The five functions required of a sales manager are coaching, performance management, recruiting, mentoring and motivation, says sales leadership consultant Anthony Cole (AnthonyColeTraining.com). The most prominent of those is performance management – the ability to set goals, inspect actual performance against goals, eliminate excuses for lack of performance, reward success and implement discipline when there is failure to perform.
How do we raise the bar and more effectively coach salespeople? Change beliefs, change attitude, change behaviors and change results, Cole says.
Step 1: Take responsibility. Raising the bar starts with you taking responsibility for what you have, what you have to do to get the performance you need, what you should expect, and ultimately, what you are responsible for.
Step 2: Make your people responsible. When someone attempts to slide by with an excuse (by the way, everything is an excuse), respond with, “If I didn’t let
you use that as an excuse, what would you have done (or would be doing) differently?”
Step 3: Clearly communicate what is expected. Tell them what you expect. Ask them to describe how this impacts their day, week, month, quarter and year. Ask them if they are willing to do everything possible to succeed. Ask them what you should do if they fail to meet these expectations. You have now raised the bar.
Step 4: Actually raise the bar for acceptable performance. Perhaps the biggest problem with underperforming is the reality that many managers have established minimal standards for performance. In essence, you are telling your salespeople: Here is the goal and
this is what you can “get by with.”Eliminate the minimal acceptable standards of performance and embrace a new approach of extraordinary standards of performance.
Step 5: Set extraordinary standards of performance.
If you continue to have two standards – goals and minimum acceptable standards – then you will continue to have a large percentage of your sales team performing at or close to the minimum success standards. If you raise the yearly standards from good to extraordinary, then overall performance will improve.
