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People have been abuzz about Sales 2.0 for some time, and rightfully so. The world of sales has evolved. Prospects have become more product-savvy. Social media has transformed the landscape of selling. And mobile technology has made it easier for salespeople to connect with prospects and manage their sales activities.
As a sales manager, here’s the question: Has your sales coaching shifted to mirror these advancements?
Sales 2.0 dictates that sales managers engage in Sales Coaching 2.0 to match their team’s updated sales world. Gone are the days of using the same old sales coaching techniques with your salespeople. To keep up with your team’s Sales 2.0 reality, your sales coaching needs some updating too.
Sales Coaching 2.0 means your sales coaching is customized to include the Sales 2.0 demands on your salespeople – product-savvy prospects, social media and technology usage.
Prospects can have much of their buying decisions made before they even speak with one of your salespeople. This means that prospects are coming to their sales conversations with information about your company’s product(s) before they speak with your team.
I’ve been polling business audiences and the vast majority of people claim they have 75 percent of their buying decisions made before they speak with a salesperson. That implies that most prospects only need help with the other 25 percent of their buying decisions.
When a prospect has a large portion of their buying decision made, the nature of a salesperson’s conversation is then limited to the remaining percentage left in the prospect’s buying decision.
What does this mean to your sales coaching?
It would be wise to coach your salespeople to focus on developing ways to discover where their prospects are in their decision-making and to address their prospects’ remaining 25 or 30 percent.
A recent Forbes headline provides a compelling argument for your salespeople to use social media as one of their sales tools. The headline? “Study: 78% of Salespeople Using Social Media Outsell Their Peers.”
As part of your Sales Coaching 2.0, ensure you are coaching your salespeople on the social media they use. As a result, they will prospect more efficiently, sell more effectively and earn more referrals.
Start by coaching your salespeople on their use of LinkedIn. It provides them with an ideal opportunity to connect with prospects and clients and demonstrate the sales principle, help others with their buying decisions. As you know, the emphasis in social media is about helping others.
LinkedIn is an excellent means for initiating relationships. Most salespeople have greater success with LinkedIn when they see it as a prospecting tool that leads to sales, rather than a sales tool that renders immediate sales results.
When coaching your salespeople on their LinkedIn profile, help them:
Once you have sufficiently coached your salespeople on their profiles, coach them to reach out and provide value to prospects.
Sometimes ensuring that your salespeople master the technology related to their job can be challenging.
As their sales manager, you can run into a myriad of problems, including knowing how to use all the technology yourself, discovering which team members are masterful with which types of technology and figuring out how to get everyone on your team using the technology appropriately.
And of course, if the technology is used during prospect or client interactions, you have an additional challenge, discovering how your salespeople introduce and use the technology to enhance the sale, rather than get in the way of the sale.
When coaching your team members on their use of technology, think of it as a three-step process:
By mirroring your sales coaching to the changes to your team’s Sales 2.0 world, you ensure your salespeople are getting the sales development they need to sell more in their updated sales reality. Sales Coaching 2.0 is the key to your team’s sales success
Peri Shawn is a sales coaching thought leader who transforms the complexity of getting salespeople to perform better into the fewest number of action steps to help them sell more. Peri’s company, the Coaching and Sales Institute (CSI), has been in the sales coaching business for 25 years and is the sales training and coaching behind the launch of such products as the debit card and Blackberry in Canada. Peri has authored Sell More with Sales Coaching (Wiley, September 2013) as well as the three corporate guidebooks.
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