Coaching With Speed - Sales Influence Podcast - SIP 615

Welcome to the Sales Influence Podcast where we talk about finding the why in how people buy. I'm your host, Victor Antonio. Thank you for joining me. Today we're going to talk about coaching and managers. Ooh, this topic is for you the manager. If you have to coach people, this podcast is for you. Now, I want to talk about what's happening in the market today. We know based on studies done by Cso Insights, we know that for the last five, maybe even six years now, the average salesperson's ability to hit or exceed quota has been falling. Let me say it again. The ability for a salesperson to hit or exceed quota has been dropping for the last six years. Now, there's many reasons why this could be happening. Let's explore some and then I'm going to focus in on one in particular. The first one could be obviously there's more competition in the market. You know the internet has brought together a global economy which means more competitors in the market. Time to market is important but products are cropping up everywhere and even if you came up with a differentiator somebody will create it within another month or two. So differentiation is difficult. Two we also have to inform buyers. Buyers have a lot of information now, content. They know what they want. They know what to look for. And maybe because they know more than you, you're not able to differentiate or sell your value proposition effectively. That could be another problem. And then there's also too many options. The flip side of the consumers is that there's too many options. The consumer is confused. they'd rather go with status quo, do nothing, and don't make a decision because you weren't able to find a way to increase their certainty or reduce their anxiety. So, they said, "You know what? I'm going to put that off to next quarter. " All good reasons as to why salespeople are not hitting or exceeding their sales quota. But let me throw in a fourth option which I think should be looked at and isn't looked at enough and that is sales coaching. The manager's ability to coach salespeople to success. Could that be a problem? Maybe instead of looking out into the market in terms of what's going on, maybe we need to look inside a corporation, inside a company, and ask ourselves, are we training people correctly? A, let's assume you are. Check that. But are we coaching them? Big difference. Training, coaching, big difference. Coaching is ongoing. Training is once in a while. Coaching is ongoing. And I found this study by Vantage Point with which looks at sales management practices. And I want to share this study with you because it's quite revealing. They looked at about 600 sales managers. And what they found is when they looked at the top 25% of sales managers who were performing high and the bottom 25 there was a $3. 5 million gap they were able to calculate in this study. They did another study for another client of theirs and they found a $10 million gap between the top 25% sales managers and the bottom 25. Now let's understand what these numbers really mean. Let's go through this very slowly. And I wish I had a whiteboard in front of me and you can see me drawing this out. be very easy to look at. So how do you calculate this gap between the top 25% of sales managers and the bottom 25%. Well, you simply begin by looking at the percent of quota achieved. So for example, if sales managers hit 115% of quota, that's percent of quota achieved. They went over 100% or 115. And on average in this study, there were they had 9. 1 salespeople working for them. And each person had each salesperson had a $1 million quota. So the way you calculate numbers is you take the top 25% and you look at the percent of attainment 115% times 9. 1 reps times the quota $1 million and you'll get a number. Then you look at the bottom 25% and what they found is that bottom 25% only made it up to 76% of quota. So they took 76% of quota, multiplied again by 9. 1 salespeople and an average quota of 1 million and what they found is a 3. 5 million gap. But if the too many numbers are confusing you right now, just look at one number and that is the difference between 115 top 25% achieving quota at 115% of quota and the bottom 25 only arriving at 76. That means that is a 39%

performance gap between the top sales managers and the bottom 39% performance gap. So then that begs the question, what are these top 25% of sales managers doing in terms of coaching their salespeople? Now what I want to do is I want to introduce a model. I came up with this model because sometimes for me as a salesperson and as a sales manager, sometimes I think you need to simplify concepts so people can remember them. So I came up with this acronym called speed. Now let me frame this. I want you to put yourself in a manager position. You're about to coach one of your salespeople. What do you do? What do you say? What do you talk about? And how do you end that conversation? This is where I introduce my speed model. The first thing you're going to want to know is what's the situation with the salesperson. You're going to look at numbers. You're going to go through some account reviewing. You're going to look at pipeline. You want to know what the situation is. In that discussion, you're going to move over to the problem piece, right? You got situation. Now, we're going to move over to let's focus in on some problems. Salesperson. What type of problems are you currently having? What are some problems that we can identify that we can work on over the next 30 or 60 days? So then you move to the second third phase which is explore. Let's say you identified a problem. Now let's explore some options. You know what's the best way of handling this? And this is like a mini brainstorming session that you can have with the salesperson and then both of you are going to agree on a way forward and that moves you into the execution. Here's what we're going to do. Okay. So let me go through this real quickly again. Situation. what's going on. Identify one or two problems. Then explore options to solve those two problems and then agree on how to execute over the next again one to two months on that specific problem. And then last the D stands for data. In other words, how do we measure if it's working? What KPI key performance indicator can we use to measure whether our solution, you know, our implementation and execution to solve that problem is actually working? So, let's do a concrete example. Let's say that you've had the conversation with your salesperson and you know that one of the problems that you're currently facing is long sales cycles, right? It's just taken too long to close the deal. So, then that's the problem, long sales cycle. So, then you go into the explore phase, right? You say, "Okay, let's explore some options here. What can we do to shorten these sales cycles? " Well, then you come up with an idea and you both agree on this idea and it's a simple rule that you come up with. If you have the right decision makers in the room, in other words, let's say you got to get uh all the sea levels in a room in order to really present your product cuz you know you'll have a higher probability of closing faster if they're all in the room. If all the decision makers are in the room, then you will do a face to face. You will fly to the location, drive to the location to actually do the presentation. But if the decision makers are not in the room and let's say you only have one or two of the five decision makers, then instead of driving to the location, doing a face to face and spending maybe a day or two doing this, you just do a video conference call or a telephone conference call. That's your execution plan because you know that if you can get everybody in the room, you'll close a deal. There's no point in wasting your time driving to a location, flying to a location if the decision makers are not going to be there and you have to go do it again. that just lengthens your sales cycle. So by trying to figure out how do we get the decision makers in the room that's our plan of execution and if we have them in the room let's fly to them if we don't have them in the room let's not do that let's do a video conference call and then the deep part the data maybe your sales cycle is now two months so you start measuring this and maybe over the next 3 to four months you start measuring whether or not your sales cycle is actually shrinking and that is the speed model situation with the salesperson identify one or two problems s then explore some ideas the e explore some ideas then agree on an execution plan what you're going to do to implement them and then what how do we measure our success what data points what KPI should we use to make sure that we're hitting our target and that is it for this sales influence podcast for sales managers go coaching matters now don't forget to leave me some feedback on iTunes Stitcher or troop. Let me know what you think. I'd greatly appreciate it. Also, if you haven't done so already, check out the sales mastery academy. We've added some new courses. We got some books up there. What we got coming down the pipe in terms of real content is going to be so mind-blowing. In fact, if you're a coach listening to this or a manager, you're going to want to get on this platform cuz we're going to have some coaching programs just for you. So

if you're serious about increasing your sales ability or your sales coaching ability, go to the salesmasteryacademy us. That's salesmasteryacademy. us. Lastly, I want to thank you for listening. This is Victor Antonio always reminding you. Oh, let's wait for the drop. Love this part. Here it comes. Selling ain't hard when you know how. Take care. Hi, I'm Victor Antonio. I'm an author, sales trainer, and keynote speaker. I'm often asked, "What makes a great speaker? " Is it someone who delivers real content that the audience can use? Is it someone who engages the audience so they're part of the learning experience? Or is it someone who can motivate an audience to push them beyond their comfort zone and discover new abilities? The answer is yes. But the most important thing to remember is that I'm not there to look good. I'm there to make my client look good. Simply put, it's never about me and it's always about them.