Tuesday, November 10th, 2020
Mapping out the solution
Here’s how to use “systemic intelligence” collaboratively. The high-pressured, action-oriented sales environment usually leaves little time for sales professionals to step back and reflect on their work. Managing a multitude of customer and internal relationships, complex sales cycles, and chronic disruption means we need robust problem-solving skills. Unfortunately, “mindtraps” have formed through human evolution. Once a matter of survival to…
Tuesday, May 26th, 2020
Moving from “I” to “We”
How a relationship-based group coaching model can improve performance. As a salesperson and subsequent sales leader with more than two decades of experience, on-the-job learning has provided me with valuable insights and business management skills. However, given the rapidly evolving business environment, I realised the need to embark upon a continuous learning path. On learning about the SAP Master’s programme,…
Wednesday, June 26th, 2019
Just call me Coach
How developing a coaching culture can make you a “destination employer”. How to embed a coaching culture was a dominant theme at the most recent Sales Learning & Development conference. Sales learning and development is not just about teaching skills; it’s about engaging and motivating the whole organization to be passionate about learning and development, and adopting a coaching culture…
Tuesday, June 25th, 2019
Comedy and coaching culture at APS conference
Two half-day programmes explored the interrelated issues of performance and talent. Driving improved sales performance via strategic insights and best practices was top of the agenda for delegates at a morning conference for APS members and guests at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on 16 May. An afternoon conference focused on developing sales talent. Speakers included a mix of company…
Friday, May 18th, 2018
Sales coaching for the digital age
How Big Data-Driven Coaching has been boosting win rates. Maintaining a position of pre-eminence in the highly competitive IT industry requires leaders to adapt to changes in the business landscape more rapidly than the competition. Continued success also relies on the development of innovative sales enablement techniques that boost performance, help meet customer needs and achieve bottom-line results. Digital Transformation…
Friday, May 18th, 2018
Can a coaching culture improve the level of performance of salespeople in SMEs?
Coaching in Ireland is in the early stage of its life cycle, mostly used by “early adopters” rather than being in the mainstream of management tools. The use of coaching in companies as a development tool for employees has exploded over the past 15 to 20 years. According to a report by Frank Bresser (2009) there are about 43,000 to…
Friday, May 18th, 2018
Recruiting coachable salespeople
Can organisations understand how to recruit salespeople who are adaptable, coachable, and willing to embrace new learning? What makes a good salesperson? Arguably there are many characteristics and behaviours, and whilst some commentators pigeon-hole salespeople with simplistic titles to define their characters (Dixon and Adamson 2011), others take a different view and suggest that great salespeople demonstrate “differentiating mind-sets”, reflected…
Thursday, May 17th, 2018
Is coaching going AI?
Last time around, I wrote about artificial intelligence (AI) and sales. More specifically, I speculated on the possible impact of one type of AI – deep learning – on sales as we know it today. I explained that many features of more routinised sales jobs might be amenable to replacement by deep-learning methods, and also that perhaps this might not…
Thursday, May 17th, 2018
Opportunity coaching for fun and profit
You’ll notice a number of articles elsewhere in this edition on the subject of coaching. I want to use this short piece to focus on an area that has become a particular interest of mine: using coaching techniques to help our salespeople develop more effective opportunity strategies. I’ve observed organisations that do a particularly effective job of opportunity coaching, viewed…
Thursday, May 17th, 2018
Using data to drive effective coaching
Organisations understand the power of coaching and the importance of data to inform this activity. But could it lead to a zombie sales force? What is the difference between coaching and training? This is often poorly understood. As a starter, we might consider that training is about transferring knowledge while coaching is about enhancing that knowledge and developing people and…
Monday, March 12th, 2018
Three often-overlooked topics to enhance sales practice
Why the three topics of coaching, change management and stakeholder engagement should be considered more seriously in the development of sales managers and sales professionals identified as high performers. Introduction I identified three topics I considered to be important to sales that were not usually taught or self-selected by salespeople, and that I believed would help outperformance in the long…
Saturday, September 3rd, 2016
Coaching for the Cloud
As part of his Masters programme, SAP’s Brice Faure researched whether a sustainable coaching methodology could support SAP sales managers during the process of transforming the business into the Cloud. The concept of coaching has been much discussed in recent decades and part of my project has been to understand what coaching means and embraces. Too often in my reading,…
Saturday, January 30th, 2016
Are sales managers coaching?
While coaching is universally considered to be a vital predictor of salesperson success, benchmarking data from Blackdot suggests that sales manager coaching of reps is happening far less than expected and is highly variable in consistency. According to the report Unlocking Sales Manager Coaching Impact – A holistic approach for enhancing coaching outcomes, the typical solution has been to try…
Thursday, January 28th, 2016
TRAINING, COACHING AND SALES REP RECALL
Today drug companies need to raise and…
Monday, July 6th, 2015
Coaching Brain
At the recent APS Annual Conference, Gill McKay of MyBrain International explored how neuroscience can help transform our coaching style. We’re probably all aware of the benefits of effective coaching: transforming salespeople into sales champions; maximising their potential and motivating people to be the best they can be; increasing engagement and talent retention; driving accountability; developing a more agile organisation;…
Monday, July 6th, 2015
The subtle approach
Does coaching work best when team members are not even aware it is happening? Angie Dixey investigates. As organisations increasingly turn to coaching to help improve sales performance and develop talent, performing the role of “coach” has become a commonplace responsibility for sales managers. Yet, even as organisations continue to expect this activity from their managers, the issue of whether…
Monday, July 6th, 2015
Best practice for running an effective salesperson onboarding programme
New research suggests the most successful programmes pursue a calculated blend of sales training and coaching activities. The bar has been raised. In a world where businesses are becoming increasingly proficient at managing a range of multi-channel, multi-touch and highly customer-focused interactions, how can we ensure that our newly recruited salespeople measure up to customers’ expectations? Toward this end, many…
Sunday, April 12th, 2015
Researchers and consultants discuss the power of first-line sales managers
Blackdot on the value of sales managers First-line sales managers are drivers of performance for pharma sales representatives, as they are in other industries… The profound and compounding impact sales managers have on their sales teams means that 1 high-performing sales manager is as valuable as a handful of high-performing sales reps. High-performing sales managers manage teams that achieve superior…
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
Challenging Coaching
Shekhar Varma, managing partner at SDV Training, says: Challenging Coaching by John Blakey and Ian Day contains very useful models and ideas for anyone who coaches the sales force, and Resonate, by Nancy Duarte is a brilliant book about making presentations and storytelling.” He adds: “Although out of print, Neil Rackham’s Account Strategy For Major Sales is still an unrivalled…
Tuesday, April 7th, 2015
Coaching style of management
New research by Angie Dixey at Oxford Brookes University presents some interesting findings for organisations actively aiming to encourage managerial coaching. Dixey’s dissertation How Managers Experience Their Role As Coach: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis explored how the “preference towards a conversational nature of managerial coaching supports the sentiment found in leadership theory that coaching should be a way of managing,…
