Author: Deborah Brown, Prosell USA Senior Consultant
Original Article published by Prosell UK
In Australia we see a trend that is reflected in many organisations around the world. As customers become more knowledgeable and are able to learn about products and services on line, they tend to engage with an organisation and its sales people much later in the sales cycle than previously.
This means the role of everyone in the business who touches the customer in any way has fundamentally changed.
The customer is no longer saying, ‘tell me about your products and services’, because they already know this. They are now saying, ‘tell me why we should buy from you, as opposed to the other suppliers out there.’ This means that the way everyone in the business expresses your value proposition in a uniform and strong manner has the biggest single influence on sales success.
This in turn means all managers and supervisors must have good coaching skills, to support people through this changing nature of customer engagement. This article looks at the way performance coaching is critical to achieving strategic sales goals.
Peter Fullbrook Managing Director Prosell Australia
Deborah Brown, Prosell’s senior consultant in the United States, considers the key factors that contribute to a successful roll-out of Licence to Coach™, our performance coaching program.
What compel ls a business to embark on a coaching program to improve their frontline sales and customer services teams’ performance? Without doubt, there is a complex matrix of decision-making criteria that is unique to each business. But I believe there are five common conditions which act as catalysts to move companies to train:
1. A realization that people don’t possess inherent, effective coaching skills combined with the belief that those skills are “teachable/learnable.” A few people are naturally good at motivating others to perform. The rest, though good intentioned, fall short simply because they have never been trained with proven communication strategies that equip others to perform consistently at their best.
2. Place a high value on having a unified approach to performance coaching across the organization (where multiple employees all use the same process to accomplish a given task, in this case, coaching).
3. An awareness that learning doesn’t take place in the classroom alone. There is a critical need for classroom training to be coupled with on-the-job coaching to help the learner translate new ideas in their everyday world. Perfect practice makes perfect. It’s hard to be perfect at something new without input from a coach/trainer who can help you see what you can’t see and fill the gaps that you can’t overcome on your own.
4. A realistic expectation about how long it will take to get through the initial learning curve and see the desired performance uplifts. There is almost always a short-term lag in results while people are implementing changes. Historically, the uplift that comes after the initial dip is well worth it.
5. A willingness to make the necessary investment of time, infrastructure revamp, and money, believing that they will see a return that in both monetary as well as harder-to-measure benefits like improved employee satisfaction, improved customer retention, higher customer satisfaction scores, and more. A student of mine once shared that using the Licence to Coach™ approach had dramatically improved how he communicated with his teenagers. They went from virtually no conversation to heart-to-heart talks that changed the way the both saw each other. The impact of those types of benefits are impossible to measure, but are very real.
When the conditions are right, the impact that our Licence to Coach™ can have on both the organization and the individual is remarkable. Not only can we achieve the business targets defined early on in the process, but also the knowledge and communication tools gained during the Procoach program have helped transformed people’s lives outside the work place.
If you would like to discuss developing the skills of your sales and customer service teams, through performance coaching, please do get in touch. We would love to hear from you.
