Bill Bartlett

Today’s sales professionals must be prepared to compete in a world where more buyer communication takes place in venues where the salesperson cannot communicate face-to-face or voice-to-voice with the buyer. This presents special challenges for sales leaders tasked with coaching salespeople competing in this hybrid selling environment.

Here are 5 coaching challenges and how to overcome them.

Onboarding sales talent has never been more important, given the tightness of the current labor market. Yet the most effective, proven best practices for shortening the runway to success for new hires remain largely unknown and unimplemented.

How do you help salespeople, who may be underpforming, to instill a mindset of abundance and growth? Here are five steps we follow.

A big question for sales leaders: How do you transfer the level of success that one team in your organization is delivering…so that everyone else on the sales side can find a way to deliver at the same level?

Many salespeople focus on behavior that is comfortable … and shun behavior that creates discomfort, even though it may drive higher performance.

Sales leaders often tell us that they want salespeople to take a more proactive role. Fortunately, there is a simple fix for turning this dynamic around.

Sales leaders: If you could only track one performance metric to evaluate the performance of a member of your sales team, which one would you choose?

There are two critical criteria you will want to look for in identifying top-tier salespeople: Self-awareness and drive.

One of the things I talk about often with sales leaders who are eager to maximize their team’s performance is the principle of reinforcement. All too often, we think of training for salespeople as a one-and-done initiative, as something we can check off a list once the "training" event is over and consider finished. Actually, the training we have invested in is next to worthless if it is not reinforced over time, incorporated as a personal priority, and made an ongoing topic for discussion within a personalized sales coaching plan. Reinforcement is thus one of the neglected secrets of effective sales leadership.

To answer the common question, “Why should I invest more time in coaching my sales team?” we must first define what we mean by “coaching.”