Why are so few of your team highly successful?

More importantly, as a leader, are you comfortable taking your current team with their current level of performance and skills into an increasingly competitive marketplace?

Will doing what you’ve been doing get you to where you want to go with the team?

In most organisations I work with, around 20% of all salespeople reach high sales levels, 60% percent turn in an acceptable performance, and around 20% produce unacceptable sales revenues. I refer to these as ‘A’ players, ‘B’ players and ‘C’ players respectively.

‘A’ players typically exceed their sales targets by a significant margin and ‘C’ players are almost ‘anti-sales’, regularly missing targets.

What’s going on here? What’s holding 80% of the team back?

Just about every sales team has loyal, honest, conscientious, good people. They know your products or services as well as anyone. They’ve soaked-up all the product literature and marketing collaterals, they may have even read numerous books on selling and can answer most client or customer questions that come up.

They attend your sales meetings and training sessions and diligently try to learn what you attempt to teach them.

So, what’s their problem?

Their problem is . . . 80% of them don’t sell as much as they could! Their days are filled with questionable intent, unfulfilled plans, reluctance to make meaningful sales calls or perhaps even avoiding certain contacts.

If only they’d do what you taught them to do, they’d be successful.

But, they don’t do what you taught.

Reading books, attending training sessions, watching videos or listening to speakers

at conferences sharing sales skills doesn’t prepare people to sell well. If it did, it would be easy to get people selling on higher levels.

Think about it and you’ll conclude that simply knowing how to sell, although necessary, doesn’t create sales winners. What happens outside of the sales meetings and trainings is far more valuable i.e. applying the learnings and teachings where it matters – in front of clients or customers.

So, just teaching them product knowledge, sales skills, and activity, doesn’t cause them to sell well. It never has done and in my view it never will.

The reasons are two-fold:

1. People don’t always do what they know how to do. They usually do what they feel like doing and what they think is possible for them to do. Salespeople are often driven by emotion.

2. They fail to cross the ‘Knowing to Doing’ gap. They struggle to implement what they learn where it counts most, in front of customers or clients.

The difference that makes the difference is a sales leader that knows the value of coaching and uses a systemised process for identifying who in the team needs investment of time and energy in meaningful coaching.

The difference that makes the difference is a sales leader that knows the value of coaching and uses a systemised process for identifying who in the team needs investment of time and energy in meaningful coaching.

Consider using the Skill vs Will matrix.

This is a management tool (made popular in “The Tao of coaching” by Max Landsberg) used to determine the best management or coaching approach for a given staff member, based on two metrics: their level of skill and their level of will.

Plotting your team members will help you determine who to invest in and what approach will generate optimum returns on your effort.

Typically, the 20% of salespeople that are ‘A’ players are high on both skill and will. The best approach with them is to delegate responsibility and focus your efforts on the ‘B’ players as this is where you’ll get maximum dividends for your investment in coaching time. The ‘C’ players won’t always produce a return and may require a very different approach.

Having considered who to coach and what approach to take – take the coaching into the field with accompaniments and simulations. If you don’t witness your team in action, you can’t know where they are failing!

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