, and helping them love their job, love their company, love their manager, and love sales.
It changes everything.
A note on culture. Spend a minute Googling the concept of a “growth mindset.” It’s our ultimate goal for sales coaching cultures. It’s a magical land where everyone cares more about improvement than winning. Did you just laugh out loud, my sales leader friend? Before you dismiss it, realize it’s the calling card of nearly every great athlete, and imagine if all your “A” players just kept getting better. How do you get here? A few ideas:
A final word of advice: over-correct. My first Sales Director job came on the heels of me launching a training department. There was no other sales leader as dedicated to developing people as I. It still took me 6 months in the new gig to start talking about and prioritizing training. So I get how hard it is and how busy everyone is and how many emergencies keep coaching at the bottom of the to-do list. So, if it’s your goal, you’ll need to triple down to shift the pendulum. Dedicate six months to over-doing it. Talk about it in every team meeting and all-hands. Drop into coaching sessions and coach the coaches. Reward top coaches and rep improvements. Add it to contests. Ask manager for skill trends in every meeting. Spend money on sales manager training. Be sure it is OVER represented in your calendar, your budget, and your voice for long enough that your team knows it isn’t a flavor of the month.
Got a tip? Drop me a line and let me know what’s worked for you! lb@factor8.com.
Fill out the form below to watch the recording from
our recent session on“Creating a Coaching Culture” for more tips.
Lauren Bailey Sales Leadership Insight, Team Engagement + Culture
Let’s talk about sales rep rewards. With employee engagement at an all-time low and more reps leaving their employers every day, we’ve got to find new and creative ways to show appreciation to our top-performing employees to entice them to stay!
If you lead a digital sales team, you’ll probably remember the days you brought big-screen TVs to the front of the sales floor for the quarterly contest. My husband and I both came up in sales, and we have patio furniture, a few game sets, and LOTS of electronics. We’ve been to countless baseball and basketball suites and even visited Maui, Whistler, and the Bahamas thanks to President’s Club Trips. I bet you’ve enjoyed the big three sales incentives yourself: Sports, Electronics, and Travel (oh my!).
They’re classics for a reason, but every once in a while I have to remind myself that classic can actually mean outdated. Here are a few creative ideas to refresh your sales rep rewards and incentives with the new generations and dispersed teams in mind:
While you’re refreshing your prizes, I invite you to also refresh your criteria. Sales incentives get eye-rolls FAST if the same people always win. Do you have a contest for the newbies? For call quality? For attitude? For key performance indicators? For metrics? All of these can help spread the love for different kinds of talent and behaviors you want more of – not just for the tenured reps with the big accounts. This is critical for keeping fresh diverse talent interested! Folks are watching your leaders and your winners for signs of favoritism and inequity, and sales incentives are definitely in that fishbowl!
Not sure where to go? Pull in a few high-potential reps and ask their opinions! That’s a reward in and of itself.
Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps and managers.
Lauren Bailey Sales Manager Life Savers, Manager Meetings
At my very first management job, I managed a little retail pop-up at Lindale Mall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Funny how that experience was SO cool in my twenties, cringy in my thirties, and now just a sweet memory.
In that job, I learned the hard way how important it is to teach yourself (or your team) what a successful meeting should look like. I learned that if you don’t have a plan, agenda, or at least a list, then what you will have is a train wreck. Your meetings will be too long, too short, too impersonal, or too casual. However, with a little pre-planning and strategy, your sales manager meetings can be both impactful and efficient!
I will never forget my first “team meeting” at the retail store. I prepared for DAYS and my 45-minute meeting went TWO HOURS long. The patient, part-time adults working there were DYING of boredom. Every new manager has felt this pain, right? (Please, tell me I’m not alone). That experience stayed with me as I left retail and went into the bright shiny world of sales.
In the sales world, there are so many important sales manager meetings. As a fledgling manager, it was hard for me to understand the nuances of each separate type of meeting.
So, for all of my newbie sales managers (or future sales managers) I wanted to break down the top 8 essential sales manager meetings you need to master and provide a little insight that I wish I had in my early days.
Now, is this a list of all the sales manager meetings you will be a part of? No, but it’s a good place to start if you need to either begin setting up your schedule or if you need to take back control of it. As a manager, sometimes your day can get away from you while you are working hard to help each member of your team. If that’s the case, use this list to find the right meeting to address the question. How would you spend the extra time you’ll get back each day?
Join one of our upcoming Virtual Sales Management Boot Camps! We offer 3 different classes for new, aspiring, and seasoned Sales Managers. Our Boot Camps cover the most important aspects of a sales management position, like running a successful 1:1, time management and productivity, having difficult conversations, call coaching, and more!