Top 10 ways to make salespeople more effective

As a professional sales trainer and coach, I am constantly asked by owners, presidents of companies, sales managers, VP of Sales, “How do I make my salespeople more effective?” There are a many ways to do this and some are more effective than others. However, below is a list of the things I have seen help over the years that I have used in coaching and training sales teams.

1. Put up a sales tracking board
a. Visualization is important
b. Helps track performance activities, behaviors and results
c. Uses the competitive nature of individuals to their advantage

2. Salespeople should become content experts
a. Creates leaders within the team
b. Allows the employee to grow
c. Forces the employee to learn

3. Role play with your salespeople
a. People retain 90 percent of what people say and do
b. Makes the salesperson stronger and more effective
c. Makes the manager a stronger manager
d. Steps to role play
i. walk through the role play
ii. have the sales manager demonstrate
iii. debrief
iv. have salesperson practice
v. create a list of action steps

4. Debriefing after a sales call
a. Valuable to the manager
i. good evaluation tool
ii. sales funnel management
b. Valuable to the salesperson as a learning tool
c. Select important questions and print them

5. Conduct productive sales meetings (many sales managers struggle how to do this)
a. Create a clear agenda
b. Create meeting templates

6. Have a coaching plan
a. An individual coaching plan is needed for “each” salesperson

7. ITNA (Objective Individual Training Needs Assessment)
a. Required for each salesperson-how do you know what to coach on without this objective data?
b. Mentor program

8. Joint sales calls
a. Observation
b. Illustrations
c. Problem issues
d. Stroke
e. Service offering

9. On-boarding a new salesperson
a. New employees are large
investments
b. Need to get them up to speed in an organized manner
c. Day-by-day printed activities & agendas
d. Find out what is being taught, who is teaching
e. TEST their knowledge

10. Do not accept excuses for not accomplishing
a. “Take 30 minutes and think about several different options.”
b. Use, “If I wasn’t here what would you do?
c. Delegation skills

Whether you use all of my suggestions here or part, I assure you all the above is about having a “system.” You wouldn’t get in to a plane and let the pilot fly without a system, correct? Want to make salespeople more effective? Have a system.

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Gary Harvey is the founder and president of Achievement Dynamics, LLC, a high performance sales training, coaching and development company for sales professionals, managers and business owners. His firm is consistently rated by the Sandler Training as one of the top 10 training centers in the world. He can be reached at 303-741-5200, or [email protected].