The Coaching Clinic for Sales Managers

Business Challenge

While sales managers often have good success with the role of model salesperson, they often have difficulty with the people management requirements of the coach role. The best sales managers make time for developing salespeople every day despite distractions, competing demands, and their own need to sell. They exhibit strong communication and people skills, and have the ability to assess sales skills and respond
accordingly. They are accomplished at providing motivational and evaluative feedback in a manner that motivates the salesperson to improve. They help sales team members improve process and results by demonstrating how to prepare for, execute, and follow up on calls. They are comfortable serving as senior resources on key accounts without dominating discussions or taking over control of the client relationship. In
short, they are salespeople who also manage and teach, creating an environment in which salespeople can succeed and providing the support that enables them to do so.

The Coaching Clinic

The Coaching Clinic teaches sales managers to make intentional investments in their salespeople through focused coaching and development activities. Enhancing and building on proven coaching techniques, The Coaching Clinic provides sales managers with an expanded set of practices and skills to help salespeople learn and develop capabilities that will contribute to individual and organisational success.

Key Content

Key content of The Coaching Clinic includes:

• Building Learning into Everyday Work: Tools and guidelines for creating a learning environment in
  the workplace. Sales managers learn tactics for expanding their teaching role and adapting to individual
  learning styles.
• Being a Thinking Partner: Strategies that enable sales managers to build their salespeoples’ problem-
  solving skills, and guidelines to help sales managers develop self-reliance and increased capability in
  their people.
• Providing Feedback to Build Capability: An approach to delivering effective feedback that is designed
  to improve salesperson performance. Specific techniques focus on the power of reinforcing feedback as
  a way to improve performance and on the use of developmental feedback to change behaviour. The
  developmental feedback model provides elements of a feedback conversation that sales managers can
  use to customise their approach, based on the situation.
• Practice Sessions: Several focused skill-practice exercises to enable sales managers to build their
  coaching skill and effectiveness.

Target Audience

The Coaching Clinic provides foundation skills for sales managers and professionals responsible for
coaching salespeople.

Outcomes

As a result of participating in The Coaching Clinic, participants will be able to:

• Create workplace environments that encourage and enable continuous learning
• Be better thinking partners by helping salespeople think through problems
• Share information and feedback with salespeople that reinforce capability and enhance performance

The Coaching Clinic typically includes 7 hours of classroom learning, as well as tools for on-the-job
reinforcement. It may be customised to drive specific business issues.