Building a High-Performance Sales Team

It is easy to energize sales people who want to be motivated, but how do you crack the tough cases, the people who never seem to do what is best for the organization or for them - yet take up all of your time? The challenge is that a fundamental rule of management is that you can not change people's character or behavior; you can not even control their actions most of the time. Change comes from within or not at all. Heaven knows I have enough problems changing myself let alone making me responsible as a coach or trainer to change others.

I propose a method that I have seen work in my external and internal coaching of sales clients. This is a simple shift of the responsibility from the subject to the object, from the sales manager to the sales person. A critical part of this shift is also involved in a twist in perspective as well - The sales manager needs to look at the sales person not as a problem to be solved but as a person to be understood. Instead of pushing opportunities and resolutions on sales people with the force of your argument, pull solutions out of the sales person. In other words use the skills that you use with your indifferent customers to explore circumstances, where you are able to identify opportunities in which you can examine the effects of the sales person when the sales person fails to deliver as required and volia' you have identified a NEED now close the sale by virtue of the corresponding feature and benefit of being gainfully employed. Harsh yes! Our job is to tell it like it is and to establish an ultimatum for improvement with a timetable. Then our obligation to the shareholders of our company is to monitor and follow up on the sales person.