How can a sales coach can help improve your sales team?

I’m sure the logic of the triage desk is lost on anyone visiting an A&E department anytime from Thursday through Sunday.

I’ve been told that’s when around 85% of all admissions are alcohol / drug related.

That broken arm/skin blemish/stomach cramp is going to have to wait.

And wait.

And, invariably wait some more.

The word triage comes from the French ‘Trier’ – from the Chief Surgeon to Napoleon sometime in the late 1700s.

The etymology of the word is ‘to separate out’ and based on the needs of battlefield wounded, that surgeon in question, Dominic Jean Larrey, treated the wounded according to the severity of their wounds rather than their rank, colour or nationality.

Triage is the filtering system that begins the patients journey through the A&E department of any hospital where the patient is scored Red (immediate), Orange (very urgent), Yellow (urgent) and Green (standard) and then takes a seat.

If they are lucky.

Can a sales coach improve business development performance?

Sales management and business owners frequently face challenges that requires triage thinking but when all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail, right?

If you focus only on the desired outcome in both scenarios (In hospital “make the patient better and send them home” and on the sales floor “improve sales performance profitably”) then any process in place is destined to fail.

Most often the problem that you are looking at is not the problem that you need to solve.

(Read that again.)

Poor sales performance is usually a symptom of a deeper problem yet many business owners and sales leaders resort to the quick fix – employ more sales people, deploy short-sharp-shock training, change messaging, change marketing, create stricter KPIs, tamper with ‘the culture’ (again), change sales strategy, write a sales strategy, more digital, less digital…

The list of options is more predictable than endless and if you keep banging with a hammer…

Poor sales doesn’t always mean a poor sales team or poor sales management – getting the sales process right to deliver the necessary results means the management of a lot of moving parts, some fixed and some variable.

Often we are contacted by potential customers looking for a sales coach with very specific requests :

“Can you come in and re-energise the team – some of them are lacking motivation”
“The team hasn’t had any training for years.”
“Our lead generation has been poor over since the start of the year.”

Genuine observations that only make any real sense under much deeper scrutiny.

As a business owner I acknowledge that it’s difficult to be told that what you are doing isn’t as effective as it could be and at the same time, I am happy to go to a dentist and allow the expert to make expert decisions on my behalf, dealing with whatever news comes my way.

There are usually no cheap or immediate solutions to any sales problem – that’s not bad news that’s just fact.

Over the years Shift Control

sales coach

has devised a process which begins with – and often ends with –  Sales Diagnostics, where we try and work out what the problem really is.

Finding the problem usually isn’t the problem – getting the business owner or management to accept the problem usually creates greater tension.

Just like A&E example, what you think is wrong is very often not what the experts see.

Take your car for a service and see how the service desk schedules their work – it’s never based on what YOU think YOU need.

If you need a sales coach or to find out more about the Shift Control Sales Diagnosis and for a no-obligation and free consultation then email info@shift-control.co.uk