Sales Coaching: On the Job Training

Personal sales coaching is rightly considered the most powerful and effective tool for developing salespeople. There's no better way than watching a salesperson in action, analyzing his thinking and his moves, and then improving his skills and his results.

A sales workshop gives learners a way of thinking, tackles misconceptions and provides tools that are essential for sales work. But there's still a good deal of fieldwork needed to help participants turn it all into practice, in their own specific line of work, while dealing with their individual personalities and limitations.

That said, a sales workshop is a basic prerequisite for sales coaching. Without a workshop beforehand, there's no "common language" between coach and trainee, you can't use professional terminology, and you can't expect the trainee to make professional moves he was never taught. Any attempt to use SALES COACHING as the only method amounts to giving every team member a private workshop: an expensive, very drawn-out solution that, frankly, misleads the client.

I was once asked to coach the graduates of a sales course I'd run at a large, well-known food company. At some point I went down to Eilat, where I met the company's (one and only) salesman in the city, along with his manager.

Even during the first visit (to the food storeroom manager at a large hotel), it was plain to see that this man had nothing to do with sales. He didn't plan anything, didn't initiate a single move, and the weakness and lethargy were screaming to high heaven. Some of the customers didn't hesitate to tell us (right in front of him) that he was utterly pathetic and that, at best, he made sure to pass along the orders they placed on their own...

After the third visit, his manager pulled me aside and asked:

"Well, what do you think?"

"What do I think?" I replied. "Can't you see the horror for yourself?"

"We knew," the manager said. "We just wanted to hear your opinion too."

"So what now?" I asked. "Do you want me to keep coaching him?"

"Since you're already here, keep coaching until your flight back," the manager decided.

We carried on with the coaching, hopping from customer to customer in the salesman's car. On the way I joked around with him and asked, "So what's it like living in a city that's one big vacation?"

"That's nothing. Before this I lived somewhere that's even more of a vacation," the trainee boasted.

"Which city?" I asked.

"California," he answered.

"What were you doing in California?" I asked. And to my complete astonishment, he replied:

"I worked for a company in TIME SHARING" (selling vacation units, a field considered especially tough that demands serious sales skills).

"You sold timeshares?" I asked, stunned. "For how long?"

"Six years," he said.

Since that didn't add up for me, I asked him a few professional questions about the field, and discovered that he had a firm grasp of the sophisticated methods they use there.

At this point I turned to his manager and suggested: "You've already given up on this guy anyway. Would you mind if I gave him an 'electric shock' and jump-started him?"

"Do whatever it takes," he told me.

At the end of the day we sat down to wrap things up at a café in the Mall HaYam shopping center.

At one point I took out a writing pad, drew a rectangle on it, and asked the salesman to walk me through his professional history again.

He repeated the bit about the timeshares in California, and even added that in his last year there he'd served as a "MASTER CLOSER"... (a senior employee who closes the toughest deals, the ones a regular salesperson couldn't).

I found it very hard to believe, but I wrote it inside the rectangle and then added another open rectangle below it. "And what did you do after California?" I asked.

"I came to Eilat and opened a TIME SHARING branch here, which I managed for three years," he answered, and my jaw dropped.

I wrote that down too and added another rectangle underneath. "And then what?" I asked.

"Then I was hired by this food company," he said.

At this point I couldn't hold back anymore and announced loudly: "That can't be!"

The salesman and his manager stared at me in shock, sure I'd lost my mind.

"Yes, after that I moved to the food company," he insisted, and I cried out again, "That can't be!"

Only then did he remember and add, "Oh right, I also worked for a year at Dr. Fischer" (an Israeli skincare and cosmetics company).

"What did you do there?" I asked.

"I bought shelf space," he replied.

"You bought shelf space?" I asked. "So you worked on consignment? You paid for shelves, stocked them with merchandise, and went off to pray it would sell?"

"Yes," he answered. Then I raised my voice and declared: "That's where they messed with your head! With the way you're performing today, you wouldn't last an hour selling timeshares. Back then you were an excellent salesman. Dr. Fischer drained you dry and wrecked everything!"

"So what do I do now?" he asked.

"Now you go home, go into the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror and go over, step by step, everything you did back then. Then you go back out into the field and do exactly the same thing, with food products!" I told him.

As we parted, his manager asked me, "What do you think will happen?"

"I don't know," I told him honestly. "But the way I see it, you've got nothing to lose, right? Either nothing happens and you'll have to replace him, or you'll end up with a champion on your hands."

A month later I called the company's national sales manager and asked about the salesman from Eilat.

"He's blossomed!" he told me. "A real turnaround."

This example, one of many hundreds I've collected over the years, shows just how much professional sales coaching matters.

There's no other way I could have spotted the problem and built a solution the way we did in this case.

Izhak Peled