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Are you ready for some football? Ok, it’s a little early, but this Thursday, May 12, 2022, the NFL releases the season schedule!
As I thought about the teams currently in mini-camps, I thought about the coaching staffs. I thought about all the professional athletes who are still being coached, day in and day out, by coaches.
You’d think that after peewee football, high school football, college programs, and even years in the NFL, that the players would know by now how to play football. I mean, why do they still need coaches?
And that led me to think about sales teams and individual producers. I have the privilege of working with a lot of companies, coaching and training and scripting their sales process, but for each company I work with, there are thousands who go without ongoing coaching.
And, unfortunately, the result shows.
If you are a sales manager or business owner with an inside sales team, you need to offer each player on your team daily and weekly coaching.
Here are three ways to go about that:
#1: Once a week, go over a recording with each of your reps and offer positive suggestions for how they can improve on their next call. Then, listen to their calls the next week and see if they’ve implemented the changes you tasked them with.
This is like football teams watching film of practice and games. No NFL team (or any other professional) could improve without constantly critiquing their performance.
If you are an individual sales producer, then grab a buddy and listen to each other’s calls on a weekly basis. This is the single most important thing you can do to improve.
#2: Make sure your team has a playbook and is drilling, practicing, and using the plays in it. Your playbook is, of course, the best practice scripts you have developed to help your sales team handle the objections and selling situations they face, day in and day out.
You do have an updated, proven script playbook, don’t you?
If you don’t, then it would be like an NFL team going into the huddle and having the players say, “I’m just going to get open!”
It’s a mess is that what is…
#3: Know your player’s statistics. Know what each rep’s close rate is, how many leads/prospects they generate, and make sure they all know it as well.
Management 101: You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Again, think of NFL players: Every stat is known. Every yard they make, every tackle they make, every fumble or missed ball is recorded and added to their overall score.
And this is what the coaches work on to make them better—and use to gage improvement.
Coaching isn’t something that happens at the beginning of a player’s/rep’s career and then stops.
It’s an ongoing process that results in constant improvement.