What we do | GoTo Market View | Better Digital Sales Managers
Better Digital Sales Managers
As Inside Sales moved beyond the telephone, digital sales took shape. Digital Sales is used to describe the mechanism for customer engagement through the power and possibilities of technology.
Advanced analytics now provide organizations with the ability to marry data from multiple sources and utilize intelligent algorithms to define the specific parameters for the next sales call. This closed loop approach is improving call connectivity ratios, as well as reducing the cost of sales by a fair margin.
Our engagements for Digital Sales Managers include the following:
The Disciplined Digital Sales Manager
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It is no surprise that sales managers are not provided all the skills and training that is required for them to maximize their effectiveness. There is an inherent assumption that they possess most of the sales management skills, which we are discovering is not necessarily true. In coaching thousands of sales managers over the past several years, we are constantly surprised about how they struggle with some of the basic management skills.
This background and experiences are the genesis for our offering.
Our Approach
- Time is the greatest leveler. Management efficiency and leadership effectiveness revolves around how, sales managers plan and spend their time. Harmonizing their various roles to maximizing their effectiveness is key.
- The biggest single impediment to sales managers’ effectiveness is the “Expert’s Curse”. This is when sales managers start doing what their team members should be doing, and start telling, when they should ideally be coaching.
- Technology exists to drive sales acceleration. The effectiveness of a sales manager lies in their ability to get technology to reflect “one version of the truth” and to gain hindsight, insights, and foresights from the data to drive insightful team conversations.
- The ability to appreciate and apply, the principles and practices of change management, can make a clear difference to the effectiveness of the sales manager.
How can your sales managers become world class?
Time is a fundamental constraint for sales managers, any engagement needs to be designed while respecting these constraints. Our engagements modularize the key capabilities that every sales manager should possess.
Modularization helps your sales managers appreciate the new normal for their skills and engage in different experiences that helps them imbibe and embed a new set of skills and behaviors that enhances their overall effectiveness. Some of the modules include elements of crucial conversations, building a better team culture, rewards, and recognition frameworks, running powerful sales meetings, coaching for performance etc.
Interactions with a sales coach who has also been a practitioner, helps the sales managers contextualize their learnings better. Specific situations and challenges help the sales managers build situational fluency in their application of their newfound knowledge.
This combination of modularization, customization and experimentation provides a rich environment for the sales managers to gain the foundational skills that would amplify their effectiveness.
Impact driven for customers
Sales managers who have benefitted from our programs and were promoted to the next level, tell us that their engagement with us has transformed them in many ways:
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They now know how to balance time, team, and talent to maximize productivity.
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Their meetings are far more effective on account of their ability to leverage technology and data to have deeper meaningful conversations.
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They have more time for their own leadership development due to their increased ability to situationally lead and coach their teams.
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Most of all, it has allowed them to overachieve on their commitments because of their increased ability to manage a better book of business.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
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Coaching Digital Sales Excellence
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The necessity to coach for a sales manager is never in doubt. However, sales professionals can sometimes suffer from poor or ineffective coaching from their managers. It is therefore incumbent upon organizations to provide sales managers with the right capabilities to become good coaches.
Our Approach
- Coaching is a journey and from a practitioner’s perspective, it moves from awareness to appreciation to application.
- Organizations expect their sales managers to coach but these managers themselves have not experienced the power of coaching.
- Therefore, it is imperative to provide sales managers with a coach who can get the sales manager to experience several “Aha moments” that triggers their understanding and appreciation of the power of coaching.
- The key to building sales managers as good coaches lies in their application of coaching. Whether it is with a team member, an internal stakeholder or a customer/ partner, their ability to coach across different audiences and teams becomes a core competency to build a coaching culture within the sales organization.
Impact driven for customers
Customers leverage this offering when they need to drive three types of outcomes:
- Build volume in their pipeline
- Build velocity for their deals
- Build quality in their execution and people management
Each of these scenarios involve existing accounts, deals or teams through whom managers need to operate to add greater value to customers.
A typical application scenario for coaching involves a pre-brief to decide on the objectives and outcomes for the manager. The objectives and outcomes differ depending upon whether the target for coaching is either a team member, an entire team, or the customer/partner.
The second phase involves the actual application of coaching through their demonstration of the principles of coaching. Their efficacy in establishing a climate for coaching, their ability to structure conversations to powerful realizations and their ability to drive towards outcomes are all tested in the application scenario. This is when managers realize the gap between the appreciation and application of coaching.
The third step involves a debrief between the sales manager and coach on their mutual observations, blind-spots, areas of improvement etc. Multiple iterations of such applications of coaching, is what helps managers to build and sustain a coaching habit.
Organizations that have invested in building a coaching habit have been observed to showcase significant increases in pipeline volume, deal velocity and seller productivity.
2X increases in volume and velocity are not uncommon.
Customer Results - Case Study
Coaching Sales Managers across Asia to appreciate and apply the power of coaching for sustained sales performance.
One of the world’s largest software companies decided to establish an inside (digital) sales team across Asia to help lower the cost of sale and to amplify the acquisition of net new customers. Given the relative newness of the team and the extent of their addressable opportunity, it was felt that coaching would be a good investment to build their self- awareness, self-discipline and raise their execution quotient to achieve their results.
We designed a coaching engagement that brought together the best of our experience, in coaching sales managers across the globe. There were three specific areas of focus that helped the managers over deliver on their aspirational commitment for the fiscal:
- Plan for adequate number of coaching sessions (15 sessions over a period of nine months), to help the managers truly appreciate and absorb the power of coaching.
- Balance the coaching sessions equally between the appreciation of coaching and the application of coaching.
- Identify individual, team, and organizational challenges that the coachee could effectively apply their coaching skills to, which included their customer and their partner as well.
All the market areas across Asia over delivered on their commitments for the fiscal. It was obvious that their appreciation and application of coaching had helped to create a greater bonding and aspiration within their teams, which still sustains their collective passion for excellence.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
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