One of David Sandler’s Formula for Success elements was developing a support group. Not the kind where you sit around moaning about the prospect that screwed you over or where conversations blame the market, the company, or the boss. A selling support group needs to concentrate on how we do a better job at developing proven skills, maintaining a positive attitude, and implementing productive behaviors.
As a manager, how can you facilitate a support group for your sales team? The people in a support group can come from a few places. We’ll start with you as the leader.
When your sales team has questions or concerns they need to feel comfortable asking you for help – they should feel like you are a part of their support group. You are there to provide the coaching, training, and mentoring needed for your team to succeed. It may be some pre-call planning to strategically develop the series of questions they need to ask that ensure they are qualifying the prospect so the company benefits from the effort they make. It may be that this collaboration results in a shorter selling cycle or higher margin return.
The help can also come in the form of a post-call debrief of the meeting. As each salesperson works to review the elements of the call there are several opportunities to build the skills and reinforce the selling system.
A professional coach may be an option for salespeople if they’re looking to take their professional skills to another level. The key to coaching is to uncover what happened and to ask the compelling questions that allow the sales rep to come to the self-discovery that they did not execute the sales call as well as they could have.
The coach interaction should be a learning process that advances their selling system. For the coach, if something wasn’t executed to its full extent, the key is find out if the salesperson knew what to do and didn’t do it or was it a lack of knowledge that led to the salesperson’s lack of implementation. The former situation calls for coaching while the latter situation usually calls for training. The two are completely different managerial skills.
There are people all around you who have skills and abilities that salespeople can tap into. There are books and websites that will them you beyond where they are today. In a highly competitive world we need to move beyond the basics. The mediocre finish last, and a support group can help a struggling salesperson self-reflect in a positive way.
As a sales manager, how are you facilitating support groups for your sales team?
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