Are you interested in improving your performance
and that of your sales team?
Our Coaching Cards for Sales Managers can help you achieve your goals by giving you the opportunity to challenge your approach to your role.
In his research for his book, “Primal Leadership”, Daniel Goleman identified that Leadership style can have a huge impact on a company’s bottom line profitability.
How is your Leadership style affecting your team’s sales results?
What could you do differently that would further increase performance?
How would your team members describe the impact you have on them?
One of the most important skills that an experienced coach brings to a coaching relationship is the quality of their questions. Asking challenging questions can help change the focus and direction of an individual’s thinking and enable them to reflect on the challenges they face.
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of coaching with sales people, from the sales people themselves to sales managers through to sales directors and have been using our Coaching Cards for Sales Managers to help them identify the best strategies for dealing with the challenges they face.
The coaching cards have been designed for use by coaches and sales managers, although all bar a few of the cards can be used by managers of all sections of an organization. There are 52 cards in the pack each featuring one, two or three questions to challenge perceptions and encourage reflection on an individual or group basis.
The cards can be used in a variety of ways, one example was with a sales manager called Anne who has been in sales for over 10 years, with the last 2 years leading a sales team of 8 people. She has been very successful, consistently hitting sales targets etc, but approximately 6 months ago started reporting to a new line manager. The new line manager was fixated on managing the figures and held a meeting every Monday to review progress, and Anne had found herself becoming increasingly more anxious about these meetings and was starting to question if she was in the right role.
I decided to use the Coaching Cards to encourage Anne to reflect on the aspects of her role that she believed really mattered. There are various ways to use the cards but on this occasion I gave her 3 specific cards;
The first asked:
“what are the activities you undertake that have the biggest impact on the bottom line?”,
The second asked:
“what is the best part of your role?
What would need to happen to enable you to do more of it?
And what difference would it make if you did?”
and the third was:
“which aspects of your role see you at your most confident?
And what are the reasons for this?”
Reflecting on these 3 cards helped Anne to identify that the part of her role she enjoyed the most was developing her people and this activity was the one which delivered the best results. This activity saw Anne at her most confident as she knows the sales process inside out and is recognized across her business as being an expert in this area. However, since the new line manager arrived she had been spending at least 50% of her time compiling and reviewing figures for the Monday meetings. The consequences of her spending less time with her people was that she was experiencing more pressure, her people were feeling undervalued and results were starting to suffer.
The outcome was to re-prioritise her time to go back to doing what she did best, training and coaching her people and surprise surprise the team results improved!
There are various ways to use the cards, the coach can use them in a coaching session as I did with Anne, the sales manager can use them as a self reflection exercise, taking cards at random to reflect on, or they can be used as an exercise in team meetings to generate debate and team building.
If you would like to get hold of a set of cards you can order them on our website thecoachbusiness.com or on Amazon here:
