‰ professional development
This Season, Coach Your Sales Team from Good to GREAT! By Lance Cooper
M
ost of us remember Alabama’s famous football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. Someone once said, “The Bear could beat your team on one Saturday, and then take your team and turn around and beat his team the next Saturday!” He knew how to coach players, knew their strengths and weaknesses, and knew how to get their best efforts. He knew how to win.
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How can you coach your sales team like Bear Bryant? How can you do this with different personalities and age groups? How do you get salespeople engaged with their best efforts and able to handle rejection with dogged persistence until they achieve their goals? In every field of endeavor, a coaching philosophy, or set of values and beliefs, drives the performance system. This philosophy affects the hearts of its listeners. As we accept certain values and beliefs, attitudes emerge about coaching or leading people. The resulting behaviors turn into habits, which then produce consistent results. For example, one group of sales coaches believes that people cannot be trusted, and so they micromanage people and their outputs like machines. Others do not believe in the coaching role at all and believe that people will succeed or fail despite their intervention—so they tell them what’s expected and then stay away. Some sales managers believe that people do better when they are afraid. As a result, they browbeat their salespeople and work to create an atmosphere of fear and control. The cultural effects are obvious: some sales teams operate out of a fearful spirit while others are courageous. Some are honest and some are not. Some believe in serving others and some do not. Some are creative and innovative while others wait for orders from the manager. Salespeople make confident and winning moves in the heat of the moment, or we see them quit early and leave in defeat.