Coach Your Salespeople to Be Their Best (A Note to the Sales Manager)

You need to coach your team to deliver its very best performance. Sometimes you are going to have an all-star team, a team that sets records and exceeds anyone’s expectations—even their own. Sometimes you will have a team with less talent than you need, and sometimes you will have a team that is a little better than average.

Your job is to coach your team to the best performance that team is capable of. This means you coach each individual to deliver the best performance they are capable of producing.

Their Best Is Their Best

It is important to remember that you want the best performance you can possibly get from each of your salespeople.

Some of your salespeople will be capable of far more than they deliver, and you are going to have to push them to give you the performance they are capable of delivering. They’re better than most even when they are coasting so they never break a sweat.

Others will have little natural ability but will work like the devil to put up numbers. They don’t need pushed; they need help getting the skills and the situational knowledge.

You coach each individual to deliver their best performance, remembering that their best performance isn’t the same as another salesperson’s best performance.

Turning In Your Best Performance

From quarter to quarter, from year to year, you and your team have to turn in the best performance that you possibly can.

Some years, you may set records because that was what your team was capable of producing. Other years you won’t produce record sales, but you still may turn in the best performance possible from the team you fielded. You might even have a year where your group of underdogs misses setting the record, but puts forth the effort that makes them your all-time favorite sales team for outperforming everyone’s expectations.

This post isn’t about making excuses for losses or missed quarters (or Heaven forbid, missed years). What it is about instead is the fundamental idea that you coach each of your players to deliver their best performance, and by doing so, you deliver the best performance that team was capable of producing. That is your job as a sales manager and coach. And if you do that much, things will turn out better than you expected.

Questions

How do you coach each individual to deliver their best performance?

How do you give each of your salespeople what they need in order to give you their best performance?

How does coaching each individual rep help you to deliver your best performance as their manager-coach?

Can you deliver your best performance as a manager-coach if some of your team members don’t? How do you get them to understand their role on the team?