In my previous article - “hiring salespeople with talent” - I explored the challenges involved in making good sales hires. In this article - first published in the International Journal of Sales Transformation - I now want to explore more of the implications.Now I want to shift attention to some of the key things we need to do if we are to fully develop the potential of the talented salespeople that we have just hired.

You might not be surprised to learn that I believe that this involves understanding each salesperson’s attitudes, behaviours, and competencies in the context of our expectations for the role that we expect them to fulfil - as well as the future roles that we anticipate they might take on as they grow and develop.

Just as there is no such thing as a completely “perfect sale” (at least I have never observed one in any complex B2B sales environment), I believe that there is no such thing as a completely “perfect salesperson”. There is always the potential for improvement in any salesperson. Indeed, I’d suggest that a personal commitment to continuing self-development is one of the defining attributes of a top salesperson...

This article was first published in the latest edition (issue 8.1 - January 2022) of the International Journal of Sales Transformation. To learn more about this excellent publication, follow the link at the bottom of this article.

Successful sales managers must master a range of important skills. They need to make sure that they recruit the right people and help them to realise their potential, encourage their teams to follow and contribute to the organisation’s learned best practices, ensure that opportunities are well-qualified, that pipelines are well managed and that forecasts are consistently accurate. I’m sure you can think of more.

But perhaps the overriding skill - if sales managers are to get the very best out of every member of their sales organisation - is their ability to coach, and their willingness to commit the amount of time required in the coaching process. I addressed some of these concepts in an earlier article “Establishing the Foundations of a Coaching Culture” in issue 7.3 of the journal, and I now want to expand on some of the themes introduced there.

In particular, I want to focus on three areas:

• Devoting the appropriate amount of time to coaching
• Acquiring the skills necessary to be an effective coach
• Developing the mindset needed to be an effective coach

This article was first published in issue 7.3 of the International Journal of Sales Transformation, and I'm very pleased to be able to share it here...

What’s the one thing that separates truly effective first level B2B sales managers from the rest? You can make a case for their ability to motivate, or to create an environment of responsibility and accountability, but there’s good reason to believe that their ability to coach, develop and get the best out of their people is their single most important asset.

But there’s a problem: although coaching is a trainable skill, few first level sales managers have been formally trained in it. Even sales organisation that invest significantly in training their salespeople frequently fail to invest appropriately in developing the skills of their managers - despite the obvious impact that these sorts of investments could have on their long-term success.

Compounding the problem, few first level sales managers spend anything like enough time on coaching or establish a regular cadence for it. Although studies from Objective Management Group and others suggest that front line sales managers need to invest anything from a quarter to a third of their time on coaching, many spend less than 10% of their time on it, and often don’t do even that particularly well.

It doesn’t help that many sales managers are appointed to their first sales management role primarily because of the results they achieved as salespeople. But the correlation between being a great salesperson and a good sales manager is questionable - particularly if the salesperson’s results were achieved because of a lucky territory assignment or (worse) a single-minded lone wolf style determination to succeed at all costs regardless of the consequences...