Richard Harris™

The most overlooked sales competency in training and coaching is around giving your team the courage and confidence to have the uncomfortable conversations. We have to give our team the words they need to use in the shifting market conditions. We have to teach them how humans make decisions, how those decisions can affect them, and meet them in their headspace to engage the conversation from their point of view. Not from the point of view from our website.

The single best thing an organization can do is to have the sales leaders and C-Level leadership conduct sales calls by themselves. Have them recorded with the right tools, and then send the recording to the sales team and ask them, "So, what could I have done better." If you do this, then the team will easily get on board with training and coaching programs.

Sometimes it's not going to just be about your sales teams' needs. In some cases it could be do you have the right people. Often times the people who got you there may not be the people to get you where you need to go now.

I encourage people to define their goals by answering the following questions. 1. At the end of sales training we want the team to be better at ___, ___, ___. 2. We will define success as an increase (or decrease) in ___, ___, and ___. 3. True / False - We have baseline metrics to grow from regarding these goals. 3a. If true, then great. 3b. If false then you must agree to the following... "We will allow 90 days to collect baseline metrics. We will assess in 30 and 60 days, but we will not let those assessments be written in stone.

Comparing your metrics to other companies and industry data points is nothing more than a fools errand. At most it may be a goal to reach. Until you know why you're not hitting that goal and fixing those specific skills, resources, or headcount, don't spend time on this other than to read the headlines.

Once you know the use cases you are solving for it's important to then know what are your expectations. Sometimes the expectations may be counter intuitive. Increasing pipeline may be desired, however you first may have to reduce the garbage that is in the pipeline. So your metric to be measured might be more accurate deals in the pipeline, and in order to do this we expect to lose 25% of current deals because they are not real.