I was recently sharing with others our experiences coaching salespeople, sales managers and sales leaders, and comparing those who were and weren’t coachable. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t about whether we liked them as people. It was about those who did or did not make changes and improve.

When it comes to coaching salespeople, many conditions must be met.

Let’s begin with the coaching environment itself.

• Salespeople must have a relationship with their sales manager that is strong enough to withstand constructive criticism.
• Salespeople must trust their sales manager’s intentions.
• Salespeople must respect their sales manager’s coaching.

If those three … Read the rest

I have written on the topic of coaching salespeople more than 400 times or 25 percent of my articles.

Why?

Because sales managers are not coaching — still — at least not consistently or effectively. As a reminder, consistent daily coaching increases revenue by 28 percent and when it is paired with effective coaching, revenue increases by 43 percent. It’s simply incomprehensible that sales managers aren’t picking up the clue phone. But it’s not really their fault. The people they report to, senior sales leadership, either sales VPs, CROs or CSOs, aren’t providing the time, framework, incentive, motivation, guidelines, expectations … Read the rest

Three of last year’s hurricanes took unusual paths for hurricanes.

• Hurricane Lee roared into Nova Scotia, becoming the first such storm to do so since 2003, although at the time it made landfall, Lee had been downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone.
• Earlier last summer, hurricane Hillary became the first tropical storm to make landfall in Southern California.
• And in late August, hurricane Idalia made landfall in the Big Bend area of Northwest Florida, becoming the first major hurricane to ever pass through that area.

With their unusual paths, the three hurricanes did not cause as much damage as was feared. … Read the rest

Even though this article begins as a baseball article, in the fourth paragraph it quickly morphs into a sales article.

As my regular readers know, my son is a baseball player — a rising college senior (as of the summer of 2023) — and I still coach him in the batting cage when he’s home for the summer. I started coaching him when he was old enough to hold a wiffle bat. By the time he was thirteen years old, he responded to every piece of hitting advice with, “I know Dad!” He was no longer coachable (by me), thus … Read the rest

The landscaper called me over to look at a tree on our property. He showed me the enormous hole and I asked, “What did that?”

“Woodpecker,” he said.

On one side of the tree, we had this perfectly cut, huge hole, and the other side of the tree had many small holes. I learned that the woodpecker that made the small holes was looking for food while the woodpecker that made the huge hole was making a home. Hunters and farmers.

Just like the two types of woodpeckers, salespeople tend to fall into the same two categories of being either … Read the rest

There has been much talk in the news about forecasts — and while most forecasts have been wrong, they are still more accurate than fortune cookies!

Thanks to satellites, computer modeling and doppler radar, weather forecasts are more reliable than ever before. Yet despite those advances, they are still guessing — educated guesses to be sure — but guessing about what will happen, when it will happen, and where it will happen. I live in central Massachusetts and between late November and early April, most winter storms track up the east coast and when a storm tracks a few miles … Read the rest

Big ones, little ones, sharp ones, and stubborn ones. I was pulling weeds from the garden when it became crystal clear to me.

The various weeds were like the many types of opportunities in most sales pipelines. Big ones, little ones, those that hurt (we’re behind the competition) and those who are stubborn (they aren’t sharing important information). The flowers in the garden are allowed to remain and are nurtured with sun, water and plant food. Similarly, we must leave and nurture the opportunities that will grow and produce sales, and weed out the undesirable opportunities that distract us from … Read the rest

Most salespeople don’t take first impressions seriously enough. If they did, their first impressions would be much more favorable.

I can still remember my first (unintentional) lesson about first impressions. My family was gathered at my grandfather’s house to watch the debut of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show. It was February 9, 1964 and at 8 years old, I was one of 73 million people watching the show that night. I was as excited about this show as I would be later that same year when I attended my first Red Sox baseball game at Fenway Park. That … Read the rest

Earlier this year Tom Hopkins shared a post on LinkedIn that resembled what I have said so many times. He said, “The art of selling involves two jobs: job one is to reduce sales resistance, and the other is to increase sales acceptance.”

Many readers left comments about the importance of relationships as a means to preventing resistance from going up.

I left a comment that said, “Thanks Tom. Most salespeople fail to lower resistance because they lack the self-awareness to understand what it is that they might say or do, or how they might act that would raise resistance … Read the rest

Over the past three months, my wife and I have been up and down the east coast driving our son to and from baseball tournaments and college showcases. Invariably, each drive back home has taken twice the time it should have because of road construction. On Sunday, Waze, my favorite navigation app, said that the drive would take just two hours and 32 minutes. Four traffic delays because of road construction delayed us for another two and a half hours.

Delays, delays, delays. Nearly every coaching call with a salesperson is about a delayed closing. Nearly every coaching call with … Read the rest

My latest data mining project reveals that the answer to this question is a partial correlation.

Check out tables 1 and 2 in this article and you’ll see just what I mean.

All of the data in this article comes from Objective Management Group’s (OMG) evaluations and assessments of nearly 1.8 million salespeople.

The first table shows the percentage of salespeople that have the Qualifier competency as a strength. Look at the difference between elite salespeople where 93 percent have it as a strength versus weak salespeople where only 9 percent have it as a strength. Also notice that the … Read the rest

During the summer they dig up streets, repave roads, and repair bridges. That leads to epic traffic jams, long commutes and tremendous amounts of frustration. And you’re late! I’ve been doing my best impression of the digging, without the paving and repairing. Several of my recent articles have been based on Objective Management Group’s (OMG) data from the evaluations of 1.8-million sales professionals, and like the road work, we’re gonna continue to dig!

In this article, we will look to determine whether there is a correlation between sales percentile, sales pipeline, and sales performance.

OMG includes a pipeline analysis as … Read the rest

Yesterday, a sales manager I was coaching asked me to explain the difference between a great question and a tough question. I gave him the one-minute version but this article has the expanded version of that answer.

I’ll use my world as an example and ask you to translate accordingly.

In my world, while I might occasionally be on a first call with a senior sales leader, I am most frequently speaking with the CEO. With CEOs, the most-common issue they articulate is “I’m not sure we have the right sales leader.”

We have three levels of questions and it’s … Read the rest