Labcast: Managing and Mentoring Your Sales Teams

In this week’s Labcast, Colleen Francis, Founder and President of Engage Selling Solutions, and who was named one of the top five sales trainers in the market by Sales & Marketing Magazine, calls in to discuss how sales managers can best manage and mentor their teams.

 

 

Labcast 66_ Colleen Francis on Managing and Mentoring Sales Teams

Kevin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. I’m Kevin Cain, and today I’m joined by sales expert, Colleen Francis. A successful sales professional with more, 20 years of experience, Colleen is also the founder and President of Engage Selling Solutions, a company that provides internationally acclaimed sales training. Thanks for joining us today Colleen.

Colleen: Hey, my pleasure, it’s always great to be here Kevin.

Kevin: So the thing we wanted to talk today about was really how to manage and mentor sales teams. I guess it makes a lot of sense to start at the beginning, and I wanted to get your sense of what’s the difference between managing and mentoring, and what’s your approach to each?

Colleen: Sure, that’s a great question, and in fact, we could even say that there’s a difference managing, mentoring, and coaching. A lot of sales managers and business owners get these wrong. But first of all, we need to talk about managing.  So managing and sales leaders often talk about business managing by the numbers because managing is very directive. It’s about understanding about what needs to be accomplished, seeing where the team is at, and then providing solutions or directions on how the team can get there.

So managing is very directive. We go out and we say to the team, “Go out and close $2 million in business. Make these five calls.” That’s what managing really is, and it’s critical that we have those things in place, because in many cases the team looks to you for direction on what markets to serve, what clients to go after, what territories we should be selling to, and what product.

Mentoring is a little softer. It’s guiding and asking questions. So, for example, I really believe it’s important for a sales leader to sit down with their team one-on-one once a week to provide some mentoring. And the most important question is, “How can I help you get to your sales goal?” So if you’re sitting down with a sales rep who’s behind, we find out, “Why are you behind? What do we need to do to get you there? What do you think the solution is? How many calls are you committed to making this week? How are you committed to getting this negotiation done?” Whatever it happens to be, and holding them accountable to that.

Mentoring is really best done in a one-on-one environment, because it’s hard for sales reps to answer questions honestly, especially if they’re around poor performance, in front of a group. But, of course, you could always mentor top performing reps. Hey, you’re 50% ahead of target. What are you doing? Because part of your role as a sales manager is to draw out what the successful reps are doing so that you can then give that back to the team and build best practices around it.

Lastly, coaching, I always look at coaching with a sales rep, and I like to see coaching done in teams, because I think some of the best sales leaders that I know help coach their teams based on feedback from everyone. So in a group setting once a week, posing problems, posing questions, and letting the group brainstorm solutions around it. The nice thing about that is when the group comes up with a solution or when one rep here’s another rep talk about how to solve a problem, they tend to adopt those more easily because there’s a peer-to-peer relationship. So it’s nice to have that balance. You as a leader can mentor your sales teams to better, but then you can also provide this group coaching environment so people see what their colleagues are doing.

Kevin: All right. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. So the next thing I want to ask you, kind of building off of that, is clearly there’s been a lot of change in the environment in the last three or four years. Things have changed dramatically, and I’m assuming that the old ways of selling don’t really work anymore, that you need a new approach. What would your advice be to sales teams to really succeed in this market? What strategy should they be using, what tactics?

Colleen: It’s a good point. Four or five years ago we used to really focus on like and trust, and we would say you have to build relationships so people know you, like you, and trust you. Today’s mindset is slightly different. They have to still, of course, know, like you, and trust you. But they also have to see you as an expert.

Expert positioning is something that we’re really working on with our clients. It’s not good enough for you to just go out there and solve a client’s problem. You need to be an expert in the problems that they’re having and the solutions you can provide, or an expert in the market they serve. So that’s one mindset change, getting salespeople more focused on writing and speaking and presenting. It’s critical to position themselves as experts because people don’t want to buy from salespeople anymore.

The other skill set that’s really important to the other part of sales that has changed quite dramatically in the last four years is again around this trust issue. It used to be that we would just focus on trust, but now our clients are asking for proof.

So collecting and using testimonials, case studies, client reviews are a very important part the sales process, that we might not have seen as much of five years ago.

Many prospects, especially your net new business that’s coming in that you’re trying to convert is really concerned about having proof, and so they’re demanding it. Being able to provide it proactively to your clients means that you’re one step ahead of the competition, and hopefully then you can shorten your sales cycle.

Kevin: Right. So the sales teams that you work with, how are they adapting to this change? Are they finding it easy enough to get onboard with, or are you finding resistance?

Colleen: That’s a great question. There’s always some resistance. Of course, the biggest resistance we get is from an old entrenched sales force that’s always been successful selling the way they have. So even though their sales maybe flattening, flat-lining, or even dropping down, they’re very resistant to change because they’ve been selling it like this for 20 years. “I’ve always done it this way. So why should I change?”

So it does require some coaching or some managing. In some cases, smart sales VPs are saying to their reps, “No, we will make this change. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.” Because they know it’s the right thing to do. Regardless of whether you’ve got a team that’s resisting or a team that’s embracing it, it’s critical to remember that change takes time. So our best clients are rolling out these changes over a period of time. In some cases, it’s been one year, two years, three years where they’re providing coaching and mentoring to their prospects on a weekly basis to make sure that the changes are being adopted.

Kevin: One thing I would imagine that has been pretty consistent over the last 20 years and longer is the need to create a positive customer experience. These days, what kind of characteristics are you trying to coach for in sales teams? What should they be doing? What are the rules of the road?

Colleen: Well, a positive customer experience is a fairly subjective term. So the first thing we coach them to do is to find out what that means to their clients. Don’t make the assumption that you know what your clients are looking for in terms of a positive customer experience. So the best thing is to go out and do some surveys. Give your customers a call. Use that time to collect case studies as well, but also to find out how they’re feeling about your service and what they’d like to see. How do they want to be sold to? What do they want as pre-sales and post-sales service? Benchmark yourself against the competition as well. Then you can roll out those changes.

Now generally what we’re seeing, and of course your business as you’re listening to this maybe very different, but generally what were seeing is clients wanting a multichannel communication access. So what that means is they don’t want to just talk to you on the phone. They want access to you through media like live chat, through email. They might want FAQ sections on your website. In some cases, we have clients who recommend that they use text message to be in touch. A whole host of things, but generally clients are looking for ways to communicate with you that are comfortable to them. So they want to dictate those terms, not have you dictate to them.

They also want access to a broad collection of experts inside your company. So the last thing you want to do in this marketplace is create a pinch-point where all customers have to go through one single person. Having a well diversified team of product specialists or implementation support, a sales rep, customer service desk, whatever that looks like for you is also important, because let’s face it, people are more impatient now than they used to be, because they do have quick access. So if a customer calls for something and they’re put on hold or they have to wait 24 hours for a call to come back, that can be very discouraging for them, and they might just hang up the phone and go somewhere else.

Kevin: Right. Well, I’ve got just one more question for you Colleen. This is a real easy one. Where can our listeners go to find out more about you?

Colleen: They are more than welcome to go to our website at engageselling.com. They can see our information about our training, coaching, and consulting programs, as well as get a whole host of free resources and articles that we’ve written for sales leaders. So it’s engageselling.com.

Kevin: Great. Thanks so much for joining us today, Colleen. It’s been really interesting.

Colleen: Hey, my pleasure. It’s always great to chat with you, and I encourage everyone to stay in touch.