Throughout most of our blogs, we have discussed the importance of learning reinforcement. It important to know as much information about your product as you can, and it is equally as important to learn new techniques that are arising in the sales world. We have always stressed that you should constantly be learning, and it has become apparent that this old adage is necessary as more and more..
The Progress Coaching Blog
Transform Like Kobe
In honor of the NBA playoffs, we have decided to go with basketball themed blogs, and how could we write blogs without mentioning Kobe. Kobe is one of the greatest basketball players of all time (being a Bulls fan, I won't say he's as good as Jordan), but with greatness comes controversy. Over the past few years, Kobe has been great and not necessarily fair to his teammates.
Build a High Performing Inside Sales Team
It is not always easy to build and maintain a high performance inside sales team. Team members have to know their product inside and out, they must understand need based selling, and most importantly, they must have a desire to succeed every day. However, employees do not just learn these skills; it takes practice, and behind every great team, there is a manager that gave them the tools and them..
A new law to help increase employee training?
We often blog about the importance of employee development, the benefits of having coaching programs, and quite often we give away free content or share inexpensive or free employee training methods. We offer up this information for several reasons, one it's what we do! We train people, and we have a passion for helping employees and management alike get better and help each other get better. The..
Why We Need To Coach
Coaching is much more effective when driving employee performance, especially inside sales and customer service personnel. Management is about telling people what to do; whereas, coaching is about asking and understanding why performance levels are the way they are. The opportunity is for managers to learn how to coach to help drive performance and the bottom line.
Staying Silent Can Be Very Loud to Employees
I just spoke to a group about "Coaching Employees with Bad Attitudes" and it was a lot of fun. The thing that managers and leaders do not realize at times is when we do not confront or address employees with bad attitudes the "silence" is non-verbal permission to continue to behave that way. We must as leaders develop skills to confront issues and not people; therefore, we avoid the silence that..
4 Employee coaching tips for ride-a-long's with reps
Below are a few coaching tips to increase the learning opportunities when riding along with sales reps for observation:
An active learning strategy for employee growth and development
There are THOUSANDS of books out there on selling and customer service skills, use them as a part of your coaching or training initiatives for access to great and inexpensive information. Have your team read 1 book a week, and require them to apply one new thing they learned from the book everyday. This one new thing could be a specific skill or technique, or even just a new attitude or way of..
A specific method to coaching employees with bad attitudes
As coaches, managers, and employees we have certainly come across the occasional (or regular) recruit with a bad attitude. They don’t want to be a team player, they complain about policy, other people, management, and in general make a work atmosphere uncomfortable. These bad apples can certainly spoil the entire bunch if not dealt with, but how do you deal with these types of people..
Why we should kill the typical employee performance review
Years ago I was walking through a client site, it was strangely quiet and all the manager's office doors were shut. I asked a manager, “What’s going on around here, why is everyone so quiet today?” He responded by explaining that all the managers were busy doing their yearly reviews of their staff, and that they were due to HR by the end of the day. While this may be a typical scenario, it left..