How Do You Enable Your Salespeople?
November 21, 2008
By Flyn L. Penoyer
Enabling is the second biggest part of sales leadership, following and closely tied to creating a vision. But, unfortunately, there is a far more common practice in use by many companies—"sales prevention." It is not practiced on purpose, but rather due to a default lack of understanding by line sales managers on how to enable their salespeople.
Most companies think that "enabling" salespeople means giving them a desk, a phone, some product training, a list of prospects/customers and a "kick in the seat of the pants" to get them going. And many sales managers seem to believe that if you hire a good salesperson, they will know how to sell your product or service effectively. This is unfortunately not the case, which makes the subject of enablement so important.
At its highest level enabling represents a philosophy more than anything. It is the philosophy of doing for your salespeople the things that allow them to sell more. It is a philosophy of focusing your time as a manager on making the little wheels (your salespeople) spin faster and thus leveraging your own personal efforts.
Here are some strategies to help you enable your reps to produce far more—and more effective—calls:
1. Give them a story to tell. Don't assume they know how to sell the product, and, more importantly, that they know how to sell it well. Develop and document a sales process and develop a story for them to use. Then, train and coach them on it. This enables them to do it better.
2. Take away their internal problem-solving tasks. When team members have a problem with shipping, finance or any other internal department, have them give that problem to you. As a manager, you can get it done much easier than they can, as you have far better leverage with other departments. You can also do it much faster and save them 30-60 minutes of selling time.
3. Run regular sales and communications skills training. Teach your team using the very story you develop. Show them how to apply the principles of the major sales methods to the story.
4. Develop a system for organizing their calling time and efforts. In order to increase the time reps spend in front of customers, give them a system. If you watch your folks work, or even better, if you do the work for a couple of days, you will discover that there are many inefficiencies that can be cleaned up.
These are only a few of the things you can do. If you look for and focus on how to make your people more effective and efficient, you will find even more ways to enable them. One of the great side benefits of such efforts is sincere appreciation your team. Salespeople truly wish to do well, and when their managers actually help them do so, they repay with hard work.
Make a difference; start enabling your team today.
For some additional information on sales leadership try the educational quiz at www.penoyer.com/Quizzes/SalesLeadershipQuiz.asp.
Flyn L. Penoyer, "The Inside Sales Guru" is an author, trainer, and the Founder of Penoyer Communications a California based sales consulting firm specializing in the development and revenue acceleration of inside sales groups. His company website is: www.penoyer.com.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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