Gold Medal Coaching For Sales

GOLD MEDAL COACHING FOR SALES

Your sales staff is (obviously) your team for winning the Olympics of Excellence. Because they are employed in your store, we’re going to assume they’ve qualified to compete! Yay! To bring home the Gold, however, each member of the team must be willing to develop themselves and their skills to a microscopic perfection—(spelled WORK. PRACTICE. HONE. REFINE. PRACTICE MORE)! As their coach, YOU must be willing to perfect YOUR techniques for leading, instructing, analyzing, managing practice sessions, instilling motivation for excellence and beyond, and combining all of it into a fulfilling, smooth and completely flowing whole!

As the coach, your leadership and guidance must be the essence of who you are! You must be a positive, possibility thinker, with great faith in humanity and the personal qualities of each of your team members and the exquisite way they combine to form the commitment to excellence.  Each team member must be dedicated to becoming their best versions in every circumstance!

You have developed the hierarchy of skills your team needs to perfect to attain their goals, as well as the team goals. You have a program for teaching product knowledge.  You have a program for teaching customer care strategies.  You have a program for motivating each team member to reach beyond their ability and reveal themselves in ways they’ve never even considered before!  You have in your skill-set a wide variety of teaching techniques to raise the bar of sales excellence!  You are a great motivator! (Both of yourself and your team!)  You have the courage to encourage! 

On the sales floor, (the competitive arena) the competitors develop and demonstrate the efforts and activities designed to take them to the next level of ability.  Each team player must develop their best approach to the tasks of bonding with customers, with understanding and meeting the needs of those customers and creating the vision of success for matching products to customer needs. One of the primary ways to do this is through the development of each salesperson’s unique set of stories and illustrations for interacting with customers.  For many salespeople, these are a natural, fluid and, relatable outgrowth of who they are. For others, this requires a concerted effort to develop.  I am convinced that everyone has the ability to do this in great style.  Some may not yet recognize thisability; others may so take it for granted that they become complacent or careless in using it! Either way, as the leader of your team, it is imperative that you develop and perfect the stories and interactions that your team members rely upon!

Role-playing is a fantastic tool for getting to the top of the podium! Social interaction, whether it’s sales person to manager, sales person to sales person. sales person to customer or sales person to mirror is a huge help to growing social ease and finesse.  Role-playing techniques could include “just the facts,” humor, engaged couple, husband buying for 25th anniversary, wife looking for retirement ring for husband—you get the idea…interacting in as many situations builds strength in all social environments, enables “thinking on one’s feet,” and provides many subtle opportunities for skill development (for all involved)!

Becoming aware of one’s own strengths and weaknesses in conversational skills is a fabulous motivator to—um, PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!

One of the most essential, yet underdeveloped, skills in life is the mastery of the wandering mind!  Often this is called “monkey mind.”  In case you’ve never noticed, monkeys are intelligent critters.  Fortunately or unfortunately, they lack the ability of intense focus on the task at hand.  Mostly their attention span is almost long enough to satisfy their immediate survival needs (Sometimes that’s a great thing)—imagine what they could accomplish with intense focus!  (Heck, they could rule the world!)

However, success in humans requires much more intensity than operating on Monkey Mind level. For this, instructional aids, such as visual cues, sounds, drawings, or cute little sayings that mean much more! Some companies utilize a series or videos to demonstrate principles. Some managers (coaches) are masters of inside jokes designed to remind staff members of specific steps to success…Whatever method you choose to use, keep it both positive and fun!  Podium prizes will belong to YOU!

Brad Huisken

IAS Training