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Coaches: Do Your Sales Skills and Behaviors Adversely Affect Your Goal to Increase Sales?

Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Article Overview: Does your coaching practice need to increase sales? Have you consider how your sales skills and the respective behaviors as a coach are directly tied to your ability to achieve this goal? Here are two (2) quick case studies that demonstrate this statement.

Coaches: Do Your Sales Skills and Behaviors Adversely Affect Your Goal to Increase Sales?

Does your coaching practice need to increase sales? Have you consider how your sales skills and the respective behaviors as a coach are directly tied to your ability to achieve this goal? Here are two (2) quick case studies that demonstrate this statement.

Scenario One
Imagine you are at your desk. The phone rings. You, as the sales coach, executive coach or business coach, decide to let voice mail take it because caller ID indicates caller unknown.

What did you do? Possibly, you checked voice mail right away (this is a behavior) and heard the following message: Hi, this is Tom, give me a call, I:

* Read one of your articles
* Came across your website
* Would like a free coaching session

Your behaviors might have been to:

1. Look at your schedule
2. Review your to do list

Then you made a decision this was not a urgent call to return and your behavior was to place it in your Not Urgent-Important pile or even Not Urgent-Not Important pile. You possibly think that if he was a real interested potential customer (a.k.a. prospect) he would have at least left his company’s name or have asked for an immediate returned call.

Your behavior (action) of putting it in the one of your to do files may have just doomed your goal to increase sales. By making a judgment based upon a voice mail can cost you increased revenue.

If you have a values statement within your strategic action plan, you possibly just violated it. Does your values statement make any reference to customer service, honesty, integrity, being responsive or accessible, doing what is right, etc. Did you ever think that individual who left you a voice mail was just checking you out to confirm if you were a person of integrity and looking to how well you demonstrated excellent sales skills given that you have identified yourself as a sales coach?

Scenario Two
You are working with someone within your sales process with the goal to earn the sale. As you have already decided to embrace an education based marketing approach, you give your qualified potential customer a complimentary sales assessment ($750 value). He takes the assessment and you invest 1.5 hours to debrief him.

Then he requests that you speak with the VP of International Sales as this person is part of the decision making process. The two of you connect and forward progress is made once again on your way to earn the sale. You also need to give this person the same assessment.

Within 2 hours after ending the conversation with the VP, you send off the email for this complimentary assessment. Then you send a quick email with your original contact updating him of what happened and the next steps in the process.

One week later you still have not received the completed assessment. Instead of sending another email, you call your first contact, the General Manager. He informs you that the VP never received the email. You promise to re-send the email and cc the general manager on the email. The General Manager thanks you for your personal follow-up and by not relying on email. He shares with you this is the type of behavior, values and sales skills he wants all his sales people to demonstrate.

Sales Coaching Lesson Shared: Scenario One did happen to me and I did return the call within 15 minutes after receiving the voice mail. I was on my cell phone when the call came over my land line. The call was from the General Manager cited in Scenario Two of a multi-million international company who was seeking sales training. Had I made judgments from not returning phone calls to relying only on technology, I potentially would never had the opportunity to develop these relationships and probably would have lost the opportunity to continue to earn this sale.

Your judgment or decision making process is literally the why behind the hows of your sales skills and behaviors. Remember, as you judge or make decisions about others so are you judged. The bottom line question is can you afford someone negatively judging you if your goal is to increase sales?

Related Articles
  Improve Your Sales Training By Changing Fuel
  How to Win More Sales
  Every Time Without Fail Focus Trumps Intention To Increase Sales
  Sales Coaching Tip: Change Your Role to Increase Sales
  How the Choices You Make Will Determine Your Sales Results

Article Tags: business coach, caller id, case studies, customer service, desk, education, excellent sales, executive coach, honesty integrity, judgment, quick case, voice mail



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