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“They’re driving me crazy!” aren’t the words you’d expect to hear from a sales manager of a high-performing team.
As any experienced sales manager knows, top salespeople are essential to a company’s success because they bring in the bulk of the sales. It’s not surprising that many companies make it a priority to prevent their most successful salespeople from being poached by headhunters.
Yet, these high performers can also present some challenges because they often act as lone wolves and sometimes require kid-glove treatment.
One of the things sales managers can do to earn their high performers’ loyalty is to help them sell even more. Since they are typically results-driven, this gives them a reason to stay.
How can a company support its top salespeople to get even better while also addressing the issues they pose?
Part of the solution lies in coaching, but with a difference. Traditional coaching methods often don’t work with high performers which can cause sales managers and high performers to avoid coaching. The result is their coaching relationship can dwindle and, in many cases, cease. Beware of this as it becomes a fertile environment for headhunters.
Getting the most from your high-performing salespeople while being cognizant of their challenges is a three-part process:
High performers are usually quick thinkers. This may seem to be great for engaging sales conversations, but it comes at a cost.
Because high performers think quickly, their fast brains limit their ability to adapt their communications to others who may not think as fast as they do. The result is holes in their communication—they may think that a prospect “got it” when in fact the prospect didn’t.
Misunderstandings created by this dynamic can create a ripe environment for unsatisfied clients, and as a consequence, you and your customer service team may spend a lot of time cleaning up the fallout left by your perpetrating high performing salespeople.
How do you work with these potential challenges?
The secret is to stop focusing your coaching on the behaviors of your top performers. Instead, focus your coaching on the thinking behind those behaviors.
Set your sights on being the catalyst of your salespeople’s thinking. An improvement in their sales behaviors will naturally follow, which will result in their improved sales. This way you coach to their strength of being quick thinkers.
As their sales coach, your role is to not to try to do the thinking for them. Instead, your sales coaching role is to improve your salespeople’s thinking. They’ll then apply their new and improved thinking to their sales conversations.
How do you provide them with feedback so they can improve?
Most people like to receive accolades. Yet, positive feedback isn’t what we want to hear all the time. There is a place where positive feedback is helpful when coaching top performers and there’s a place where positive feedback can be unproductive.
When salespeople try new sales approaches, they usually appreciate and desire positive feedback.
But once team members develop a level of skill or mastery in a particular area, research indicates that they want “negative” feedback. They want to know what they did that didn’t work and figure out how to do it even better next time.
Knowing when to provide positive or “negative” feedback is essential when it comes to coaching your top salespeople. Reality is: You really don’t know when or with whom to use positive or negative feedback. It can be a crapshoot. The best way to go about it is to ask each of your top performers how they prefer their feedback—and then get feedback on your feedback so you know if what you are doing is working for them.
Recognize that trust is the key for making your feedback and coaching sessions fruitful. Without it, you turn your attempts at coaching your high performing salespeople into a power struggle that will make the headhunters’ job a lot easier.
When you are looking to retain your top performers, focus on understanding them better, coaching their thinking and providing them the “right” kind of feedback. This way you’ll keep the recruiters at bay.
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