Here’s the challenge: Sales leaders carry some of the greatest workplace responsibilities in any organization. They must hit sales targets with little direct control over the outcomes, manage strong personalities, and lead directives from senior leadership.
Unfortunately, in many organizations, emerging sales managers receive little or no training before taking on this job – even though 67.5% of sales leaders don’t have experience leading remote teams and 40% of sales leaders don’t have the skills or training needed to coach their teams. (Source: Sandler Research Center.)
Investing in sales leader growth is one of the most impactful organizational investments. While a powerful and effective sales leader offers mounting benefits, an ineffective sales leader takes a major toll on a company, resulting in stalled or lost deals, expensive turnover of staff, and missed revenue goals.
The solution: real coaching sessions on real deals to ensure real results.
Sandler’s Sales Leader Growth Series delivers this solution. It was designed for organizations that are:
- Experiencing a talent gap in leadership due to high growth or high turnover.
- Hitting a sales plateau and struggling to hit revenue targets for growth.
- Concerned about consistency and management across teams.
- Looking to invest in training and performance of emerging sales managers.
In this series, sales managers learn Sandler’s best practices for sales leadership, garnering the knowledge of Sandler’s five-decades-long history empowering organizations across every industry. We empower sales leaders with the behaviors, attitudes, and techniques needed for success, challenging them to use these strategies and tactics in real coaching sessions on real deals, ensuring real results.
There are four critical elements to the job of sales leader: supervision, training, coaching, and mentoring. Unfortunately, people often get sidetracked with the first two, and never move beyond them. Coaching and mentoring are actually the key growth drivers for both the team and the organization, and of the two, effective coaching is the most effective, and most commonly overlooked growth driver.
Our experience is that the most successful sales leaders spend roughly 35% of their time coaching salespeople. By contrast, we see that sales leaders who struggle spend far less time than that on coaching, typically because of a flawed understanding of what effective coaching is and a perceived lack of time. Mastery of the neglected art and science of sales coaching is the key process improvement of the Sales Leadership Growth Series.
Effective coaching is actually the ultimate time-saver for sales leaders. The more time you invest in coaching up-front, the less time you have to invest over time to the task of solving problems and putting out fires for a given salesperson. This is why we ask sales leaders this question:
How many times does a salesperson come to you with the same issue – and you simply fix it, month after month, quarter after quarter?
Such a cycle is a symptom of a broken sales leadership system. Effective coaching empowers salespeople to break the cycle of learned helplessness. It makes them self-reliant, agile, innovative, responsible – and last but certainly not least, more productive. It empowers them to fix their own problems, drive between the guardrails, and free up your time by pursuing the shortest path to their own personal, professional, and financial growth. This is why effective coaching is the cornerstone of the Sales Leadership Growth Series.To learn more about the Sales Leadership Growth Series, email me at Bill.Bartlett@Sandler.com
