At TopLine Leadership, our sales training programs are designed to help your sales team to think and feel like a customer, that is, how to get into the customer’s head. With our sales training program, your sales team will learn how to sell based on how customers buy. We understand what it takes to improve … Read full article
Are you familiar with the old sales axiom telling is not selling? Well, telling is not coaching either. Confucius had it right when he said, “What I hear I forget, what I see I may remember, but what I do I understand.” He could have been giving advice to sales managers on how to develop … Read full article
A common mistake sales managers make when coaching salespeople is to give them a laundry list of things they need to improve upon. Most of us only have the capacity to improve one or two things at any given time. You don’t want to overwhelm your sales reps because you may damage their self-confidence. Give you … Read full article
In sales management, most sales managers focus on the “Close” part of the sales process because that is where problems/mistakes rear their ugly heads. A sure thing sale suddenly goes “silent.” The prospect decides to check out other vendors. Everybody panics”¦ and that’s when the sale manager steps in to try to close the sale. … Read full article
If you’re a sales manager, how did you spent your time over the last week, the last month? How much of your time was spent helping your sales reps develop their sales skills? How much time was spent helping them think through what they need to do to move a client forward in the buying … Read full article
I have reviewed many sales manager job descriptions over the years. Recently I was retained by a Fortune 500 company to examine their job description for the sales manager position. Fully 85 percent of the duties were directly linked to coaching salespeople. After this review, I conducted face-to-face interviews with a number of the sales … Read full article
In sales management, many managers face a lot of distractions. Often times, the first thing to go out the window is developmental coaching… time spent helping salespeople improve their skills (not just closing one sale). These sales managers haven’t observed their salespeople selling, or intervened at key points of the sales process, so when a … Read full article
To get better performance from your sales team, the solution is to steal a lesson from the medical profession and “triage” your sales team. Chances are, your peak performers and highly experienced/tenured people will survive regardless of how much time you spend with them. Praise and recognize them – continue to motivate them – but … Read full article
Based on my contact with thousands of sales managers over the past 30 years, one of the most common mistakes I see is sales managers who spend most of their time with either their poorest performers or their top producers. Focusing on the poorest performers is misguided. Suppose your coaching efforts result in a 10% … Read full article
There are many similarities between selling customers and coaching salespeople. Both require understanding another’s problems, diagnosing the cause of that problem and helping the other person to understand the complications/ripple effects if they don’t solve the problem. Sales managers already possess many of the abilities that they need to become a great sales coach—but habit … Read full article