Successfully training and coaching sales management is a very tricky thing. First, most sales managers are not a good fit for their job. Second, most sales managers are not really open to learning how to be great sales managers. And third, most sales managers don’t really know what makes a good sales person. Three strikes and you are out, but read on and you will see how easy it can be to be successful at training and coaching sales management!

A Good Sales Person Often Does Not Make a Good Sales Manager

Most great sales people are singular in their focus. They are driven to understand their client’s needs and to fulfill them. They are not only focused; they are obsessed. On the other hand, great sales managers, like all great mangers, realize that their job is to achieve their goals through their team. They know that by helping ten people to a very good job, they will achieve much greater results than by doing a superhuman job by themselves. Many exceptional individual contributors, in sales or other fields, simply don’t get this. If you cannot get this idea across, you need to decide if your client should go back to individual sales or you should walk away from the job.

A Sales Ego Can Make Training and Coaching Sales Management Nearly Impossible

Successful sales people often develop extraordinarily strong egos to arm themselves against the rejection that is a part of sales. Unfortunately, this strong ego can also make it hard for a newly promoted sales manager to listen to your training and coaching. The trick is to sell your ideas to them. First, ask them about their challenges. Then, determine the value that great training & coaching sales management would mean to them in dollars and cents. Finally, explain how you can help them be more successful and put those dollars and cents into their pockets. If you don’t sell it, they can’t buy it.

Use Your Knowledge of Assessments to Help Them Hire Manage Sales Superstars

By understanding personality types, values and basic skills through assessments, and matching them to those of sales superstars, you can identify people who are natural sales superstars. You can also identify the ones that are pretty good fits and who can be coached to success. And you can also identify the bad fits, who need to be moved into other positions, for their good and the good of the team. By offering assessments as a service and teaching sales managers how to interpret these assessments, you will expand your business and you will master training and coaching sales management.

Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article…Thank you!

Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach