answer your questions about sales, sales management, sales coaching and a

personalized development of your team. We're excited to share our point of view

with you and today's featured question is...

- [Woman] To what extent should a sales manager be involved in delivering,

executing the trainings themselves? Is their primary role reinforcement in

coaching or should they be doubling as a trainer?

- That's a really excellent question. Something that comes up a lot from

clients. You know, we believe the sales manager should have a very active

role in the training and development of their teams.

That said I'd kind of make three distinctions. I would look at formalized

training, informal training and personalized sales coaching.

Let me start with the first. The formalized training is really a sales

training program. That may be run over a couple of days, then go through some

ongoing reinforcement, followed up by personalized coaching. The actual

classroom component of that is probably best led to professional facilitators who

can deliver that training.

That said it's the best practice for the managers to attend.

They can observe their people. They can certainly join in the conversation and

really get a good benchmark for where their sales professionals are at.

Once that training's delivered though, you have informal training

and that can happen pretty frequently. It can be in the weekly or monthly sales

meetings. You could pick a topic like overcoming difficult objections

or if you have an initiative to drive new business, prospecting for new business.

Or maybe doing a better job of presenting value so you're not kind of really stuck

in the price trap, and that kind of informal training, group discussion,

sharing of best practices, maybe even a little bit of role playing is really

healthy for the sales meetings and what I would call informal training.

And then the most important role for the manager is really individualized or

personalized sales coaching, and that's working with each sales person on two to

three key skill areas that they can develop each quarter. And that should be

a individualized plan where you've kind of collaborated with a sales person and

say, "Hey, you know, over the next quarter, let's work maybe on identifying

customer's priorities. Maybe doing a better job of presenting the

value that we offer and maybe overcoming some difficult objections," and then based

on those skills you would observe some sales calls, provide feedback and then as

they improve you would reset the coaching plan.

So to recap we think managers should be involved extensively in training and

development. When it comes to the formal classroom training, probably best left to

training development professionals with the managers attending as they can.

Informal training, a great role for the managers. A great way to get their team

involved. Maybe even periodically have a member of their team kind of lead a

session in something they're particularly good at, so you're actually

starting to leverage the team's expertise.

And then the personalized coaching probably the most important role for the

manager in terms of ongoing skills development. Hope that helps. Thank you.

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