Top Sales Manager Blog

The gym trainer tells you to do three sets of basic crunches, 15 counts each. Why is that? Why not make it 45 counts of basic crunches and get it over with?

There are times when breaking something down into smaller portions make it a lot easier to perform the feat. The same is true with turning underperforming staff into sales wizards, which I discussed in my previous post. A top-performing sales manager is someone who catches his sales person doing something approximately right, and praises him or her to guide the sales person on the path to doing it exactly right.

Take note a top-performing sales manager doesn’t wait for something exactly right to happen before he starts giving out praises and kind words. Almost no one gets something exactly right the first time they do it, especially not underperformers.

The best example I could think of is teaching a baby how to walk.

When you teach a baby its first steps, you don’t stand up the baby, let it go on its own, and yell, “Walk, walk, you moron!” And when the baby falls down, you don’t yank it up and spank it for not doing it right. No parent in his or her right frame of mind would do that.

First you got to stand up the baby and keep holding its hands while it tries to balance itself on its wobbly feet. It’s okay for the baby to fall down every now and then. When the baby loses its balance and falls down, you embrace it and kiss it and tell it how proud you are that it’s finally learning to take its first baby steps.

Keep doing this day after day, until the baby begins to realize the more it tries to learn how to walk, the more hugs and kisses it’s going to get. Pretty soon you’ll be seeing your baby walk all the way on its own.

But don’t get me wrong though. Your sales people are no babies. But they are human beings, too, and human beings, in general, are known to respond better to encouragement and praise than under an air of criticism.

The drill is to “touch” your sales people in all the right places. This is done by the careful use of proper encouragement and praise, hopefully to get your underperformers to be confident about themselves. This is where it all begins – confidence. If a sales person is confident that he or she has what it takes perform better, then you’ve done your part as an effective and top-performing sales manager.

Praise your sales people and grow their confidence towards ultimate achievement.

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Filed under: Coaching, Motivation, Underperformers by ralphburns