By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing
Late in 2015 we started producing a bi-weekly radio program called Sales Pipeline Radio, which currently runs every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. Pacific. It’s just 30 minutes long, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales & marketing professionals.
We’ve already featured some great guests and have a line up of awesome content and special guests into 2016. Our very first guest was Funnelholic author and Topo co-founder Craig Rosenberg. Next we had Mike Weinberg, incredible writer, speaker, author, followed by Conrad Bayer, CEO & Founder of Tellwise. Recent Guests: Jim Keenan; Joanne Black; Aaron Ross; Josiane Feigon, Meagen Eisenberg, and Trish Bertuzzi.
We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities heading into and throughout the year. We’ll publish similar highlights here for upcoming episodes. You can listen to full recordings of past shows at SalesPipelineRadio.com and subscribe on iTunes.
Joining us for this episode is Norman Behar, CEO & Managing Director at Sales Readiness Group and co-author of: The-High Impact Sales Manager.
This book draws on over 30 years of personal experience and our proven sales management training methodology.
What makes this book unique is that it is highly practical and provides sales managers with the systems,processes, skills, and techniques to:
Hire the best people and hold them accountable.
Manage sales performance by focusing on the underlying behaviors that drive results.
Manage the sales pipeline and produce accurate sales forecasts.
Provide personalized sales coaching that results in better skills and hire win rates.
Lead, motivate, and inspire their sales team.
Matt: Thanks everyone for joining us to another great episode. We are having a ton of fun on this show; we are excited and humbled that you are all joining us each week.
If you are new to the show thank you for joining you can check out some of our past episodes at www.salespipelineradio.com. You can find on-demand access to any of our past episodes and great presenters; great speakers, great thought leaders in the world of B2B sales and marketing.
And today I am very, very excited to have a good friend of mine who is based up here in the Seattle area, Norman Behar who is the co-author of the book The High-Impact Sales Manager: A No-Nonsense Practical Guide to Improve Your Team Sales Performance and Norman let’s just get right into it, thanks so much for joining us today.
Norman: Matt thank you so much for having me on your show; looking forward to speaking with you and joining your audience.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Norman we’ve known each other for a long time now and you’ve been someone that I’ve gone to quite a number of times for advice from a sales management standpoint with clients that need sales management training that need to improve the efficacy of the sales teams. And I was so excited when I found out that you guys were writing a book. I have been spending a lot of time with this and actually have been quoting it with a lot of clients.
My favorite part of the description here is that they no-nonsense and practical part, like this is not just a strategy; this gets into the nuts and bolts of how to improve your team’s performance. Talk a little bit about where this book came from, why was this important for you and how is this book different than others that exist on the market today?
Norman:I think Matt as you know; we have a very active blog at The Sales Readiness Group and probably our favorite subject to blog about is sales management. The reason behind that is we just think sales managers can have the most dramatic impact on sales team performance. Although we offer training programs and the training programs help develop selling skills, it’s really the sales managers that are in the trenches day in and day out with their sales team.
Matt: Yeah. And all of our sales management blogs were really geared on providing very practical advice that drew on our sales training programs and our personal experience. I mean myself and the other co-authors who are our business partners have been in sales and sales management for over 30 years. And some of the input we were getting was: you guys should really write a book.
And we thought about it and we looked at a lot of the management books, the sales management books that were on the market and they were highly theoretical and we said you know, we could put together something that’s really practical, easy-to-use, pretty quick read and allows managers to have an immediate impact in working with their sales team.
That’s what we set out to do. We were able to really organize this in a way that we think gets to the key skills managers need to develop and implement. And one of the things I liked about your comment is the goal was to offer this advice, offer these techniques and allow managers to readily put them into place and we are hoping the book is achieving that goal.
Matt: Yeah. The feedback I’ve had from people that I know that have read it have definitely reiterated that, definitely gets out of the clouds and into the details very well. I’ve got Norman Behar today who is the CEO and president of The Sales Readiness Group and is the co-author of The High-Impact Sales Manager.
Could you quickly summarize for us what does it mean to be a high-impact sales manager. I am sure a lot of people have a lot of different definitions of that but for you what are the components or characteristics that make for a successful high-impact sales manager?
Norman: I think there is really five key areas that if you think about a sales manager they can often get trapped in the weeds of being chief problem solver and what we call ‘getting stuck in the daily grind’ but if they can learn to transcend it there is really five things they are going to do very well. One is: hire the best people and hold them accountable. If you have the right people on your team it’s a lot easier to manage, coach and lead that team.
They are going to learn to manage sales performance and sometimes people, they have the wrong notion there, and they are hyper focused on results. And ultimately we are measured on results but results are backward looking so what we want them to do is to manage sales performance by really focusing on underlying behaviors that drive results so that would be a second key element is learning how to manage sales performance.
The third is learning how to manage the pipeline. A lot of companies end up with a bloated sales pipeline, deals that are dormant, deals that are stuck and as a result the managers can’t produce accurate forecasts so that’s embarrassing not only for the manager but also for the VPs and all the way up the organization; so being able to manage the pipeline is the third element.
The fourth element is really providing personalized sales coaching. So if you think about managing performance that’s really a framework for managing a team, sales coaching is something that can be very individualized that helps each person develop better skills and improve their win rates.
And then the fifth element is really being a leader and part of being a great leader is learning how to motivate and inspire your sales team. So those are the five key elements that we had set out to address in the book The High-Impact Sales Manager.
Matt: That’s great. If you want to learn more about the book you can certainly find it on Amazon.com, it’s available for purchase. You can also go to www.salesreadinessgroup.com; you will find just a ton of great resources from Norman and his team including the ability to download a free chapter of the book; so I highly recommend that you check that out and at minimum get that free chapter to whet your appetite for the rest of the book.
I like your five keys to the sales, the effective sales manager. So let me ask the opposite question then; what keeps people from doing that? What keeps high potential sales managers from achieving that higher level of success?
Norman: I think there is a couple of things. If you think about where do most sales managers come from, they came from the sales rank. So maybe a VP of sales is looking to add a new sales manager, add a new district or maybe one of the managers is being promoted and they are looking for the next sales manager, they are typically going to look within the sales team and they are going to look probably at a high performer and say okay, this person is really doing a great job at selling, they will start having some conversations, the salesperson may see there is a great opportunity and within a relatively short period of time they are promoted into management.
But what’s kind of missing there is not the fact that a great salesperson can learn how to become a good sales manager, is that it’s really a different skill set. When you are a salesperson it’s all about you, it’s about your prospecting skills, your call planning skills, you may be part of a team but the skills that you are using are really individual selling skills; identifying priorities, asking great questions, having great sales conversations and as a manager it’s really about success through others. So I think that unless there is a mentoring or training program that really helps the salesperson, once you are promoted, understand the difference, they are likely to fall back on what they know which is selling and which typically leads to telling other salespeople: here is how I used to do it, not very effective versus managing.
When you think about what does a manager need to do, it’s setting team goals, recruiting and selecting people, coaching the individuals, the things we just talked about; performance management, leadership and motivation. So it’s a different skill set so I think that’s one of the issues that holds managers back and that’s pretty easy to address through sales management training programs but also requires a change in mindset.
The other thing is if you just think about managing a sales team, it’s a pretty fast-paced environment. Salespeople are not always the easiest to manage. You’ve also got also customer issues that come up, you have also meetings you need to attend and so managers can get stuck in a time trap where almost all their time is really responding to urgent requests.
And typically the problem there is that they haven’t really learned how to empower others and prioritize. And so actually the introduction tour book is called Transcending the Daily Grind and really learning how to compartmentalize this so that you are not the chief problem solver and it just putting out fire after fire every day and by the end of the week you are exhausted and then it repeats the following Monday morning but you are learning to understand; okay if I empower people and really put this in perspective, how do I allow enough time to do five things that I’m supposed to do that really allow me to be a very effective manager.
Matt: We are talking with Norman Behar today on Sales Pipeline Radio. He is the co-author of the book – The High-Impact Sales Manager and we have been talking a lot about the components of high-impact sales managers, the things that keep them from doing that, clearly there is a blueprint for how to help sales managers become more successful that you outlined in the book.
Before we go to the break, if you could quickly just answer the question, how do you get sales reps and sales managers to more proactively invest in their own growth and success? We can put them through training, we can teach them these things, how do we get them to be self-motivated to learn and hone these behaviors?
Norman: I think that’s really about a mindset and having a training and coaching culture and unfortunately a lot of organizations don’t have that mindset. And I think what happens is, again these are pretty fast-paced environments and you get caught up in all the things you need to do to respond to the daily needs of customers or prospective customers. And what we really want is to encourage a level of self-discovery both at the sales management and sales area.
So one of the key skills for a manager is being a great coach and being a great coach can really help those develop those attributes within the salesperson. We use something that we referred to in the book called The Three A’s Framework which is managers have a problem Matt, in a lot of cases they can’t resist this, as I was saying before, of going in to tell mode; here is how I used to do it, here is what you should do, here is what you need to do next and that doesn’t create the motivation to learn and grow. Instead, what we really want them to focus on is these three what we call the three A’s. So really ask open ended questions much like they would a customer, really find out what’s going on with their salesperson, what does their salesperson want to achieve and showing the level of interest in really understanding the salesperson’s perspective.
The other thing I want them to do is become great listeners. Unfortunately many managers again because they want to go into tell mode, that they don’t necessarily practice active listening which is not only just hearing what your sales reps are saying but understanding the body language. Are they just saying what they think you want them to say or do they really have the true meaning behind it? So the same skills you would use again if you are calling on a customer to understand their needs.
And then assume the best of intentions. Assume that salespeople really do want to improve and those three things will create a level of receptivity where salespeople want to engage their managers and talk about career development and really focus on development as opposed to just going through the motions on a daily basis.
So I think you can apply that both to the management level and at the sales level to start creating a coaching and training culture where people really do want to grow and develop.
Matt: How long does it take for the typical sales manager to make this a habit? Is there a period of time that you recommend people really put a focus to make this a habit? Is this an ongoing process that people are always working on?
Norman: Well I think it is ongoing. I think that the nature of, and I have been in sales and sales management for 30+ years, is that when you get busy it’s much easier to tell than to coach and so I think it does have to be ongoing. That said I think people can develop really good coaching skills probably in about 90 days and then if they implement those over maybe the course of a year, they are going to become part of that cadence of management. So I think it takes about 30 days or maybe 90 days to develop the skills and then apply them for roughly a year.
And when I say apply it, we use a benchmark; how much time should a manager spend coaching; probably 25% to 40% of their total time and I think if they do that for probably nine months following learning how to coach, they will become pretty proficient and it will become part of their cadence of sales management.
Matt: These half hours always go by so quickly. I know Norman did a great job earlier of enumerating the five keys to high-performance sales managers and some of the things that keep them from doing that. If you want to check those out again you can certainly go to www.salespipelineradio.com, we will have a replay of Norman’s comments here today up there in a couple of days. We will also have a summary of some of his key points on our blog at www.Heinzmarketing.com.
And you can check out a lot of our other former guests on Sales Pipeline Radio as well as our upcoming guests. Next week on Sales Pipeline Radio we are going to be featuring Martin Lindstrom who is the author of the brand new book Small Data. We talked so much in sales and marketing about big data and the importance of having access to all the data and this deep level of data.
What I love about Martin’s new book is he talks about the importance of some of those subtle buying signals, some of the sometimes seemingly insignificant behavior observations that could actually point towards trends or unmet customer needs and so we’re going to be talking a lot about buying signals; about not just big data but the right data, the actionable data, fast data and small data next week with Martin Lindstrom on Sales Pipeline Radio.
But I want to keep talking a little bit today about effective sales management and I want to go back to the idea of coaching Norman. We’ve got Norman Behar today who is the co-author of the book High-Impact Sales Manager. He talked about being a good coach, how do you coach the coach? What are some of the things that sales managers and other executives can do to help make their coaches more effective and help increase and reinforce the right behavior from those coaches?
Norman: Well I think you have to think about coaching in two buckets Matt. There is what I would call opportunity coaching or what is often referred to as deal coaching and that’s coaching that you provide when you are doing let’s say a weekly review of a salesperson’s pipeline; you are sitting down with that salesperson, you’re looking at which opportunities are progressing from stage to stage.
Unfortunately what opportunities might be stuck or dormant, maybe a new competitor emerged, maybe they are having a difficult time getting to decision-makers, maybe they are not able to really to articulate their win theme so I think you have this whole notion of opportunity or deal coaching. And to develop those skills, those are really skills that the manager has developed as a salesperson because they’ve been in the trenches, they’ve closed business before and they can advice.
But again as opposed to telling people what to do, we want them to use questions that really get to how well-qualified is the opportunity and then digging down a little bit deeper than BANT; and I know you probably talked about BANT in this and other episodes before but beyond Budget, Authority, Need and Timing, you are only getting to what is a customer’s business need? What’s the unique value you bring to that customer?
Who are the decision-makers and what’s your relationship with them? How is the competition going to try and beat you and most importantly why you will win. So those are some of the kind of questions that managers need to start asking salespeople as they look at specific opportunities. And the benefit of that is a salespeople will start asking those questions themselves and so you are really going to start empowering and doing a better job of creating better velocity in your pipeline and higher win rates.
The more difficult skill developed is really skills coaching and skills coaching gets to how did it help your salespeople improve selling skills whether that’s called planning skills and salespeople often unfortunately don’t do enough called planning and they really are not prepared with clear objectives when they call customers or they may not be fluent in how to manage objections or how to negotiate. And so helping salespeople develop skills really gets to learning how to assess their current level of proficiency and motivation and then develop very targeted coaching plans.
So one of the keys for the power of sales coaching and why it’s the most powerful management action is that it is personalized and so by taking the time to do an intellectually honest co-assessment by the manager and the salesperson of their skills inventory and in our programs we use eight key skill areas and three behavior statements in each so we have this 24 point quick assessment, you can develop very positive and focused coaching plans that are individualized for each salesperson. So I think having the tools and the processes in place are really key to developing better coaches and better managers.
Matt: You talked earlier about the percent of time coaches should be spending coaching and I think I would be hard-pressed to talk to any sales manager that doesn’t want 25%, 40% of their time to be able to spend coaching but I do find that most sales managers don’t feel like they have that time. How much of that is related to just how many things are on their plate but how do you also help sales managers get better at time management? How do you help them carve out more time to be better at spending time doing the coaching?
Norman: It’s not that sales managers aren’t busy. Most of the sales managers that I know are working far more than 40 hours per week. They are busy during the day, they often travel, they have to attend conferences, they have to prepare forward casts, they go to meetings, it’s a difficult conversation.
But what really holding them back is they still are probably going way too much into reactive mode when it comes to business problems and they have to learn to empower so it is somewhat of a Catch-22; I have to empower my people to be able to solve their own problems. To do that I have to coach them but I may not have the time for coaching.
And I think initially it will take an increased investment of time beyond the time they are already putting in but once they do that it’s going to have a very quick payback because many of the things that the managers have been solving for their salespeople, the salespeople learn to solve themselves. And that I think is just a very conscientious method of guarding their time and making sure that they have allocated time.
And that 25% to 40% doesn’t necessarily need to be formal coaching. There are almost always coaching moments. So if you’re working with someone on a call plan and they are going on a call today: hey Matt, I know you’re going to be calling on XYZ Corporation later today, what are your call objectives?
Just even a quick calling conversation can be a part of a coaching moment.
Matt: Absolutely. We are wrapping up here with Norman Behar who is the co-author of The High-Impact Sales Manager. I highly recommend everyone check this book out, you can find it on Amazon but you can also get a free chapter if you go to www.salesreadinessgroup.com.
Norman just with the last few seconds before we wrap up if you could just talk about what the format preferences are for this kind of training. I know you guys do a ton of sales management training as part of your practice. Sales Readiness Group has been regularly ranked as one of the top sales training companies by Selling Power Magazine and others but just really quickly, what are some of your preferred formats for doing that training and if people are interested, how can they learn more about how you guys might be able to help them?
Norman: Sure. So the book itself is a synopsis of the training program. The training program, it really centers around a 2 ½ day workshop where we cover those five key areas that I mentioned earlier about managing a team, leading a team, coaching a team and hiring the best people.
The pre-work typically involves assessment and customization and then the post training typically involves live online reinforcement and measurement and then those programs are all custom tailored. So in many cases I think of one large publicly traded company, we broke that out over the course of the year focusing on one key area per quarter. But generally it’s a combination of assessment, live on-site training and live online reinforcement and then post training measurement. So we have the key elements built in; people can learn more about by going to our website and taking a look at The High-Impact Sales Manager.
They can also email us at info@salesreadinessgroup.com or email me directly NBehar@salesreadinessgroup.com and we would be delighted to provide you more information on our sales and sales management training programs.
Matt: Awesome! I want to thank our guest today Norman Behar who is the author of The High-Impact Sales Manager, great information online at www.salesreadinessgroup.com. Not only the free chapter more information about their sales training programs but tons of great insights to help your sales team and your sales management perform better.
If you want to get a replay of today’s conversation with Mr. Behar you can find that on our website at www.salespipelineradio.com here in a couple of days we will also have a summary of his conversation on our blog at www.Heinzmarketing.com shortly.
You can also on Sales Pipeline Radio, find all of our past guests and all of our future guests so you can check us out. If you want to follow us live we look forward to seeing you here every Thursday at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific and you can also follow us on the podcast. You can catch every episode by downloading it through iTunes or through Google Play.
Until next week that’s about it for today! Thanks again Norman for your time, thanks everyone for listening, looking forward to seeing you again next week, this has been Sales Pipeline Radio!
The post Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 20: Q & A with Norman Behar, CEO of Sales Readiness Group appeared first on Heinz Marketing.