Skip to content
Have you ever noticed how negatives seem to jump out at you and smack you in the forehead, and the positives can go unnoticed or taken for granted?
Your sales reps hear the negatives every day, “No one listens to radio anymore”, No one listens to your stations”, “Your prices are too high”, “I’m cutting my budget”, “I tried radio once and it didn’t work”. They get beat up every day on the streets.
Part of a Sales Manager’s job is to motivate the troops. At your next sales meeting, open a discussion about what it is that they like about their career. (Use the word “career”, not “job”.)
You’ll get an amazing array of answers like, “helping businesses succeed”, “the creative aspect”, “it’s different every day”, “working with a variety of different people and businesses”, “not having to sit behind a desk every day”.
This exercise will achieve three different objectives for you:
1) It will remind them about the positives of their daily lives.
2) Some of their peers will present positives others never thought of.
3) You’ll gain valuable information into each individual’s motivation to help you in your coaching sessions.
Note: You may have to prime the well and start the conversation by sharing why you enjoy your career and/or company.
If you are a sales manager, you probably started in this business as a sales rep, and it was all about the math of selling. The number of cold calls and the number of “packages” you presented became part of your success formula.
Now as a sales manager, with probably very little management training, you’re expected to train the troops. Your idea of “training” might go something like this; “When I was on the street I …”.
Stop it! No one cares how you did it “in the old days”.
You know there have been dramatic changes in the world; changing technologies, changing station ownership, changing economies, changing, changing, changing.
What is it that makes you think the marketing and sales arena is the only thing that hasn’t changed from “When I was on the street”? Let’s look at old world cold calling as an example.
How do you feel when a telemarketer interrupts your dinner to sell you something you haven’t felt a need for? How do you think your prospects feel when your reps embark upon a door to door cold-call campaign to sell them a one-size-fits-all package of the week? Most salespeople don’t like making cold calls, and certainly, most clients view these interruptions to doing business as rude! So why do we do it?
We’ve focused on cold calls because traditionally, that’s the beginning of the sales process. Every step in modern strategic selling has changed today, and sales training has changed as well. Training is no longer a manager’s “show and tell”.
Like with all other aspects of your business, you can either embrace the changing world of sales and sales training or continue doing the same thing over and over. I’m sure you’ve heard what Einstein has called doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result…that was his definition of insanity.
In the new media world, there is a better way of training and selling. It involves creating warm calls rather than cold calls, using technology to build stronger customer relationships, and it’s been proven to grow your long-term revenues.
Business guru Jack Welch says, “There is always a better way. Find it!”
Click here if you would like to discuss implementing our “better way” for 2018 and 2019.