Sales Team Development

The Problem:

Development of the sales team is critical because the sales team usually controls the flow of new business into the company. An under performing salesforce becomes the bottleneck, slowing the growth of the entire company.

Often the owner has little or no prior experience in managing salespeople. Even a great salesman, when promoted to sales manager is often not great at managing other salespeople.

As a result, most sales managers need coaching to develop their sales management skills.

Salespeople, on the other hand, typically lack many of the skills required to be successful at sales. Once in a while a new sales hire will turn out to be a star, most will not do so well.

Many of the mid-level performers would become much more productive if they received personal coaching and sales training to develop the skills and techniques of sales and selling.

Ask your salespeople:

• How often does the sales manager ride along on a call, listen to and constructively critique the salesman’s presentation? Every month? Every Week? Almost never?
• How much time does a salesperson spend in the office role playing, practicing answers to objections or learning stories that work?
• How often is there a sales meeting devoted exclusively to closing?

Failure to provide coaching is one of the most common mistakes made by owners and managers in charge of a sales team. One recent study stated that more than 73% of sales managers spent less than 5% of their week coaching their subordinates. It’s no wonder that so many sales people don’t grow and improve.

We have worked successfully with organizations, from startups to small entrepreneurial companies, to larger established family businesses, up to and including organizations with a hundred or more sales people.

Our services for sales team development are focused on coaching sales managers and developing the selling skills of the sales team.

Coaching Sales Managers

LVI’s coaching program is tailored to the specific needs of each individual client’s organization. We provide coaching services for:

• Owners who are responsible for sales, but do not have sales backgrounds,
• New sales managers who come from sales, but have little sales management experience, and
• Experienced sales managers who have potential, but are currently underperforming.

Our coaching program provides the owner or sales manager with regular opportunities to interact with a mentor who has directly relevant experience and to receive counsel on problems, challenges and opportunities related to improving the performance of the sales people.

Our sales manager coaching program usually involves several days working closely with and observing the sales manager as he works with the sales team. This is then followed by regular telephone and webinar conferences and on-site visits to review the sales manager’s experiences with the sales team and the sales team’s performance.

Developing the Sales Team

LVI believes sales training requires much more than a single, high-powered sales motivation session, a 2 day sales training seminar or even an annual retreat.

While all these sessions are helpful and useful, it is even more important to have regularly scheduled sessions with ongoing reinforcement of sales best practices, regular improvement of sales skills, role playing and open discussion of actual sales situations. These sessions need to be weekly or at least bi-weekly.

LVI’s sales training is focused on making a lasting improvement in the sales performance of the individual sales team members.

With our program, they not only learn what to do, but also why it works. We focus on increasing specific sales skills, including: prospecting, developing rapport, asking questions, presentation, closing and follow-up.

LVI’s sales training program includes seminars, follow up contact, role playing and field follow up. It includes developing prospecting, presentation and closing skills, as well as work habits, motivation and inter-personal behavior traits. It involves coaching the sales managers so they can reinforce and further improve sales team member skills and performance.

For the owner who is truly interested in making a lasting improvement in the performance of the sales team, LVI will design a program for you.

LVI’s Experience

As owners, executives and consultants, LVI’s Principals have developed and managed sales teams for businesses in:

• residential security,
• commercial security,
• systems integration,
• fire protection,
• fire alarm,
• security equipment manufacturing, and
• security services.

If you have an interest in improving your sales team or your sales management skills, give us a call or fill out the form below and we will confidentially discuss your situation with you.