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Sales Coaching: Enjoy the Ride and You’ll Hit Goal

Good morning, fellow coaches. This last week I’ve been working in the operation of a client with a tough combination: he’s got a sales challenge in his organization, but he’s’ got zero personal selling experience. He’s a guy with lots of operations experience in large companies, but he’s never been on the street hustling product. So his approach to his young selling staff has been to harp on month end numbers repeatedly, threaten consequences, and offer well meant but arcane suggestions from the sidelines that are silently laughed off by his sellers.

Part of my coaching relationship with him has been to slowly teach him about the process of a sale in his operation, and to show him that part of getting salespeople to hit goal is to identify the parts of the process that they are strong in and work out in layers from there. One of his key people, for example, is a guy who hates to pick up the phone for the cold call, but really gets a charge out of the conversation that leads to an appointment (these are different types of calls in today’s selling world, by the way). So the coaching tip for this rep is to focus him on the goal of X number of appointments per week as his big number, not the number of cold calls he makes. The assignment was: dude, you are killer at closing people into appointments. We want you to focus on your appointment number only, and we don’t care how you get there. We don’t care if you do it all through networking or referrals, we don’t care of you don’t make a classic cold call all week, as long as you get your appointment number. Enjoy yourself, because we know when you get your appointments, you sell ‘em and we’re all happy. I coached my client to focus his seller on the seller’s “happy spot”. Result: last few weeks, a solid stream of appointments led to a near doubling of sales production. Sweet. Lesson: get ‘em to enjoy the ride and they’ll hit goal.

As always, if you have any stories or questions to share, I’d love to hear them!



Joe Pursch