Sales Leadership Archives

Put Your Salespeople At The Heart Of Sales Transformation

5th July 2023 Jim Bloomfield

The ultimate aim of any sales transformation strategy is to grow revenue and drive greater profit. In B2B sales the relationship between buyer and seller has changed dramatically in recent years leaving sellers with little opportunity to influence buyer decision-making. Some see the rise in online sales channels and the apparent preference of some buyers to purchase without engaging a salesperson at all as a sign that the role of the salesperson has diminished.

In light of this new reality it may be tempting to focus sales transformation programmes on tech investment and the systems and processes that need to change. However, others tell a different story. One where the role of the salesperson may have evolved but to the benefit of all parties. Deep sales is the buzzword, where technology drives insights about customers that enables salespeople to focus their time where it will have most impact. Yes, that may be later on in the buying cycle and they may not have the customers’ attention for long but, when they do, a great salesperson can make a massive difference.

Any investment in sales systems should not be at the expense of sales talent. Ensuring that there is clarity (and training) on the behaviours that drive success is crucial. Studies show that less than a third of all business transformations succeed, with a staggering 70 percent of failures due to “an organisation’s inability to adopt the required new behaviours quickly and completely.” In fact, McKinsey, argue that “businesses need to invest at least as much in organisational culture and health as in the intricacies of what will change on the ground” when embarking on transformation programmes.

At Bloojam, we’ve studied salespeople to identify the key capabilities that drive superior sales performance. Salespeople who consistently demonstrate these capabilities are proven to achieve higher performance ratings, deliver greater revenue performance and exceed target.

Find out more about these capabilities and their impact on sales performance here.

Jim Bloomfield is a Director at Bloojam Consulting with 20 years experience of assessing and developing salespeople and leaders.

Blogs Business Consulting Sales Development Sales Leadership Sales Training Uncategorised War for Talent

Don’t Let Your Sales Talent Walk Out The Door

9th March 2023 Jim Bloomfield

In a recent Gartner survey, 89% of salespeople reported feeling burned out and 54% were actively seeking alternative employment. Furthermore, nearly 70% felt that management doesn’t understand how to motivate them. These are worrying numbers for any organisation that is serious about retaining top sales talent.

Fortunately, the 2 key themes that prevent sellers performing at their best, a lack of development opportunities and a lack of empowerment, can be addressed.

It’s easy to say that sales leaders need to invest more time in supporting their teams when the average leader spends less than 10% of their time on developing their reports. But to be truly effective they first need to be able to accurately diagnose the problem, something that is unlikely to be the same for every member of the sales team.

At Bloojam, we look at a salesperson’s Drive through three lenses:

Motivation; are they a self-starter, focused on achieving excellent outcomes, persistent in the face of setbacks and driven to solve client problems?
Goal focus; do they have clarity about what they are trying to achieve, are they focused on the end goal and the actions required to successfully reach it?
Self-belief; are they confident in their ability to positively influence a sale, do they show resilience when faced with setbacks and self-awareness of their own strengths and limitation?

Truly understanding what is impacting upon the Drive of your sales team, at an individual and collective level, allows sales leaders to provide much more targeted support and challenge to their teams. By facilitating more detailed discussion of the key causes, personal to them, of their burnout or demotivation, salespeople are much more likely to open up and engage with the conversation. As a result, the sales leader can respond to the needs of the individual rather than taking a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to re-energising their sales team.

That benefits the individual as they will feel that their manager truly understands their needs. It benefits the sales leader as the limited time they have with team members can be focused on the factors most likely to enhance performance. And it benefits the organisation as any subsequent training or support can be tailored to individual needs, thereby ensuring that training budget ROI is maximised.

Jim Bloomfield is a Director of Bloojam Consulting with 20 years’ experience of using business psychology to develop salespeople and leaders. He is a member of the Association of Business Psychology (ABP) and the British Psychological Society (BPS) and has successfully helped some of Britain’s best-known businesses exceed their sales goals.

Bloojam Consulting offers a range of robust recruitment and development tools and interventions, including the Acuity for Strategic Sales suite of psychometric assessment and development tools.

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Don’t Forget To Look Back To Get Ahead in 2023

11th January 2023 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

It’s a new year, a time for renewal and an opportunity to look ahead and to make plans for the future. This is as true of the sales profession as any walk of life and we know that the most successful salespeople have absolute clarity on what they want to achieve by setting themselves specific goals and measurable targets distilled into tangible actions that will drive success. Perhaps less intuitively high-performers also look back. Not to berate themselves or to ruminate on failure but to learn from what went wrong. Appropriately negative emotions enable people to reflect and to consider feedback so that they can achieve a better outcome in future.

Resilient people use positive emotions to rebound from, and find positive meaning in, stressful encounters. Research by psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, showed that a ‘golden ratio of positivity’ (not too much, not too little) creates wellbeing, enabling individuals to display resilience (the ability to “bounce back” from stressful experiences quickly and effectively). Or ‘bouncebackability’ as the former Crystal Palace manager, Iain Dowie, called it.

So as you plan for success over the next 12 months, don’t forget to look back and identify those scenarios where you can do things differently to achieve better results.

Bloojam Consulting offers a range of robust recruitment and development tools and interventions, including the Acuity for Strategic Sales suite of psychometric assessment and development tools.

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Why The Great Resignation Is A Double Whammy For Your Salesforce

28th June 2022 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

The Great Resignation is a term first coined last year by Professor Anthony Klotz of Texas A&M University but already it has proved a compelling shorthand for a cluster of factors impacting upon the War For Talent in the jobs market. The numbers differ by country, but all tell the same story. Here in the UK, 20% of the workforce plans to leave their current role in the next 12 months, according to PWC, while nearly 30% are planning to ask for a pay rise. But it’s not just the large corporates that are encountering these problems. A survey of SMEs by Grant Thornton shows that 50% were struggling to replace staff that had left while a similar proportion were finding it hard to fill newly created roles.

The impact on sales teams is two-fold.

Churn Among Client Stakeholders: According to LinkedIn, turnover among B2B buyers is up nearly 30% globally and as a result 85% of salespeople have delayed or lost a deal because of a change in stakeholder within their client account.
Turnover Of Sales Talent: Within sales teams turnover is also high with moves among salespeople up by over one-quarter. This disruption further impacts the ability of organisations to close out opportunities in a timely fashion and to win new deals.

A two-pronged approach is required to minimise disruption.

Sales leaders must focus on retaining their top talent. First, they must look in the mirror. A recent McKinsey survey found uncaring leaders and unreasonable expectations were two of the most commonly cited factors for people leaving a job. Third was a lack of career development. Not a surprise when sales leaders typically devote less than 10% of their time on developing their teams. All three are push factors away from a management-style and work culture that employees feeling increasingly confident to walk away from. If you don’t want your people to look elsewhere these factors must be a priority.

To manage the impact of turnover within prospects and existing client accounts, salespeople must be well-connected. Our own model of sales capability, Acuity, shows that those who are well-networked across their client accounts are better able to build their understanding of their customers’ key drivers, to bring client stakeholders together and to drive the sale to its conclusion.

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Should 360 Feedback Surveys Feature In Sales Transformation Programmes? What The Research Tells Us.

11th January 2022 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

In earlier blogs we have considered the features of successful sales training and the value that coaching can bring. Our focus now turns to 360 feedback.

Can multi-rater feedback improve workplace performance? The answer from academic literature is mixed and could be summarised as “yes, provided that….”. Previous research has shown that multisource feedback can be an effective method of improving work performance in its own right (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Smither et al, 2003). Many researchers agree on the potential for 360 programmes to raise self-awareness and have a positive impact on performance, but mixed empirical findings can be attributed to the “high degree of variation in design features across 360 processes” (Bracken and Rose, 2011) and the fact that often the content of the feedback is provided to the individual without a coach or facilitator to help them understand it (Lawrence, 2015).

Research shows that for 360 feedback to have a positive impact on performance it must:

be accepted by the individual (Alexander, 2006; Smither et al, 2005)
be conducted by a trained professional (e.g., McDowall and Kurz, 2008; Alexander, 2006; Latham et al, 2005)
involve goal setting for the participant (Latham et al, 2005; Smither et al, 2005)
provide “short- and long- term support for participants, as they seek to make sense of the feedback and commit to specific actions” (Lawrence, 2015)
“provide a comprehensive and valid measure of workplace behaviour” (McDowall and Kurz, 2008) that is linked to the purpose of the programme (Lawrence, 2015).

The latter point is particularly relevant in our experience of working with sales organisations. Historically, many have used generic 360 surveys more geared to measuring leadership or general workplace behaviours, whereas what they should measure are the capabilities that drive improved sales performance.

The importance of the skill and diplomacy of the feedback facilitator in navigating the potential sensitivities and nuances of 360 data is highlighted by a number of authors and researchers, because it is critical that the feedback is understood and accepted by the individual in order for there to be a commitment to goals and behaviour change (Alexander, 2006; Latham et al, 2005; Lawrence, 2015).

Finally, the overall sponsorship and positioning of the 360 programme is key, as it must be based on mutual trust and buy-in that is fostered through good communication (McDowall and Kurz, 2008).

Combining 360 and coaching: turbo powering the impact on performance

Whilst there is a lack of research specific to the field of sales, there is a growing body of evidence that shows professional coaching support following 360 feedback can be a powerful way to improve performance.

A large study of over 1000 senior managers examined the effects of executive coaching on 360 feedback over time. One year later, they found that managers who worked with a coach were more likely to set specific (rather than vague) goals, to solicit ideas for improvement from their superiors and had improved more than other managers in terms of 360 ratings (Smither et al, 2003).
Luthans and Peterson (2003) found that participants need systematic coaching along with the 360 degree feedback in order to gain self-awareness and have a positive impact on work satisfaction and organisational commitment.
Thach (2002) found that the combination of 360 feedback and individual coaching increases leadership effectiveness by up to 60 per cent.

In contradiction, Jones et al’s (2015) review suggests that using 360 feedback reduces the size of the positive impact of coaching. However, they acknowledge that this may be due to issues of the participants not accepting the feedback or using generic leadership surveys that have no direct relevance to their objectives. In other words, poorly designed or delivered 360 programmes will inevitably not achieve your desired aims.

McDowall and Kurz (2008) conclude that coaching and 360 feedback processes are mutually beneficial as “coaching is helpful for initiating and embedding behaviour change following the initial feedback process” and “360 feedback measures make an effective contribution to the coaching process, as differences in ratings provide both the coachee and coach with valuable information about levels of effective performance at work….”.

Key Findings:

Goal-setting and ongoing support for the individual enhances the impact of a 360 feedback programme
If you want to change sales behaviour, you need to measure sales behaviour in your 360
Feedback must be accepted and understood by the recipient in order for them to commit to behaviour change
Combining 360 feedback with ongoing coaching will turbocharge its impact

Bloojam are business psychologists who take an evidence-based approach to selecting and developing salespeople, leaders and sales leaders. To learn more about our Academy approach to developing sales capability in your workforce please visit our website.

Alexander, D.M. (2006) How Do 360 Degree Performance Reviews Affect Employee Attitudes, Effectiveness and Performance? Seminar Research Paper Series. Paper 8. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/lrc_paper_series/8http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/lrc_paper_series/8

Bracken, D.W. & Rose, D.S. (2011) When Does 360-Degree Feedback Create Behavior Change? And How Would We Know It When It Does? Journal of Business and Psychology 26, Article number: 183

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y.R.F. (2016) The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89, 249-277.

Kluger, A.N. & DeNisi, A. (1996) The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory. Psychological Bulletin, II9(2), 254-284

Latham, G.P., Almost, J., Mann, S. & Moore, C. (2005) New Developments in Performance Management. Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 77–87.

Lawrence, P. (2015), “A best practice model for the effective deployment of 360° feedback”, Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 29 No. 6, 13-16.

Luthans, F. & Peterson, S. J. (2004) 360‐degree feedback with systematic coaching: Empirical analysis suggests a winning combination. Human Resource Management 42(3), 243-256.

McDowall, A. & Kurz, R. (2008) Effective integration of 360 degree feedback into the coaching process. The Coaching Psychologist, 4(1)

Smither, J.W., London, M. & Reilly, R.R. (2005) Does performance improve following multisource feedback? A theoretical model, meta-analysis and review of empirical findings. Personnel Psychology, 58, 33-52.

Smither, J.W., London, M., Flautt, R., Vargas, Y., Kucine, I. (2003) Can working with an executive coach improve multisource feedback ratings over time? A quasi experimental field study. Personnel Psychology 56, 1, p23-44

Thach, E C (2002) “The impact of executive coaching and 360 feedback on leadership effectiveness” Leadership & Organization Development Journal Vol. 23 No. 4, pp. 205-214.

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Is Coaching Salespeople Worth The Investment? What The Research Tells Us.

17th December 2021 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

In the first blog of the series, we explored the features that make sales training succeed. In our second blog, we look at the value in coaching (and mentoring) your sales team.

Does coaching improve performance in general? The answer is a resounding “yes”. Definitive research reviews by Theeboom et al (2013) and Jones et al (2016) have found that coaching is an effective change methodology (Grant & O’Connor, 2019). In particular, coaching has a large impact in terms of performance improvement. Jones et al (2015) argue that this is likely to be because coaching involves many characteristics that we already know from research will enhance performance. These are:

Coaches apply goal-setting
Goals generally feature work-based activities, promoting experiential forms of learning
and thereby directly encourage transfer of learning to work behaviour

Jones et al’s (2015) research overview found that it makes no difference to outcomes whether the coaching sessions are delivered face-to-face, online or by telephone. Their findings also suggest that internal coaches can deliver stronger outcomes than external coaches. However, research also tells us that the strength and quality of the coach-coachee relationship is a key ingredient to the success of the coaching process (De Haan et al, 2016). For example, empathy, positive regard and autonomy support are important characteristics of the relationship (Grant & O’Connor, 2019). So, while it may be ideal for organisations to develop a culture of coaching internally, due care should be taken in terms of training managers to be effective coaches and ensuring they have the relevant skills and characteristics that support quality relationships with their coachees.

Evidence of Impact of Coaching on Sales Performance

The purpose of sales coaching is to equip salespeople with the right knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) to achieve role and organisation-related objectives and goals. It can be delivered by a Sales Manager or an external coach. Similar to executive coaching, the aim is to improve performance through a series of conversations, feedback provision and activities (Badrinarayanan et al, 2015). Mentoring on the other hand tends to not have a focus on the development of KSAs and performance per se, but is the “exchange between a senior experienced person and a less experienced, more junior protégé” with a focus on career goals (Bradford et al, 2017).

Sales coaching is an under-researched area, but Badrinarayanan et al’s (2015) overview finds that it is an effective element of training and development programmes and that “professional sales coaching plays an important role in the development of salespeople…”

Sager et al (2014) found that salespeople are more satisfied with both selling skills and product knowledge training when it is supported by role models. Furthermore, sales organisations can assist salespeople by providing role models and mentors during initial sales training. Participants are more likely to be satisfied with training if role models continuously and consistently demonstrate correct and expected selling behaviours. Bradford et al’s (2017) found that a combination of external training and on-the-job training are more related to performance enhancement than are internal training courses. They also recommend the use of internal mentoring, especially where the mentoring relationship gives the opportunity to shadow, observe and mimic the behaviour of the more senior colleague. These researchers suggest that developmental support from line managers is important to realise the full potential of sales coaching.

In summary, the research tells us that coaching and mentoring play very important, but distinct roles in the embedding of sales capabilities. Coaching embeds learning by setting goals that feature work-based activities and encourage learning transfer. In this relationship, the coachee benefits by taking ownership for converting the ‘theory’ of sales training into a set of clear goals, supported by a tangible set of practical actions that will embed the desired behavioural change. On the other hand, mentoring allows the mentor to reinforce the expected sales behaviours and the mentee to observe and imitate these.

Key findings:

Evidence that coaching can improve individual performance is strong
Coaching embeds learning by setting goals that feature work-based activities and encourage learning transfer
Quality of coaching support is critical to the success of the coaching relationship
Participants report increased satisfaction with sales training when it is supported by mentors who role-model the expected behaviours

Bloojam are business psychologists who take an evidence-based approach to selecting and developing salespeople, leaders and sales leaders. See our website to learn more about our approach to developing sales capability in your workforce.

Badrinarayanan, V., Dixon, A., West, V.L. & Zank, G.M. (2015) Professional sales coaching: an integrative review and research agenda. European Journal of Marketing, 49, 7/8, 1087-1113.

Bradford, S.K., Rutherford, B.N. & Friend, S.B. (2017) The impact of training, mentoring and coaching on personal learning in a sales environment. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 15, 1.

De Haan, E., Grant, A.M., Burger, YD. & Eriksson, P.O. (2016) A large-scale study of executive and workplace coaching: The relative contributions of working relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 68(3), 189-207

Grant, A.M. & O’Connor S. (2019) A brief primer for those new to coaching research and evidence-based practice. The Coaching Psychologist, 15(1) 3-10

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y.R.F. (2015) The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89, 249-277.

Sager, J.K., Dubinsky, A.J, Wilson, P.H. & Shao, C. (2014) Factors influencing the impact of sales training: Test of a model. International Journal of Marketing Studies, 6(1), 1.

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B. & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2013): Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology: Dedicated to furthering research and promoting good practice. (September 2013)

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4 Stats That Show How B2B Buyers Suffer From Information Overload (And Why The Salesperson Is As Critical As Ever)

25th June 2021 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

Consider these stats:

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web, published the first website (info.cern.ch). Ten years later there were over 29 million websites and today there are over 1.8 billion.
Google, when launched in 1998, processed around 10,000 searches a day. It now receives around 2.5 billionqueries a day.
Last year there were over 600 million active blogs. 70 million new blogposts are published each month on WordPress. Nearly 80% of the Fortune 500 uses a corporate blog to communicate to their customers.
There are 57 million companies on LinkedIn. 2 million posts, articles and videos are published on the platform every day.

It’s all a far cry from the pre-internet days when information was scarce and a client’s ability to compare one supplier against another was limited. Today the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that there is now too much information out there. The result is information overload for buyers. Buyers report that two-thirds of their buying journey is spent on gathering, processing and deconflicting information.

In addition, the word “buyers” is no longer correct. Buying groups are increasingly common in B2B sales. Research from Forrester shows that 63% of purchases involve four or more people, each of whom is likely to represent a different department and to play a different role in client decision-making. With numerous stakeholders involved on the buyer side, each independently uncovering information from different sources, it is easy to see how buyers find it difficult to find agreement between themselves about how to proceed.

It falls to the salesperson (consultant, account manager) to help clients to make sense of the information they have uncovered, to help them to deconflict contradictory evidence, to challenge their thinking and to coalesce them around a solution. Doing so enables the salesperson to demonstrate their knowledge, to establish credibility and to create that trusted partner relationship that creates the right environment for a sale to proceed.

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5 Key Trends All Sales Leaders Need To Navigate To Get The Best From Their Sales Teams

24th May 2021 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

Prior to the pandemic, many organisations were already responding to the changing needs of buyers by undertaking sales transformation and digitisation programmes. Research from Gartner conducted over the course of 2018 and 2019 showed that 87% of senior business leaders reported that digitisation was a company priority, whilst 66% of CEOs expected to change their company’s business model in the next 3 years.

However, these were not delivering the expected benefits, with 72% of leaders reporting that corporate digitisation initiatives were missing revenue expectations. In fact, the ‘democratisation’ of information has, alongside other factors, created a sales journey that is more convoluted with 77% of buyers now describing the purchase process as ‘complex’.

The pandemic has further fuelled the digitisation and transformation agendas for sales. A cross-parliamentary report in the UK (2021) argues that the pandemic “has accelerated the digital revolution in how we trade and exposed an acute skills shortage in professional business-to-business selling”. A number of key themes have emerged that, whilst not new, have certainly become cemented over the last 18 months and have significant implications for sales leaders if they are to maximise the performance of their sales teams:

More Of The Buyer Journey Is Online: McKinsey (2021) research shows that omnichannel interactions, already prevalent in B2B sales, are now the predominant path for customers. A global survey by Bain & Company (2021) found that buyers and sellers alike prefer virtual sales interactions. Even as face-to-face engagement has begun to re-emerge as an option, buyers demonstrate a clear preference for a blend of digital self-service, remote human interactions and more traditional approaches. In the space of the last 12 months, the appetite for digital self-service, necessitated by global lockdowns, has cemented a pre-existing trend particularly at the early ‘discovery’ stages of the buying cycle.
Buyers Have Too Much Information: Conversely, this rise in self-service buying appears to have exacerbated a trend we highlighted in our previous whitepaper which is one of sales complexity. Gartner’s research shows that whilst the vast majority (89%) of buyers agree that the quality of information available to them is high, half (50%) also found it overwhelming and 43% said it was contradictory. As a result, buyers report that two-thirds of the buying journey is spent on gathering, processing and deconflicting information. With numerous stakeholders involved on the buyer side, each independently uncovering information from different sources, it is easy to see how buyers find it difficult to find agreement between themselves about how to proceed.
Buyers Are Prepared To Buy ‘Big’ Online: Perhaps surprisingly, despite this lack of clarity a significant proportion of buyers are prepared to spend 6 figures or more with a wholly digital sales process; that is, without any interaction with a salesperson at all (McKinsey, 2021). Research from Gartner suggests that when a salesperson is able to interact with a buyer, they can expect to get only 5% of their time and so their window to influence a purchase decision is extremely narrow. This risks an increase in purchase regret from the customer, if the solution doesn’t meet their expectations, and reduces the likelihood of repeat business.
Seller Capability Is Not Fit For Purpose: Only 54% of B2B salespeople are confident in their ability to close deals in the new environment (Salesforce, 2020). 84% of sales leaders say that they don’t have the sales talent they need to succeed in future (Miller Heiman) and just 22% report that they consistently hire sellers who succeed. In the UK, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Professional Sales (2021) reports a shortage of sales, digital and management skills amongst sales organisations. Clearly there is an urgent requirement for organisations to invest in developing their sales talent so that it is fit for the future.
Sales Leaders Are Not Equipped To Support Salespeople: Allied to the dearth of sales talent, is the increasing expectation that sales leaders should play a key part in developing employees. Gartner research shows that 42% of managers say they lack the confidence to develop the skills that employees need today. Little wonder then that the average frontline sales manager devotes just 9% of their time to developing their direct reports. So not only are sales leaders failing to hire well, they also appear to give too little of their time and attention to help individuals to adapt to the new sales landscape. Sales leaders need to develop their own capabilities as leaders so that they can improve their recruitment and development of sales talent.

Whilst the capability of the individual salesperson is clearly important, they cannot perform at their best without effective leadership. It is therefore imperative for organisations to understand what is required of sales leaders so that they can support them in bringing the best out of individuals to create high-performing sales teams within the increasingly complex and fast-moving context that we describe.

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The UK has a Skills Shortage in B2B Selling

13th April 2021 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

The latest report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Professional Sales demonstrates just how critical the sales profession is to the performance of the wider UK economy; 80% of UK businesses make part or all of their turnover from selling to other businesses.

The report acknowledges the profound impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on many businesses through the acceleration of the “digital revolution in how we trade and exposure of an acute skills shortage in professional business-to-business selling.”

Whilst the report highlights that businesses have had to quickly adapt to digital selling, it also recognises two much more long-standing issues: the lack of sales skills and leadership skills.

As the report argues, if companies do not train staff in how to sell, then digital technology will not confer much advantage, and may even be counterproductive.

Whilst investment in digital sales channels may grab all the headlines (and the investment), it is increasingly clear that the human element will remain crucial to effective selling. Too many businesses ignore the development of sales skills and capabilities at their peril.

Read the full report here.

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6 Reasons You Should Use 360 Feedback and Coaching To Create A Sales Culture

24th November 2020 Jim Bloomfield No Comments

In our previous blog we looked at the 5 things needed to supercharge sales training. But sales training in isolation is doomed to fail with one estimate indicating that when it comes to transformation programmes “70 percent of failures are due to an organisation’s inability to adopt the required new behaviours quickly and completely”.

When evaluating the impact of training, many organisations will measure feedback from participants as evidence for success. Others may apply a formal measure of learning in the form of an assessment at the end of the training. But the most powerful measures of success are ‘learning transfer’- do the individuals apply what they have learned back in the real world- and what is the impact upon business performance.

So what can an organisation do beyond sales training that will directly impact upon the bottom line? Research indicates that combining 360 feedback with ongoing coaching to support training can be very powerful for the following reasons:

360 feedback with individual coaching has been shown to increase leadership effectiveness by up to 60 per cent. By soliciting feedback from a number of individuals known to (and usually respected by) the participant the results are very targeted and personal in a way that sales training is not.
The coach is able to support the participant to understand the feedback results and to link these to actions that will change behaviour.
Coaching alongside training helps to embed learning and facilitates learning transfer by encouraging individuals to set work-based actions and activities. In effect, the coachee takes ownership for turning training ‘theory’ into practice.
In subsequent coaching sessions the coach is able to hold the coachee to account by encouraging the individual to review their actions and the effectiveness of these. ‘Live’ situations can be dissected enabling the individual to amend existing activities or to identify new actions that will enable them to handle that situation more effectively.
Goal-setting is found to enhance the impact of coaching. This is different from identifying specific actions. Goals are over-arching objectives that show the individual the destination that their many small activities will lead them towards. Having goal clarity is shown to enhance workplace performance.
Above all else, the key to successful coaching is the quality of the coach and their relationship with the coachee. Internal coaches can be effective but if training managers to be coaches it is critical that they are well trained and have the relevant skills and characteristics to support quality relationships with their coachees.

So if you want to maximise the impact of your sales training, we strongly recommend that you support any such program with 360 feedback and ongoing coaching.

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