Sales Managers & Team Leaders Coaching - How to Raise Sales Standards

Sales managers and team leaders spend a huge amount of time trying to move people from “capable” to consistently good. 

Most teams have a few strong performers, a few people who need a lot of support, and a large middle ground where standards can drift depending on confidence, pressure, energy, or habit.

In this episode, Bob and Jeremy talk about what raising standards looks like in practice and why consistency matters so much in sales teams.

They explore the coaching conversations that help people improve, the behaviours that can damage customer trust, and why some salespeople hit targets in ways that create bigger problems later on. There’s also a simple four-step coaching framework for leaders who want clearer conversations around performance, behaviour, attitude, and development.

The episode also covers:

• helping people understand the “why” behind expectations
• defining what good looks like
• closing the gap between current performance and consistent performance
• what to do when somebody slips back into old habits
• and how to recognise when coaching has stopped moving somebody forward

A practical episode for sales managers, team leaders, and anyone responsible for improving performance while keeping people engaged.

To find out more about our work and to see what we could do to help your organisation, visit www.realitytraining.com.

Transcript

Welcome And Who This Helps

Bob Morrell 0:14

Welcome to the Reality of Sales Training, presented by me, Bobby Morrell, and my dear friend and colleague Jeremy Blake. Today we're going to do the second in a short series for sales managers and team leaders. And of course, if you are a salesperson listening to this, it'll be interesting to look at this from your point of view because it definitely concerns you. Now, as a sales manager or team leader, you have a group of people that you work with, and some of them will be pretty good and successful and won't need too much assistance. Lots of them will be in the kind of what you might call the middle ground, and there'll be a few lower performers that need your assistance and coaching to be made really, really good. And that's your that's your focus. What you also get are the occasional individuals who struggle to tick the box in certain elements, like they won't demonstrate the right sort of sales behaviors that you're looking for, or they'll behave a certain way in front of customers, which isn't quite what you're after, or they will have, you know, little attitudinal issues which are causing your problems and causing them an issue with regards to their performance. Now, when it comes to a leadership, um, it's really important that you understand what your expectations are of your sales team. So before we go into the the remedy for this, Jay, have you got any more thoughts on that?

Jeremy Blake 1:42

No, I think that's really important that whoever's listening, you're listening in a sense, how does this affect me? And also if you're someone with a team, you're you're getting a perspective on how best to lead and move people forward. No, I I think I think you covered everything.

Why Consistency Protects Your Brand

Bob Morrell 1:58

So the key here is consistency. That is what you need. If you've got a group of people who are inconsistent, you're gonna have inconsistent performance, in inconsistent behaviors, that's gonna cause reputational damage to what it is you're doing, and that is bad for business. Okay. So your job is to go, right? I need to increase the consistency of all of these people. So the behaviors, the results, everything moves in a kind of forward way. Now, let's think about that. An individual, and that person isn't doing what you need them to do. They might be quite successful, but they're using the wrong methods to do it. They might be being disloyal to the company, they might be using a few underhand discounts and uh using a bit of uh cajoling, which is not the necessary integrity behavior that you're looking for.

Jeremy Blake 2:54

And the other thing is they're just their general energy management is so fluctuating that that affects consistency, their attitude is good some days, it drops other days, they're blaming lots of exterior factors, home life, weather, and they just seem to be a bit boom and bust, and it's fairly exhausting for them. They've got to have somebody really lead them and help them say, look, within these hours, within this time frame, stay on your game. And these are some things that you can do, which we'll go into now that will help that person who is struggling to focus, struggling to say can stay consistent. So, what do you think is the big tip here,

The Four-Step Coaching Framework

Jeremy Blake 3:28

Bob?

Bob Morrell 3:28

So there's four things you do, either with the individual and sometimes with the team. The first thing is you remind people of the why. Why are we doing this? What is our objective? What is the overall objective of the organization? What is it that we're really trying to do? Let's make sure you understand why we're doing it. We need to achieve this, and these are the reasons why. Do you get that? Yes, I do. Okay, so that's the first thing. What is the why? Then the second thing is what does great look like? Well, great looks like you're working really efficiently, you're demonstrating all the behaviors that we want you to show to customers, you are making really good use of your time, which incidentally we're paying you for, so you're making really good use of that, and you are focusing on the results that we are trying to achieve. Okay.

Jeremy Blake 4:24

And you're also controlling and being present and understanding the effect of the language and the words that you're using.

Bob Morrell 4:32

So we we know the why, and we know what great looks like. Then the last two is easy. But between where this person is and the great, there is a gap. So you now need to say, look, I've just shown you what great looks like. Well, what we've seen from you is a couple of little elements of greatness and a couple of elements where that greatness has fallen away, and that's affecting your results. It's affecting the way that you come across to customers, and that is not consistent. That is not giving us the quality level that we're really after. So that's where you are compared to where great is. The last thing is really simple. I now need to build a bridge as your team leader or your sales manager, a bridge from where you are to where great is. Now that might take several conversations, it might take six months of development.

Jeremy Blake 5:23

And some milestones, you know, might have some things to reach. That the model, the language had dropped off, the prospecting, the retention conversation, whatever it might be.

Bob Morrell 5:32

Yeah. You might need some training, you might might need some more development. There might be additional things that you need help with, but I need to make it very clear that we are going to build this bridge together for you to get to grade, and we're going to have a sorry, you made some very good demonstration and modelling that you just haven't really seen it.

Jeremy Blake 5:49

Um you're trying to picture it, but you need to go out and do accompaniment with one of the best in the team. Or, you know, the interventions so far supplied uh are minimal because people learn in so many different ways. They need to see things, hear things, watch things, read things, demonstrate things. Um, you know, so you haven't had the learning you need.

Bob Morrell 6:08

Now,

Reset The Conversation When They Slip

Bob Morrell 6:09

if that individual has an attitude problem, the first time they hear this, they might say, Okay, well, that sounds great. And then a week later you hear them, witness them, observe what they're doing, and they've just gone back to what they were always doing. Now, don't go, Oh dear, what's going on now? And start to start to sort of pick up from the end of that previous conversation. No, you go back to the beginning. Remind me why we're doing this. Oh, um, okay, yes. Yeah, you're now coaching it, you see, because they've had it. That's the difference. You've switched. What's the why? Yeah. What does great look like? Well, yes, great's this, that, and the other. Okay, and where were you? Oh, yeah, I did this, that, and the other. Okay, so how do we now move to that for the next level? Now, you keep coming back to this. Success as a sales manager and team leader is in small, repeatable actions that absolutely progresses that individual or that team to the place where you need them to be. Now, it takes practice, it takes a quite a lot of um organization to make sure you're available to have those conversations, and you need to prioritize this sort of conversation over some of the more mundane things that you do as a team leader because this is where the difference is.

Jeremy Blake 7:25

And the only thing

When It’s Time To Move On

Jeremy Blake 7:26

I'll add is people listening to this are thinking, gosh, I've done this and I've still got this bad apple, this neg ferret, whatever you want to call Adrian Webster's energy vampire. Energy vampire. Um, my question is, how long would you let somebody work with you for you know what time period is long enough before you say it's game over? And I know corporate organizations got to get HR involved, but if the person refuses to change, the thing that you'll be doing them is a favor when you help them move to either another position or or get out of the company. And if if you do this religiously properly, really put the time in on the why, the gap, the learning, and so on, and there is no change, it's very likely just purely attitudinal, or it could be capability issue. It's just way, way beyond them.

Bob Morrell 8:14

Now,

Building A Career In Sales Leadership

Bob Morrell 8:15

lastly, if you aspire to be a team leader or a sales manager, this is the stuff that you need to be able to deliver and work with. If you can get your head around this, you can demonstrate that you can transform the performance of individuals in your team. That's what brands want. So if you're able to do this, you could become very successful very quickly because lots of team leaders are not very good at this and they need to practice it and improve.

Jeremy Blake 8:44

And one of the things I'd say about the sales ladder, career ladder, is you generally have to be a successful salesperson before you become a successful sales leader. Definitely. You can leave, sideways move, and go and become a leader in another department to then come back. But if you are really much better in leadership, you want to try and get on the ladder and get into it and become a team leader and then see where your career takes you. Okay, hope this has been useful.

Bob Morrell 9:08

Okay, we'll see you on another one soon. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. This podcast

Reality Training And Next Steps

Bob Morrell 9:14

comes from Reality Training. For the last 25 years, we've transformed the customer interactions of many leading UK businesses and developed thousands of managers to be better at what they do. To find out more about our work and to see what we could do to help your organization, go to realitytraining.com.