The emphasis in the system is to grow individual salespeople, and then sales should follow. It means we need to spend more time with our team and support their growth by coaching them to excellence. To be able to coach, you need to know where the pain points are for each team member and empower them to grow beyond their limitations. No coach can coach unless there is data to confirm your conclusions. Using Accrete to coach will make this job much more manageable.

The Sales Game forms the basis for coaching in Accrete. It is essential to understand what the approach is to enable the sales manager to be an effective coach.

Why does the Sales Game Model matter?

It helps you to implement a motivational system that addresses the core competencies to achieve, ensuring that you have enough sales to exceed your sales targets. As mentioned in previous articles – activities equal sales. If we make sure that we have sufficient activities with well-established sales strategies and techniques in place, we will achieve sales success. The sales coach’s role is to keep on developing the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the salesperson’s sales strategy.

Using Accrete to coach: Conversion focus

The sales coach needs to monitor sales interactions and revisit the failures and successes to find out what to improve and what to change. With the information available, the coaching function entails getting the answer to what’s working and what’s not. Monitor each step in the sales process to see where the issues lie.

According to research, 28% of salespeople say they struggle with closing, and 35% says it is more challenging to close now than three years ago.

Closing is also the second-highest issue that salespeople are struggling with within the sales process. If your team is struggling with closing, the problem will probably be higher up in the sales process. You need to analyse the ratio’s between sales pitches, quotations and closed sales to see if there are any issues with a specific salesperson compared to their peers.

Maybe they’re not selling the benefits, or they might be qualifying the wrong prospects, or they’re not handling their objections—all things you might address with sales training.

By examining the detail in the reporting, you will find the proof for your coaching conclusions. You must make sure that you have the detail in your sale management system. “The devil lies in the detail.”  

Detailed sales reports based on activities and client interaction surely can be the provider of essential information. The leader is just as strong as the team he is leading. It is your job to make your team as strong as possible. If you want to go to the world cup and you are not willing orable to coach your players, you will not reach that goal.  

Using Accrete to coach: Scoreboard

With Accrete, we want to get you from not reviewing activity performance to announcing the winner of the Sales Game and creating high levels of motivation in our team. If you follow this method, it will allow you to reward the top salesperson not only based on sales value but by repaying the effort that went into the sales process. With the scoreboard and activity-based reporting, you can coach your team to excellence.

As you measure Key Performance Results, you should aim to double the average score of the team within 90 days, resulting in sales growth of at least 25% every 90 days.

What we are doing in the Sales Game Model is to follow the outcomes on the steps in the sales process, by setting clear expectations of performance in every step of the sales process. When we get to the scoreboard, we know exactly how everyone is performing concerning all the steps required. Accrete provides the overall leader board to compare the team members to peers and an activity-based matrix for actual activities vs target activities per individual.

The focus now in the coaching should be on closing the caps in the activity performance.

Using Accrete to coach: Tools to provide direction

Accrete gives the sales coach a dashboard designed to provide immediate insights into the core ratios and activity flow, which contributes to a high-level understanding of issues to be addressed. The system further features detailed reports on client interactions, calling cycles that are behind, indicating customers not being contacted or followed-up, and outstanding quotations and pipeline activity, to name a few.  

With the information in the reporting, you will get an in-depth view of the sales person’s world.

Summary:

Let me summarise by providing steps you can follow: 

Step 1: Create and Review a Scoreboard

Have a Tournament system in place, based on activity scoring and have it live, so that it can drive the competitive spirit, which occurs naturally in salespeople. 

Step 2: Review activity-based reporting and get into the detail

Have a system where you can quickly get activity reporting without having to spend too much time reviewing or entering data. 

Step 3: Coaching Sessions

After reviewing the information, set up coaching sessions with each salesperson and help them to confront their fears and provide them with guidance or coaching on how to do it better! 

Step 4: Rewarding the winner

Have a Winner announcement ceremony? Make something of the prize-giving and inspire the rest of the team with something motivational in the preceding’s. You can do this monthly or quarterly as you see fit. If you are unsure if your system can provide you with every aspect mentioned above, connect with us and let’s see if we can be of assistance.