Living Sales Excellence - Dennis Connelly's Blog

It's a new year. "Don't train your sales force!" As strange as that sounds, it might surprise you how often this was my recommendation to business leaders looking for help last year for their sales organizations. But please don't misunderstand. Unless your sales force has a full pipeline, accurate forecasts, high closing ratios, improving margins, consistent revenue growth, and meets budget every quarter, they might need training. But that doesn't mean you should get them trained. For sales training to be effective, the conditions must support it, or it isn't worth the investment. Without knowing the underlying causes, the training could be indiscriminate and ineffective. 

Recently, I posted an article listing the 7 Success Factors that support sales training. If interested, read it here. Today, we'll address number 4, below: Trainable and coachable sales managers. After all, why should it matter? If the manager is on her game, knows how to sell, and operates autonomously, is it really necessary that she be coachable and trainable, too? C'mon! Here's why.

7 Sales Training Success Factors

1. Pre-evaluate the sales team, systems, and processes (Article published 10/8/18)
2. Formal, staged, milestone-centric sales process (Article published 11/4/18)
3. Trainable sales team (Article published 8/14/18)
4. Trainable and Coachable Sales Managers (This article)
5.  (Article published 1/7/19)
6. Training the managers before training salespeople (Coming soon)
7. Salesperson training with sufficient time scale (Article published 9/23/18)
8. Sales leadership accountability (Coming soon)

Number 4 is that sales managers themselves must be trainable and coachable. Mining the data from 1.8 million assessments of both salespeople and sales managers evaluated by Objective Management Group, we know that 22% of managers are uncoachable and 28% are untrainable. That means that almost one in four won't be able to make the changes necessary to improve their skills 

Among many of the conditions or environment that support training success are the willingness and ability of sales management to support and reinforce the training to ensure that it sticks and that the team improves. It isn't always simply a matter of needing to make improvements, but rather it's having an organization structured and ready to capitalize on those improvements. 

Most managers are interested in developing their skills further in important sales management areas such as motivation, coaching, recruiting, and holding people accountable. Understanding the common areas where sales management gets in their own way is a good start to mastering number 4, above, and clearing the way to effective sales training.

How sales management gets in the way:

1. Not coachable - think they know it all, and won't listen to advice
2. Not trainable - apathetic - do not desire success enough to work to improve
3. Not skilled - want to succeed but don't know how
4. Not committed - won't exceed their comfort zone to do what it takes to succeed
5. Non-supportive beliefs - this covers a wide variety of beliefs but any belief that doesn't support either sales success or managerial impact on sales success would be in their way
6. Too busy selling - Some sales managers are really glorified salespeople with a large book of business. Don't expect real sales management from this group.
7. Non-Existent - What sales management? Do we need that? Haha. Sometimes, it's the CEO in an "acting" role. 

Sales management is a full-time job. Sales managers must desire success in the role and be committed to doing what it takes to be effective in the role. If they are not coachable or if they are not trainable, or both, they will not be able to improve and will have a difficult time cultivating an environment that supports learning and improvement among their team.

Because there is often confusion with two important terms above, I have illustrated the difference between Untrainable and Uncoachable using pictures:

Untrainable people lack the desire to succeed. They won't try to improve. Uncoachable people might or might not be trainable - they are independent. The uncoachable cannot imagine that you or anyone else could help them perform better. They already know everything. If they are right and they do know everything, that's great until you try to implement a change. If they don't already know everything but think they do, or if they are no longer interested in improving in their role, welcome to a world of frustration for company leaders. And for goodness sake, don't train the sales team. Yet.

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If you would like to know how your managers measure up in these important areas, click here.

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Book Dennis Connelly to speak at your event.

 Top Photo: Copyright : Eric Isselee

Learning an effective sales process is easy. It usually fits on one sheet of paper, takes about an hour to memorize, and, having just come off of two weeks of travel to four different clients for intensive day-long training sessions, I can confidently share with you that salespeople and managers understand the simplicity and effectiveness of a fundamental sales process right away. There's a collective "a-ha" that occurs in every session at the moment when something that seemed so complicated at first is suddenly understood at its foundation. So why does it take months to impact sales results? I'm glad you asked. Read on to find out.

Think of the complexity of your product offering and how, while there are differences in ability on your team, most of your people can talk about the products and services in great detail. There could be hundreds of items or dozens of service combinations and options, but most seasoned salespeople can rattle them off like they are discussing backyard barbecue tips at a Little League game. With little investigation, one can see that most of your product offerings exceed the complexity of an effective sales process, often by an order of magnitude. So why does it take the team so long to adopt the sales process, use it on every call, and reap the rewards of regularly outselling their competition?

There are reasons of course, or if you prefer to use the language of elite salespeople (those possessing selling skill scores in the top 7% of all salespeople), then let's just call them excuses. Here's my list of the 7 excuses I hear the most related to the lack of adoption of sales process:

Top 7 Most Common Excuses for Delayed Sales Process Adoption

1. Management doesn't insist they use it.
2. They don't practice it enough to be comfortable using it on an actual call.
3. They aren't coached specifically to sales process.
4. They have too many hidden psychological barriers.
5. Managers can't identify their people's personal obstacles.
6. Their beliefs don't support acting on key steps in the process.
7. They don't have the right sales process.

1. Management
If management isn't insisting that salespeople follow sales process, then is it a corporate adoption and buy-in problem, or is it an accountability problem? Accountability runs all the way through the organization. Sometimes there's an expectation that because managers are tasked with achieving the overall outcome of their people, that they will do what it takes, ethically, to accomplish their goals and we don't need to tell them what to do.

This kind of thinking lets leadership off the hook. That would be like managers telling their salespeople to go out and sell "so I'll just leave you alone so you can get on with it." Who will motivate them, who will coach them, and who will hold them accountable to performing the activities that lead to hitting the goals? Sales management isn't the top of the chain of sales hierarchy. The top of the sales food chain is occupied by the party or parties responsible for the outcome of the business: Owner, CEO, Board of Directors. Insistence on something as fundamental as sales process starts there.

When it's important to find out how you are getting the results you are getting and why, it might be time to evaluate the sales organization as a whole. Click here to see if a Sales Force Evaluation makes sense for your team.

2. Practice
Try it out in practice sessions first, using role-play, ideally with a manager or between salespeople and an observant manager helping to facilitate or play one of the roles. You wouldn't change your grip in the middle of a golf tournament. You would try it out on the practice green first. Do the same with sales process. Ask yourself what this call should sound like? Look for places it could get derailed and work through each one. Then be prepared for the call to go nothing like what you planned.

3. Coaching
Think of the greatest player you know in a sport you love to follow. That person has a coach, right? And if that person happens to be the best player in the world in that sport, they still have a coach. From this perspective, it means the coach is, by definition, not as good at the sport as the player, or they would be number one. Yet, the star player wouldn't want to lose them as their coach and they would never stop wanting to be coached. That's how they got where they are. In sales, formal scheduled coaching should happen daily. It's the most important role of the manager. You can read several articles on coaching by selecting from the list found by clicking here.

4. Psychological Barriers
What is blocking a salesperson from saying or doing something that they know they should say or do? The answer is often based on certain barriers that lie within their own head? It might not be a lack of ability or understanding; it might instead result from how they stop themselves due to habit, discomfort, or fear. Thanks to the magic of the OMG sales assessment, we now know that among many, there are six major hidden weaknesses that can cause a barrier to success and lead to slow improvement. They include:

• Non-supportive Buy Cycle
• Excessive Need for Approval
• Getting Too Emotionally Involved
• Discomfort Talking about Money
• Non-Supportive Beliefs
• Difficulty Recovering from Rejection

Rather than explain each one of these in detail, I would direct you to our upcoming one-hour live webinar on this very topic scheduled for June 14th at 11:00 am U.S. Eastern Time. It's free of charge and you can register by clicking here.

5. Identifying Issues
Often, even when salespeople have barriers to their success slowing down their progress, it goes unrecognized, either because the manager isn't looking for it, or the manager has the same issue herself and doesn't recognize the weakness in her people. To find out how your people compare with respect to the 21 Sales Core Competencies measured in the OMG assessment tool, against other salespeople, click here.

6. Beliefs
Beliefs are at the heart of all of our outcomes. Our beliefs, especially the ones about which we feel most certain, determine how we view our potential. Our beliefs about our potential determine the actions we take. And our actions produce the results we get. Each time we get a result, it reinforces our beliefs and the process starts again. I first learned of this cycle of success from neuro-strategist, Steve Linder of Strategic Brain, who had learned it from Anthony Robbins over 20 years prior.

When we come to terms with the fact that our beliefs are the driving force of our personal success machine, it can feel quite energizing. When I conduct Belief-System workshops with clients, we cover over 90 self-limiting beliefs that can impact sales outcomes, drawn from the original work of Dave Kurlan along with others such as Nassim Taleb, Robbins, Linder, Napoleon Hill, Milton Erickson, and repeated personal observations from my work with clients.

Of the over 90 self-limiting beliefs addressed in the workshop, here are seven:

• My prospects usually buy on price.
• My prospects don't have the time we really need.
• My territory is the hardest.
• My lack of result was due to the competition.
• My prospects are often unreachable.
• It takes several meetings to build rapport.
• I need my prospects to like me.

If you are interested in having your own facilitated Self-Limiting Belief Workshop, click here to book me as a speaker.

7. Wrong Sales Process
The sales process should be a customized, optimized, staged set of steps that naturally describes and directs your actions and conversations with a prospect as you move them from lead to close.  If you are using the wrong sales process or if your sales process is inadequate, what should you do? Click here to take our eye-opening Sales Process Grader to find out.

Summary
To re-cap, all that is required to ensure speedy and effective adoption of your sales process is to address and resolve each of the seven most common excuses listed above. I'm willing to bet you could memorize this list in under five minutes. See how easy that was. And here is your perfect success formula if you are willing to accept it. Create a to-do list to address each of the seven excuses for not getting total early buy-in on your world class sales process. Then do the items on the list!

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Book Dennis Connelly to speak at your event.

Photo Credit - Chalkboard: Denis Ismagilov  (123RF)
Photo Credit - Road Barriers Elena Elisseeva (123RF)

When a sales manager says, "This guy isn't cutting it, but I can't let him go," it's an "uh-oh" moment, the "a-ha" moment's evil cousin. When she says, "I have him on an improvement program but it's not working," adding, "Every time I give him something to do, he has an excuse for why it can't be done, shouldn't be done, doesn't work in this market, etc." And then she says, "I think he thinks I don't have the authority to do anything about it. I have no leverage." That's when I say, "uh oh, what's behind this?" Having no leverage is like a rugby scrum. No one has any leverage and the line of scrimmage at the center of it barely moves at all. But there's always a way to get the ball out.