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Success in sales has a lot to do with the self-limiting beliefs of the salesperson. These beliefs can make it difficult if not impossible for salespeople to execute sales techniques they “know” how to use. For example, if a salesperson believes that it is not OK to talk about money on the first sales call, then even though they are skilled in the art of uncovering budget they will not use the techniques due to their self-limiting belief. However, most sales managers focus on background, presence, product knowledge, how they dress, experience, etc. and ignore the issue of self-limiting beliefs. There are many self-limiting beliefs that salespeople have such as “I have to call on the purchasing agent”, “I need the prospect to like me”, “It’s ok if my prospect thinks it over”, etc. The problem for the hiring manager is that these self-limiting beliefs are not evident in the interview. You have to know what you are looking for and be a skilled interviewer to uncover them. Sales managers need to dig deeper on interviews to uncover the self-limiting beliefs of the salespeople. Alternatively, you can use an assessment specifically designed to identify self-limiting beliefs and the hidden weaknesses such as the Objective Management Sales Candidate assessment.

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Role playing is one of the best ways to train your salespeople. When you role play with your salespeople, you should play the part of the salesperson and let the salesperson play the part of the prospect. There are 3 reasons for this. The first is that the salesperson will expose for you his or her self-limiting beliefs in the role play. They will also show you what obstacles they anticipate happening on the sales call. When you know what obstacles they are anticipating, you can demonstrate the proper way to handle the objection or the obstacle. You can also condition their mindset (i.e. give them an empowering mindset which is the opposite of the self-limiting belief). That is the second and probably the most important reason for role-playing. Salespeople will role-play the worst prospect you are ever likely to see so that gives us the third reason for role-playing. It will sharpen your own sales skills. You will get to practice against the worst objections you will ever hear.

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One of the primary functions of the sales manager is to coach the salespeople. However, most sales managers are severely lacking in coaching skills. One of the biggest mistakes is substituting status updates for coaching. The coaching session degenerates into a pipeline review with little to no coaching involved. Status reviews give answers to questions like: “what is the next step”, “when will it close”, “what changed since the last ‘coaching’ session”, etc. This is all valuable information for the sales manager to know, but it is not coaching. The Sales manager should be able to get all that information from the CRM if the salesperson is keeping it up to date. Coaching, on the other hand, involves debriefing what happened on the last call and providing input on what could have been done better or reinforcement of what was done right. It involves understanding the salesperson’s mindset for the call and correcting it if it was not supporting the desired outcome. The sales manager should provide guidance for upcoming calls and advice on what the salesperson could be doing better. This venue does not allow for a complete description of what to coach on and how to provide the coaching. But stop turning your coaching time into status updates and pipeline reviews. Pipeline review and coaching are two separate things.

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Everyone measures the bottom line. Sales managers typically know where they stand at all times relative to the sales goals that were set. However, that is not enough to get a true picture of the effectiveness of the sales team. Sales managers need to track activity at the top end of the funnel. How many attempts (dials or walk-ins) are the sales team members making and what percentage of them lead to a meaningful sales conversation? How many face-to-face or phone meetings are they having on a weekly basis? How many of them lead to a qualified prospect? Effective sales managers know exactly what activity is taking place at the top end of the funnel. And, they know the conversion ratios. Any change in the level of activity or conversion ratios at the top end of the funnel is cause for further investigation and possible intervention by the sales manager. Activity at the top end of the funnel can be an early warning to increased sales in the future or impending doom. Sales managers ignore this data at their own peril.

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You must track pipeline movement to get a true picture of the effectiveness of your sales team. Most sales managers look at their pipeline regularly. However, what they usually look at is a snapshot of what the pipeline looks like at a given point in time. This is valuable information. But it is not enough. To get a true picture, you must track the movement of the pipeline. How do the deals move through the pipeline? How long does it take? Where are deals stalling. If you don’t track the movement through the pipeline you will run the risk of a false sense of security. Yes, you have a $50 million pipeline but how has the average sales cycle changed over the past month. What is the average sales cycle of the deals in the pipeline now projected to be? Answers to these questions are critical to understanding changes in the performance of the salespeople. If deals are slowing down, that foreshadows difficulty meeting numbers in future quarters and action can be taken to mitigate the problem, but only if you track movement in the pipeline.

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