How do you coach your sales teams?

Its a common challenge across sales teams throughout all industries: the natural tendency for many salespeople is to react versus create in the sales situations they find themselves. Like in other aspects of our lives, reacting to a situation as opposed to creatingor being in control ofa situation will not yield the success you want.

The problem is, as it relates to sales, if people arent held accountable, they will look for shortcuts and be reactive rather than creative. Thats where effective leadership comes into play. Salespeople want a leader that they look up to and trust. If you put processes in place that allow them to follow an effective and proven leader, they feel more ownership of their work.

Ive found that all too often, sales leadership will hold people accountable in the wrong way. They use the carrot and the stick approach rather than giving them the tools they need to succeed along the way. Instead, successful organizations focus on coaching, training, and providing the resources needed to create success rather than react to situations they didnt create.

This is why we created The Dakota Way. We believe there are distinct ways of working and doing a job. We aim to avoid shortcuts and focus on doing business in what we consider to be the right way. By right way, we mean doing the things other people don't want to do. Sales is hard; rejection is hard. But it's not personal. If you have a high-quality product, there are people who want to hear about it.

As a leadership team, we created a sales approach that defines how to sell an investment strategy to a professional buyer of investment strategies. Our goal has been to put an extreme amount of detail around the sales process so everyone on our team knows what works, how it works, and how to follow it. The buck stops with the leadership team. The tough reality about sales is this: most salespeople, without proper sales leadership, will do things that avoid doing what's most important because it's not easy.

Your goal as a sales leader is to hold people accountable for doing what is most important. However, before you can do that, leaders need to take responsibility for how they engage and interact with their teams. For me, I focus on my people personally and how to help them grow individually.

Its safe to always assume that your salespeople dont know what is needed to succeed, that they want to be led and shown how to succeed. As leaders, its your responsibility to help develop them according to your best practices. Ensure there is a high level of interaction with your sales team focused on reporting on how they are doing within the process you have designed.

There are many different levels of leadership and sales leadership, but to put the bare bones in place you want to be, in the words of the great leadership consultant and author, Robert Anderson William Adams who wrote Mastering Leadership, you must move beyond the Reactive leadership style to Creative leadership style.

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The Key to a Performing Sales Team is Its Leadership - Forbes