Great managers realize that one of their key roles is to maximize the productivity of their team and ensure they are operating at peak performance. The consequences of not having your sales team live up to their potential are severe: a decrease in sales, lower morale, higher turnover, client attrition; even your job.
Additionally, there’s the stress every manager feels from the added workload each time there’s a vacancy in a position, sales that need to be made, and territories that have to be covered.
Now, compound this challenge with the additional responsibility managers often have. Aside from being responsible for the production and development of their sales team, some managers are often responsible for hitting their own sales numbers and production goals.
With long work hours, deadlines, and personal responsibilities, something gets sacrificed. As such, managers find that developing, coaching, and retaining their staff takes a back seat to the problems and challenges that arise daily. Even with their best intentions, managers don’t often have the time and resources needed to effectively coach their staff or a strategy to identify and develop the essential skills and core characteristics needed to become a masterful coach. As a result, morale and productivity suffer.
Through the eyes of a salesperson, this lack of attention and support translates to a feeling of isolation. Quite often salespeople believe that management simply doesn’t care, won’t take the time to work with them, or simply isn’t available. This environment becomes the perfect breeding ground for low trust, high attrition and deteriorating performance.
What is management’s fundamental problem that proliferates dismal results, inefficiency, and failure? When it comes to strong leadership principles, while most managers may have the theory down, they struggle to convert these leadership principles into actionable, measurable steps and a process that can be duplicated consistently to achieve objectives. Until you experience it first hand, it is effective coaching that cracks the code and solves the most pressing issues that plague most managers today. My book makes it possible for any manager, business owner, or executive to develop the missing skill amongst leaders today: coaching.
Most leadership programs train in ideology rather than in developing a core competency or skill. Nothing more gets accomplished other than identifying another great concept in leadership, an overanalyzed theory, or an attribute the greatest leaders possess. Although they are sound principles, they’re devoid of a specific, measurable process or framework and a practical application that generates the results you seek. With a team of salespeople to manage, objectives to reach, and expectations to meet, you need measurable results fast!
Increased global competition, a rapidly changing marketplace, and less face time with customers and remote employees are forcing companies to reevaluate their selling and leadership strategies. With more business conducted across various communication platforms and more sales teams operating in a virtual environment, these managers question how proficient they can be at managing their team at a distance—especially since they have never been shown how to do so effectively. Managers do not always have the luxury of calling a face-to-face meeting and instead find themselves supporting, coaching, and managing their people over the telephone. Developing and strengthening your telephone coaching skills becomes essential to leveraging your competitive edge or you’re bound to get left behind.
Top leaders know that in order for their people to live their fullest potential every day, they need someone in their corner supporting them throughout the process. As such, a growing need for a proven, long-term solution that can be rapidly deployed to continually develop and retain top talent while maximizing new business opportunities has sparked the evolution of this new kind of manager that develops great leaders: the executive sales coach.
