Top Sales Manager Blog

This is the second part of the article Sales Coaching Myth #1: Stop Teaching And Start Reaching Out To Your Sales Reps.

In the first article, we discussed the difference between teaching and reaching out to your sales reps. Reaching out is essential if you want to develop a well-rounded sales team. As a top sales manager your job is to study and figure out your sales reps’ individual strengths and weaknesses, and adjust your strategies accordingly. Sales coaching as teaching is a myth because sales reps rarely learn anything from that method.

Which leads to…

Myth #2 – Most sales reps can assess their own strengths and weaknesses.

The saying goes, “No one knows you better than yourself.” Or something like that.

Does this mean that no one else is a better judge of our own strengths and weaknesses than ourselves? Should sales managers trust their sales rep when he says he has a talent for drawing people in and is bad at compiling periodical reports? Sad to say, but the answer is a resounding “NO”.

Scientific studies reveal that most people actually do a poor job, a very poor job, of constructing an accurate assessment of themselves. Apparently there’s no such thing as being objective about oneself. Most people tend to stick to other people’s positive opinions about themselves, and disregard anything that says the opposite.

The result is that sales reps normally hold on to their own positive self-assessment even when their sales manager shows proof of their poor or below average performance.

One way to overcome this obstacle is to develop a shared vision of the sales reps’ capabilities. You can’t lift the boat off the water, but you can take the steer and change its course.

Here’s an idea: why don’t you, the sales manager, alter the standard against which your sales rep judges himself or herself? For instance, stop trying to compare one sales rep’s performance with “what everyone else is doing” and instead make a shift towards a best practice standard model.

In addition you can now be sales rep-specific in describing important behavior topics such as “developing customer relationships” and “selling value”. It also puts the sales manager in the critical position to help his sales reps depersonalize criticisms and negative information to make it easier for them to handle.

The road to performance improvement is a difficult road to travel unless both parties, the sales manager and sales rep, agree on where the journey should begin. It is a joint effort with rewards for both parties waiting at the end—performance growth for the sales rep, and a job well done for the sales manager.

That’s another sales coaching myth busted. Tune in on the next blog post for Myth #3 – Results Must Be Reinforced For Performance To Change.

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Filed under: Coaching by ralphburns