Andreas von der Heydt

So moving on from last week’s breakdown of some of the key trends in building a world-class key account management programme, I thought we would turn today’s blog into a more people development related blog post.

Coaching your sales team is an integral part of the success formula within a sales organisation. Thus we need to examine the role of the manager and the amount of time that we spend on building the capabilities of our team.


Firstly, let’s list some activities that we can do as part of a coaching programme

1. Pre-Sales Activities
2. Strategizing around the pipeline
3. Mentoring your team
4. Sales Activities – get involved (presentations, negotiations etc)!

High-performing managers emphasize three opportunity creation activities in particular, and these combine to support key coaching benefits and are geared around effective use of time:

· identifying the best prospects
· assessing prospect fit with supplier value proposition
· quantifying the full cross-sale opportunity within a prospect

“Star managers take the time to coach their reps to spend time against high-value activities.”

To take an example, McKesson (http://www.mckesson.co.uk/?section=page&p=/), a healthcare technology specialist, uses a daily scorecard that enables managers to work with reps to dynamically assess prospect/deal attractiveness as the sales process unfolds. This ensures reps focus time on those opportunities with the highest likelihood of success.

So as we draw to an end today, let me finish up by outlining three of the key activities managers should focus on during their day from a coaching standpoint:

1. Deciding upon if a potential customer is a good fit for the supplier capabilities
2. Prospecting appropriate targets
3. Determining the full opportunity and quantifying it

Now the final point would be how long should we be coaching for?

To this the Sales Excellence Council recommends about 3-5 hours per month. Not a lot of time for sales success!

Happy Coaching!

Best Regards

Umar Gill
Rewiring Sales
Exclusively on: http://www.consumergoodsclub.com