Rethinking Your Sales Management: Communication
Career Path : Business
Whether youâre the owner of a small business with employees with multiple responsibilities or the head of you companyâs marketing department. Itâs always worth assessing your sales training approach to make sure youâre getting the most out of your resources.
The first and most essential piece in your sales management tool kit is communication. If you donât regularly check in with your staff it will become impossible to be on the same page in regards to your companyâs goals. Nonetheless, wasted time in meetings that are not conducted efficiently is wasted money. You can avoid this by focusing on efficient structuring, deciding what you want to communicate and involving only exactly the people who need to know the information you are sharing. It also goes without saying that the same body language that makes you an effective sales person also makes you a good trainer, so donât neglect your good eye contact and attentive posture. Finally, make sure your conversations with employees are dialogs, not monologs. Thereâs a place for speeches, but letting employees speak up makes sure they understood you and are ready to follow the ideas you have developed.
Feedback is another powerful tool, and must not be left out of your sales training approach. Perhaps you have heard the old adage that it is better to praise in public and criticize in private, and this maxim makes a great foundation for your strategy. By making critical feedback private, you help your employee take your comments less personally. Theyâll be more approachable, and more likely to internalize your advice. Donât forget, you should not just bring a problem to someoneâs attention without a solution. Where possible, work with the employee to make sure it doesnât happen again. This doesnât just mean making top down suggestions, but also getting them involved to developing their own success, as another part of sales management is making your guidance effective even when youâre not there.
Meanwhile, praise, conducted in public, gets more value for your compliment. Everyone likes to know theyâre doing well, in fact many people would even be happy getting more positive feedback than a bigger salary, but making sure everyone knows it when someoneâs doing well makes the person being praised feel more valuable, and communicates your standards to everyone else. Donât just give it to your high performers only, either. For example it can be easy to emphasize the value of a star on your sales team, but recognizing people who are trying and achieving, but havenât reached the top yet, especially on matters of improvement. You will always have one or two stars, but the goal of sales management is to focus on the entire team in your sales training approach.
Visit Fusion Learning Inc. for more information on sales manager training programs.
