Everyone has experienced the sales blues, when everything seems perfect and you are confident the sale is going to close until you hear the words, "Sorry, we’re going ahead with someone else." It is important that we take the emotion out of the sales loss and learn something from it in order to learn from our mistakes and create more successful closes in the future. Always remember that you cannot always control what happened in losing that sale, but you can chose your response. The success of your sales future is made by these choices, it is important that you make the right ones.

Definition of Coaching

Coaching is all about driving performance through developing employees. Each employee will progress in different ways. Not every employee is going to need development in the same areas. Coaching is fundamentally based in discovering each employee’s area(s) in need of improvement and developing each targeted area. The fact is every person, including coaches, can always be better at something.

The following blog post will examine the 4 A's of coaching and how we can leverage them to build better employee performance:

When we think about a selling process, you probably think stages of the specific selling process we want people to follow. During those stages there will be requirements from a knowledge, skill, and behavioral perspective. For example, in stage 1, which we can call general prospecting; a salesperson may need to know how to use LinkedIn search features to define target prospects. Next, they must have the skills to handle the phone to ask contacts for introductions and referrals into their personal networks. Last, behaviorally they must do this on a consistent basis during stage 1 to maintain a full pipeline.

 After a long weekend, most people find it a struggle to get back into the work grind. The same can be said about training. Weeks after a seminar or workshop, employees find it difficult to change their day-to-day work. So, managers need to put training reinforcement and coaching into place.  The two methods are different, but both employ the same types of techniques.

LESSONS SUSTAINABLE FOR EASY TRAINING REINFORCEMENT 

Here is another easy and inexpensive training reinforcement method that we use for our clients. Remember there are many reasons training reinforcement programs are important, including increased returns on investment, increased retention of knowledge, increased sales from better-trained teams, etc. 

Training is in such a tail spin, I LOVE IT. The days of "take my staff to an all day event for $250 a head" are finally leaving us . I love it because those events NEVER produce long-term, measurable results. E-learning simply does not work when the courses are long and too generic to really hit home with its learners. In today's fast paced, social media driven world our attention spans are short and the only learning that works is when it addressed to what people specifically are challenged with or need.

TOP 5 WAYS TO DRIVE PERFORMANCE

AND…always have fun, coaching should create fun for your employees, not be a dismal task.

I am learning more and more we need to be more specific when we are coaching employees. This is not a criticism rather an opportunity for us to become more laser focused and assist our employees to greater performance development. The link below will play a presentation giving some examples so let us know your thoughts.