Article
The world of sales is a thrilling roller coaster.
As a sales leader, you wear many hats: strategist, motivator, and, most importantly, coach. But let's face it – coaching your team can be a challenge!
Customer expectations are at an all-time high – being an order-taker won’t cut it these days. In the same breath, poor customer service in this role will have customers high-tailing it off to a competitor. Customers want a trusted advisor who can walk with them in lock-step as they navigate their business needs. A Key Account Manager (AM) is that person.
A Key AM plays a critical strategic role focused on managing and expanding relationships with a company’s most valuable customers, also known as key accounts. They serve as the primary point of contact and liaison between the company and key clients.
Their core mission is to maximize sales opportunities and revenue growth from these key accounts while ensuring continued loyalty and business – it’s no small feat.
When asked what an Account Manager (AM) does, the plain-jane answer is, well, they manage accounts.
And while that answer is logical and incredibly simplistic, it’s not entirely accurate. Sure, most AMs can offer a bare-bones relationship that is purely transactional, but this leaves a lot of money on the table and worse, displeased customers. With customer expectations at an all-time high, AMs are called to be so much more than that.
Here is a generalized breakdown of the basic activities an Account Manager typically does:
Over the past couple of years, a recurring theme has popped up at conferences for sales and sales enablement leaders. The main theme: growth is attainable, but sales performance is on a continual decline. Here’s the rub – everyone seems to be scrambling for the tool or missing piece that can take their team to the sales promise land.
This is probably why the latest productivity tools are so hot, with the latest AI tools at the top of the list. It seems like everyone is interested in leveraging AI to read the prospect’s mind.
There are now over 3,000 sales and productivity tools on the market, and the number grows each and every year, with each one claiming they have cracked the code. Everyone, it appears, is looking for something to make it easier to sell – and more power to them.
Selling is hard and any edge you can get is worth pursuing.
But here’s the truth about selling – There is no secret sauce, silver bullet, magic fairy dust (choose your favorite metaphor) to mastering the profession.
Make no mistake, we’re a big fan of the tools, pro tips, insights, and anything that will make it easier to sell. Our company has invested heavily in tools. But just like learning to play golf or the violin, there’s a defined set of capabilities sellers need to succeed. There are no shortcuts.
If a golfer struggles to hit the ball in the fairway, yes buy them the latest driver but rigorous practice is required to fix their swing.
As long as sellers are talking to customers, there is no shortcut to mastering the art of influence.
So this begs the question, what’s the most effective strategy for developing a seller’s capabilities?
Training? Nope.
Is it delivering real-time micro-learning to your team? Nope.
Here’s what we’ve learned from 20 years of research, conducting control group studies, and analyzing the highest-performing organizations – If you want to change performance there is nothing more effective than focusing on your front-line sales leader.
Training, micro-learning, and productivity tools are all critical to improving performance but nothing has more impact than the leader/coach. The leader drives the culture and engagement and is the key to developing the seller’s competency.
Simply put…change happens one to one and not in a workshop.
I know this idea on face value, isn’t revolutionary. You’re probably a big believer in coaching. You love the whole coaching movement. Almost every organization I’ve worked with supports the ideas.
But then I spend some time on the field and ask a few questions:
Imagine someone who knows nothing about sales, coming up to you and asking what a manufacturing sales rep does on a daily basis – how would you answer?
Sales in the manufacturing industry can feel like a page ripped straight from Dante’s Inferno – “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” That might be a bit overdramatic, but you don’t have to spend much time in the manufacturing space to understand that the struggle is real.
Have you ever heard the old saying that “the only constant is change?”
Have you ever been set up on a really bad blind date? You are probably thinking to yourself, “What the heck does a blind date have to do with sales rapport and referrals?”
Landing a referral is the holy grail of sales leads for most reps. Referrals are viewed as an easier win because they are motivated to buy, have at least basic knowledge of your product, and were pointed in your organization’s direction by someone they trust.
If you’re in sales, you might think everything is negotiable. But if you want to take your B2B sales team to the next level, one thing that’s non-negotiable is investing in training.
Great sales training means reaching as many people as possible in ways they understand.
Successful sales relationships are built on trust, acceptance, and understanding.
The effectiveness of sales training is determined far before it begins, and continues long after everyone has exited the conference room or logged off the video call.
Sales managers play an important role. They manage the plan and productivity. They support sales reps in their efforts to hit numbers. It can be a hard role to do well, and requires an advanced set of skills.
My transition to sales manager was fairly typical. I was promoted from a role I had excelled in (selling), to a role where I was completely incompetent (leading). In those early years of managing a team, I was more of an interactive kiosk than a leader: “If you have questions, I have answers. Be safe out there.”
I have spent the last 25 years singularly focused on answering one question: How do you improve a sales rep’s performance?
Chuck Noll was the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1969-1991, leading them to four Super Bowl wins (more than any other coach) and nine AFC championships during that time. Noll was the youngest NFL head coach in history when he took over in 1969, but he showed great talent for choosing to draft players of exceptional quality, including the league’s first African-American starting quarterback Joe Gilliam and first Super Bowl MVP winner Franco Harris.
Tom Landry was the first-ever coach of the Dallas Cowboys. He coached from 1960 to 1988, leading the Cowboys to five Super Bowl appearances and a record-setting 20 consecutive winning seasons. Landry pioneered several new techniques including the 4-3 defense and the shotgun formation on offense.
As Superbowl LVI approaches, along with many folks across the country, we’ve got football on the mind. And especially where it relates to us most in the world of sales… that’s right, coaching.
The role of a sales leader is complex and nuanced. Sales leadership is really about having the ability to motivate your people to accomplish set goals by empowering each individual. It requires you to focus on their professional growth, as well as their personal growth. Being an effective leader is about seeing the big picture, without overlooking important details. Great leaders drive results by motivating their team to want to do their job.
Every so often, we like to highlight stories from frontline sellers and sales leaders to discuss the applications of sales philosophy and methodology not just in theory, but in practice. I sat down with Charles Forsgard, VP of Global Sales at Honeywell, to discuss his own experience on the frontlines of sales leadership.
Building a new capability or skill can be a challenge – whether you’re a sales rep, sales manager, sales leader, or someone just getting back into the gym (quarantine workouts were nonexistent, at least for me). There has been a great deal of research done on what it takes to form a new habit or new skill. It’s a hot topic for many people, both personally and professionally.
There are lots of coaching models out there in the sales world. But the goal for each is the same: to improve sales rep performance and drive revenue. Our preferred and proven model, based on decades of our own experience working with sales reps and sales managers alike, consists of 3 stages: diagnose the gap, align, and develop. In this blog, we’ll focus on the second stage, align (how we actually coach) and put forward a 6 step coaching framework to manifest powerful and effective sales coaching sessions.
Implementing a long-term sales coaching program is a key component of any successful sales organization. In fact, the 2019 CSO Insights Report on sales enablement states that organizations that effectively incorporate a sales coaching program are nearly three times more successful in meeting their sales goals and almost twice as likely to have engaged sales professionals.
Every winner has a coach, and every coach has a philosophy. Here is a deeper look inside the philosophy of one of the best.
Simply put, you are coaching the wrong sales reps.
Let’s have you “lay on the couch” and talk about your feelings. You have a relationship problem and we’re here to help. Building and strengthening the relationship between B2B sales reps/ account managers and their sales leaders is absolutely vital to a productive and happy sales organization. We hope to improve that communication by sharing what we’re hearing from both sales reps and sales managers, and by adding some of our own insight as well.
In the midst of basketball season, this take on coaching seemed particularly fun and relevant. I realize that not all of our readers are basketball fans, so I opted not to title this piece “Sales Coaching Lessons from Phil Jackson” – for fear that those of you who don’t know that Phil Jackson coached both the NBA championship Chicago Bulls with star Michael Jordan and the NBA championship Los Angeles Lakers with star Kobe Bryant, might not be motivated to read the article.
This article is a continuation of one we discussed last week. In the past, we’ve referred to it as “strategic coaching” or “OtherCentered® leadership,” but the idea we’re exploring here, called “Quadrant Coaching” is the same.
Our topic today is one of the more radical things we teach front line sales leaders here at ASLAN. In the past, we’ve referred to it as “strategic coaching” or “OtherCentered® leadership,” but the idea is the same. And this subject isn’t just for sales leaders, it is key for the reps they lead to understand this as well.
Each week here at ASLAN, we put out content to help sales reps adjust to this new world of virtual selling. I asked myself, what’s the best way to help reps achieve their sales goals? Who is their “best friend” as they navigate this age of selling? It’s really their sales manager. It’s their coach, the person that helps them set goals and achieve them, growing as a seller along the way.
In this article, we are going to explore why much of the coaching provided in the workplace today is less effective than it could be, even now with the added pressure of most sales professionals needing to work remotely.
In the coaching workshops that I’ve led over the last twelve years, there is always a manager who asks me this question:
Let me guess, you never coached your reps much when you could travel with them. Now you are stuck in your home office and you do have time to coach and you are not sure where to start. Well you are in the right place, coaching and developing reps is even easier virtually and now, we actually have the time to do it.
I’m a die-hard cross-country skier. I’ve been out 93 times so far this season. When I first started trying to conquer hills and sharp turns, I fell – a lot! It was discouraging. Then, my husband, who has been a skier since he was four and is now a skilled coach, said to me,
We’ve recently discussed the biggest pitfalls of sales training objectives, from believing sales program effectiveness relies solely on the front-line to trying to tackle too many deficiencies at once. For this last post, we’re honing in on the last, and maybe the most important, pitfall: The assumption that generic sales training strategy will work for your sales team.
Previously, we discussed Why Sales Training Programs Aren’t Exclusively A Front-Line Responsibility and the importance of involving top-level leadership in your sales training strategy. In this blog post, we’re highlighting another leading problem with sales training programs: cramming everything into one program and applying the training to every possible service.
In our previous post, What’s More Important in Top Sales Training Courses: Measuring Behaviors or Outcomes? we discussed the importance of measuring the effectiveness of sales training courses by behaviors rather than outcomes. In this blog post, we’re highlighting another leading problem with sales training programs: focusing the initiative exclusively on front-line employees rather than involving mid-level and top-level leaders, too.
In our last post, 2 Ways Sales Training Courses Can Develop Your Sales Management & Reps in 2019, we talked about a serious problem in top sales training courses: Investing more in what happens in the workshop than after. In this post, we’re focusing on another leading problem with sales training courses: measuring behaviors instead of outcomes.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most sales training initiatives fail to deliver.
Over the past two decades, I’ve learned that there is a critical concept in understanding how to close more deals. And it’s perfectly illustrated by what’s on my calendar today: Two calls that couldn’t be more different.
Here’s an idea: What would happen if we learned about our client BEFORE we pitched our solution to them? And we don’t mean what you can find out from their website, but things that you can only learn after a conversation with them. For example, what challenges are currently on their whiteboard.
Last month, Bobbi Kahler published an article, How We Sabotage Change by the Way We Coach. One of the saboteurs that she talked about is “Diverting Focus to Soon.”
Another year, another failed sales quota. This year marks the fifth year in a row that the percentage of reps hitting their quota have declined — and they don’t look to be changing for the better anytime soon. So, what do reps need to know to meet the new demands in successful prospecting and see positive change?
All the experts and data say the same thing about sales coaching – it works. Initially, I wanted to start this article off with a series of data-driven statistics to substantiate the case I’m about to make. But if you are in sales, you already know it is true: Sales organizations that effectively coach their sales teams yield substantially better results and have better employee satisfaction rates. Period.
Over my eleven year career with ASLAN®, I’ve coached hundreds of managers, and I’ve learned a couple of things.
There’s a distinct difference between sales tools and sales training, but because they often overlap, it can be difficult to know which one is best for your organization.
Every rep at one time or another has struggled with obstacles in sales, and when it comes to sales motivation and sales strategy, there’s a lot of white noise out there trying to solve the problem with a series of tips.
It’s one of the oldest questions in the book: How do you make people care about what you have to say? It’s not just about your sales tactics; it’s more about how you’re delivering your prop.
Why is every rep struggling with sales prospecting? Here’s why. Most everything we’ve learned about selling sabotages our chances of converting the disinterested.
In our last post, “Is What You Learned About Sales Coaching and Performance Assessment Wrong?” we asked a tough question:
In our last post, Is What You Learned About Sales Coaching and Performance Assessment Wrong?, we asked a tough question: Are you developing the wrong people with your sales training? With this post, we’re going to explore another big mistake in sales coaching and performance assessment: Measuring behaviors instead of results.
For much of the sales world, the notion that sales coaching is an essential ingredient in improving sales organizations is not up for debate.
The last few blogs have focused on the #1 characteristic of high-performers: desire, including how to create it, how to measure it, and how it affects coaching. Now I want to attack a myth about evaluating performance.
With the last blog in our sales strategy series, we explored a topic that’s even more important than coaching: igniting the desire to be coached.
I’ve recently attended two conferences for sales management and sales enablement leaders. They were different events, but they both had the same focus: Even though the economy is growing, sales performance is not.
This week on sALES with ASLAN®, VP of Marketing Scott Cassidy chats with ASLAN President Marc Lamson on sales coaching and what it means to lead and manage successfully (hint: It starts with a nice beer on Friday afternoons).
When you’re trying to assess the sales strategy effectiveness of a large organization, your first goal should be this: to understand the needs of the sales organization and build the perfect training program.
ASLAN Training and Development announced it has been included on Selling Power’s 2019 list of the Top 20 Sales Training Companies that excel in helping sales leaders improve the performance of their sales teams. The list appears in the May 2019 issue of Selling Power magazine, which will be available to view online starting May 8.
I’ve been looking at nice watches since the Rolex my father gave me tragically fell into the lake in 1988. I’ve always wanted to replace that extravagant graduation gift, but with four kids and 12 grandchildren, it’s hard to justify spending that kind of money on something I really don’t need. But I like to look.
If you fall into that category or you just want to sell more in the coming year, here are seven questions and some New Year’s resolutions to consider as you start 2019. I promise if you thoughtfully consider the questions — and follow through on the resolutions — when the clock strikes midnight 2020, you will clearly see (I know but couldn’t resist) why you had a great year.
For nearly 20 years, my wife and I have been a lead couple for Pre-Cana, the Catholic Church’s marriage preparation program. We attended a full weekend of preparation prior to our own wedding more than 25 years ago, as well as a marriage encounter weekend around the time the 7-year slump was approaching. We’re not just preaching what we believe, we were in the trenches too, just like the young couples we advise.
When I meet with sales and learning leaders, I see them make two big assumptions. First, they think they know what their sales reps need. Second, they overestimate the real competency of their reps to do the basics.
Is it a slick brochure on the programs offered? Probably helpful but it’s hard to condense a two or three-day program down to 500 words.
“Where did the name ASLAN come from?” It’s a common question I hear when meeting a prospective client. “Is it a combination of the founders’ initials or an acronym of our sales methodology?” No, it’s much more than that. The name reveals the deeper purpose of our company.
In December of 1995, I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia written by C.S. Lewis to my two young boys. It’s a series of books set in the mystical land of Narnia that appeals to both children and adults. Much like the Lord of the Rings, the story is filled with deep meaning about good and evil, with creatures foreign to this world. The villain is the white witch and the hero is a lion named Aslan.
If you had to characterize Aslan in one word, it would be servant. Yes he was the most powerful creature in Narnia but instead of leveraging that power and strength to serve himself, he chose to serve others. I instantly knew that this lion called Aslan captured the essence of what we were about. But I’m getting a little ahead of our story.
The desire to start our company first bloomed when my ASLAN co-founder (Tab Norris) and I decided to test our unique approach to selling. Prior to starting ASLAN in 1996, we were both running a large inside sales organization. Selling and prospecting over the phone was tough and we needed a training program. As we explored all the traditional sales methodologies, we quickly discovered they failed to address the unique challenges of selling over the phone. Worse, the programs perpetuated the adversarial relationship – the root cause of why selling is so difficult. So we decided to build our own program based on what had worked for us individually for years.
– on this earth, this big sphere, right now? How’s that for a casual conversation starter at your next backyard gathering?
Have you ever stopped to think what it would take to sell yourself something? I mean to call you during dinner and really have your beliefs changed about a product or a service and get you to stop eating and invest your hard-earned money. Do you have what it takes to sell yourself?
When I look in the mirror (not literally), and think about selling to myself, I learn quite a bit. I'm a hard sell. I'm typically immune to being approached by salespeople in general, and especially bad ones. And yes, I am a sales person by profession. Because of this, I take the art of selling very seriously, and I have a passion for helping salespeople transform into sales professionals. I also am very quick to recognize and reward good salesmanship.
I have rookies, amateurs, and time termites approach me every day, trying to pitch or persuade me. Very few succeed.
So, if I look in the mirror to selling me, what are the fundamentals to gaining access to me?
Check out this article recently published by TrainingIndustry.com and written by ASLAN CEO and co-founder Tom Stanfill on how we validate the impact of our training initiatives efforts.
Check out this article recently published by Selling Power and written by ASLAN CEO and co-founder Tom Stanfill on what he's learned from the sales leaders who are consistently on top.
It seems to me that every sales VP attended a secret meeting in Vegas a few years agoand they all came to a consensus as to what was the most important focus area for hitting quotas – the front line sales manager. Overnight, it appears, everyone now agrees that the best way to impact a team of reps is not just a 2-day training program but investing in the one person who works with the reps every day – the sales manager.
Whoever led that secret meeting in Vegas was pretty smart. Because I think they are on to something.
Behavior change happens one on one, not in the classroom. Don’t get me wrong; I am a big fan of the classroom. That is the most efficient place to ignite change and ensure reps begin to adopt a new methodology, skills, etc., but you cannot sustain change without the involvement of the manager.
So if the manager is so critical to the success of their sales team, what is this new sales superhero supposed to do you may ask? Good question. I’m not sure the guru in Vegas covered itbut I’m willing to give it a shot. But first it may be more helpful if I focus on what the sales manager is not supposed to do – a subject that will be easy for me to tackle since all I have to do is reflect back on my first year as a sales manager. I was horrible. I really wasn’t a manager at all. I was more like an ex-baseball player who liked to teach by saying, “Hey! Watch me hit the ball!” Or worse yet, just bat for you. “Let me show you how it’s done!” I had zero understanding of how to leverage my success as a sales rep to improve the performance of my team. It turns out that some of the big mistakes I made are still very common among seasoned and green managers alike. See if any of these misconceptions about managing hit home for you and then score where you are on the bad sales manager meter.
ASLAN Training & Development just concluded our ASLANetwork Certified Reseller (ACR) Jam Session in Atlanta where we had some of the top ASLANetwork Certified Resellers in to focus on continuous improvement in three key areas:
Improving salesmanship
Improving the ACR program
Improving each other
It was a successful and well-received event with learnings, shared ideas, and opportunities for self-improvement with colleagues and friends.
The ASLAN Other-Centered® Leader
Coaches Quiz Blog Series
Every winner has a coach, and every coach has a philosophy. The ASLAN Other-Centered® Leader Coaches Quiz matches your coaching style with some of the legendary coaches in sports. Here is a deeper look inside the philosophy of one of the best.
Pat Riley has an amazing list of achievements: he coached and managed three NBA teams to a total of eight championships during his 27-year career. He was five-time NBA Coach of the Year, and he coached the All-Star Game nine times. Plus, he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008, the year of his retirement.
Riley experienced early coaching success when his Los Angeles Lakers won two championships and narrowly lost in the NBA finals during his first four years of coaching. To keep his team from becoming complacent, Riley began to compile detailed statistics that represented their lifetime performance in a single number.
The following article is written with apologies to and great respect for Alaska’s Inuit people who have historically been referred to by outsiders as “Eskimo” but who have never used that term to refer to themselves and view it as offensive. It is also written with apologies to the manufacturers of modern day refrigerators who no longer refer to their food storage units as iceboxes. And finally it is written with apologies to Dr. Seuss whose classic Green Eggs and Ham is blatantly ripped off in this article’s title.
