What we do | Sales Audience View | Build Sales Managers
Build Better Sales Managers
Core strength is what defines the human being. In a sales organizational context core strength is showcased through the strength and capabilities of sales managers.
In fact, sales managers form the fulcrum for change, control, and culture. Strengthening the core is where our engagements are focused.
We think about empowering sales managers through three distinct offerings.
Multiply Your Pipeline Through Coaching
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One of the dysfunctions that sales leaders constantly complain about is the tick box exercise of Account Planning. This is often seen as a Q1 exercise to be completed by the end of Q1 to gain a certain level of pipeline sufficiency. Some leaders say their teams ask them how much pipeline they require so that they could “stuff” their pipeline with enough ghost opportunities to meet their account planning goals. There must be a different way!
Our Approach
- Planning happens best through the interplay of divergent and convergent thinking.
- The admission of ignorance is the beginning of learning.
- Thinking “outside in” is a powerful way to connect the dots from the customer to the seller.
- An environment of positivity and possibility helps everyone deliver more.
- Getting the sales team to integrate and collaborate is crucial to a greater outcome in account planning.
- An account plan without customer validation and stakeholder triangulation is hallucination.
How can your sales managers coach to generate multimillion-dollar pipelines?
A benchmark is important for every individual to assess their gap from their current version of performance to the standards required for excellence. Our engagement delivers a benchmark across three levels:
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The quality and depth of information needed for any account
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The quality of coaching and facilitation required for running a planning session
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The quality of validation and triangulation required for any account plan
Our facilitator leads by example on group coaching of the account planning session, post which one of the sales managers demonstrates their capability to do the same. Multiple iterations of observations and applications across industries builds the core strength of managers to coach towards powerful account planning outcomes.
Impact driven for customers
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Coached hundreds of Account Planning sessions and empowered hundreds of sales managers to generate over $4billion dollars of net-new pipeline.
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These engagements have covered over 20 different countries across 5 different continents, which is a testament to the effectiveness of this framework across different cultures.
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Smart customers build the operational discipline to track net-new opportunities generated right through qualification, acceleration and closure.
One of our customers, who identified $125 million net-new opportunities through our engagement was surprised to realize $8 million dollars of closed opportunities, through this process, within a quarter.
Imagine, how much more you could drive for your sales organization through us.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
Recommended Resources for you.
Doubling your Win Rate by Exercising Deal Control
Time Team Technology and Transition Management
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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
- The greatest leveler is time. Management efficiency and leadership effectiveness is indexed 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 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.
- 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 and any engagement needs to be designed while respecting these constraints. Our engagements modularize the key capabilities that every sales manager should possess.
Modularization helps the sales manager appreciate the new normal for their skills and engage in different experiences that helps them imbibe and embed the new set of skills and behaviours that are relevant for the future.
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 new knowledge.
This combination of modularization, customization and experimentation provides the rich environment for the sales manager 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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The program has allowed them to overachieve on their commitments because of their increased ability to manage a better book of business.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
Recommended Resources for you.
Is true leadership found at the points of value, or at the points of control?
Is true leadership found at the points of value, or at the points of control?
Appreciating and Applying World Class Coaching
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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.
The entire market area across Asia over delivered on their commitment for the fiscal. They were conscious that their appreciation and application of coaching helped create bonding and aspiration within their teams that still sustains their collective passion for excellence.Customer Engagement Testimonial
