Businesses always seem to be perfectly willing to put up with sales managers who consistently are bad guys. Then, as if that isn’t bad enough, businesses are also willing to retain field sales people who consistently fail to achieve performance goals and sales projections.
Stay Nimble
Business doesn’t lead, business follows economic cycles. As a result, business gets sales people-bloated during good times and goes sales people-lean during tough times. Why? It is because when times are good, business gets greedy and tries to grab every dollar it can by sending too many people after what ultimately turns out to be too few opportunities. When the next economic slowdown occurs, business often panics and cuts back. When the inevitable recovery comes along, business gets caught flat-footed and winds up throwing too few people at too many opportunities, creating a costly cycle that plays havoc with sales, profits, and people’s lives.
Stay Motivated
When business loses, it refuses to accept responsibility for its own failures. Instead of looking within to make necessary changes and improvements, business tends to blame outside forces including ad agencies, competitors, the government, even customers, for its problems. Whenever a good sales team loses a client or sale, it doesn’t waste time playing the blame-game. Good sales people take immediate responsibility for their failures. Nothing, not politics, money, and/or relationships, changes a good sales person’s motivation to achieve defined performance. Failure to perform causes the team to make immediate changes in management, coaches, workers, training, or whatever else it takes to turn the team around.
Be Serious
Business bounces from loss to win to loss because it is unwilling or unable to invest the resources necessary to train sales professionals to perform at the top of their sales games. Professional sports teams, on the other hand, are more than willing to invest whatever it takes to prepare bosses and staff to compete and win against their toughest competitors. This means if you’re serious about finding the right sales coaching for technical product development, you’ll study, adapt, and apply good sales team performance strategies and tactics to prepare your team to win against your toughest competitors.
