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The Sales Process vs. The Buying Experience
Ideally, the sales process you use creates a very desirable customer buying experience but this often isn't the case and can become a real problem.
"What we've found after studying about 5,000 Sales People at our company is that the relationship the Sales Person has with their direct manager, their Sales Coach, is the key to everything. If you want to keep more top performers, improve that relationship. If you want more medium performers to improve, you have to work on that front-line coaching relationship. All too often, Sales Managers spend way too much time in their offices, analyzing numbers, generating reports, responding to problems and reacting to requests from Sales Executives. When this chokes the time spent coaching, results nearly always are hurt. We have learned to protect the Sales Coach / Sales Person relationship and one-on-one interaction time."
Kelly R. - President Sales - Media Sales
"We really thought we were training our Sales People to be effective. However, when we went out and watched them sell, way too many of them, people we had spent a lot of money on, couldn't engage the buyer in a natural and effective way. They talked too much, asked questions that were obvious and simply were not listening and recognizing opportunity when it popped out. We had to re-evaluate completely how much training and practice was necessary to get our middle performers effective on sales calls. Once we accepted this and stopped blaming the Sales People, we started making a lot of progress and quickly. We practice a lot more than we ever did and it's paying off many times over."
Bill S. - SVP Sales
Financial Services
20 years, working with over 155 companies, 17,000 Sales People 1,500 Sales Managers and 400 Sales Executives was what made this new book, "Sales Levers & The Power of One" possible. Dycoco Sales and Training Consultants have worked with Sales Professionals from 120 of the Fortune 500, generally to accomplish 4 objectives:
- Increase sales
- Cut sales costs and improve margins
- Build a strong sales culture
- Build a real coaching culture
The collective knowledge gained on all those projects combined with 100's of interviews with leading Executives were conducted to find out what the best Executives, Managers and Trainers are doing to build and sustain top performing Sales Teams. That insight and knowledge is what this new book is all about
"When you look at the way sports teams train their athletes, you see a much more serious commitment to training, practice and more practice. We were expecting out Sales People to figure it out on their own for far too long, then we thought because we'd done good training, they should all just "get it." The reality is, we needed constant coaching, practice and review to get all of our Sales People up to an acceptable level of competency. I think most Sales Executive have no idea how much work goes into teaching a Sales Team how to consistently execute under pressure."
Sharon R. - VP Sales - Internet Advertising
Develop a "RECHARGE" Operating Style
Sales Teams need constant replenishing of energy. Some Sales Leaders have forgotten this as they focus their energy on internal organizational issues.
Why Sales Managers Don't Coach (no quotes listed yet)
73 of 75 Sales Executives interviewed in 2016 stated that the number one issue that prevents improving sales performance is a lack of front-line sales coaching.
Sales Levers & the power of one
A new Book on how Sales Leaders generate Results
More Quotes in the Chapter Links being added every week
Competency Thresholds - The Key to Building a Coaching Culture
A remarkably simple and effective tool that is essential if you want to build a true sales coaching culture. Without it, it's hard to get skills-based coaching to happen.
The Sales Team Interactions That Matter Most
How Sales Managers interact with Sales People, how Executives interact with Sales Managers and how Sales Trainers work with the team is the topic of this chapter.
The 8 Key Sales Levers that Matter Most
There are 8 levers that Executives, Sales Managers and Sales Trainers can use to lift the performance of Sales Teams. This chapter explores what they are.
"It's much harder to get Sales Managers to coach than we ever expected. We severely under estimated how much training and COACHING Sales Managers need in order to transform into effective Sales Coaches. Coaching is about running practices, watching the players play the game and responding, in real time with helpful feedback, advice, suggestions and demonstrations. It's not just about looking at and analyzing data. In fact too much analysis of data can become a real problem."
Carol S. - Sales Executive
IT Systems
The High Performance Sales Leadership Mindset
This chapter summarizes what top performing Sales Leaders have in common and more importantly, how they approach the job of building great Sales Teams.
Links to Chapters and Interview Quotes
The Most Under-Utilized Resource on the Training Team... BY FAR
Many of the best Sales Organizations see the Sales Training team as a high powered "special ops" group capable of MUCH MORE than doing training classes.
Spark > Flame > Fire > Heat ... Light a Pilot
To accelerate improvement, it is critical to focus extra resources on a small pilot team to get the sales culture firing at the highest possible level ... first ...
Sales Leadership Blindspots that Stall Progress
This chapter explores the danger of "we're already doing that" thinking that gets entrenched in Sales Organizations and how to defeat it.
Background on Michael St. Lawrence, Dycoco and how the information that made it into this book was generated.
Below, you'll find links to the chapters of Sales Levers & The Power of One the way it is currently laid out (will probably change!) and the interview quotes of yours and other Sales Executives we interviewed. A number of the people we interviewed were curious about more detail on the book content so that they could contribute more relevant insights. Please feel free to explore the chapters, review your quotes, as we're going through the interviews and putting more up every week. We will send you a notice when all of your quotes we would like to use are up and posted. Thanks again for all your help and support and if these chapter summaries give you new ideas you'd like to contribute, PLEASE call or email me. I'd love to hear them!
Top Performers - The Ignition Key
Every Sales Leader wants more top performers, but they can be a real challenge to manage. This chapter explores how to better tap this powerful resource.
"We started becoming a much better, more effective and efficient Sales Organization when we started thinking about our Sales Trainers differently. We used to use them for new hire training and a few other deliveries from time to time. When we started to think of them as our most potent sales coaching resource, it caused a lot of very positive changes. We look for a completely different person now for the Sales Trainer role and it is transforming our teams faster than we ever were able to do before this change.
Sheila K - EVP Sales
Commercial Lending