Sales Coach

3 ways to be your biggest ally and become a great leader w/ Annmarie Avery

If you don’t feel confident and empowered yourself, how can you instil those values into your team and lead with greatness?

If they are looking to you to lead by example, and you don’t believe in your own abilities, how can they believe in themselves?

Today’s Tip for Sales Leaders is from Annmarie Avery who is a Senior Manager at DocuSign in Ireland.

When you want to be the person that seems to have all the answers you might find that you start to feel you have no support. There is too much pressure focused on you coming from other people.

This is where you are own mental health can suffer and you may start to doubt your abilities.

Annmarie believes that you can turn that inner critic into a tool that can help you become a great leader.

In this episode she is will explain the tips and methods you can use to be your biggest ally.

As Annmarie says - " It's so easy to focus on other people all the time and neglect our own needs.

When you are in that situation you can endure stress. You can find yourself taken off your plan and focusing on other people's plans.

We forget ourselves, our own needs our own priorities.

We end up helping someone else to the detriment of ourselves.”

Check out the rest of today’s episode now, follow the link in the comments!

Are you runnning a performance review with your sales team soon? The performance review addresses the totality of your salesperson's performance. Not just work-related aspects but mindset-related aspects such as:

• How they prioritise their time and activities
• How they are tracking to their personal goals
• How they see themselves developing under your leadership

It's a chance to get 'under the hood' and really get to know the salesperson you are leading.

It's also a chance to practice and improve your listening skills. So keep an eye on your 'talk-time' ratio!

Great coaches dominate the listening - not the talking. Click on 'subscribe' or 'follow' to be notified of upcoming episodes!

Do you use LinkedIn as a tool to sell? If not, you could be missing out.

Today’s Tip for Sales Leaders is from Prem Patel who works at Okay in the Austin, Texas.

Prem believes that there is still a huge knowledge gap on what social selling looks like and how to use LinkedIn. But, if used correctly it’s a huge opportunity to help generate pipelines, map out deals and close deals.

Today he’ll be talking to me about how you can use LinkedIn to its full advantage and use it as a social selling tool to your advantage.

As Prem says - "LinkedIn is social in nature and allows sellers to position the challenges that we solve and the companies that we work for in a meaningful way so that buyers can interact with us and build meaningful relationships.

Social Selling is an opportunity for you to present yourself as a human being to your buyers...you're out there to solve a meaningful challenge that they have and share content that resonates with them.”

After 10 months of using LinkedIn as a social selling tool, Prem was able to land a deal with an organisation that was notorious for doing things in-house. Listen to find out how he did this and how you can use social selling to your advantage too.

Check out the rest of today’s episode now, follow the link in the comments!

Do your team members really understand the metrics by which they are measured? How do you make sure everyone on your team is on the same page and understands what is expected of them when they are not in the same space?

Today’s Tip for Sales Leaders is from Rich Belson who is a Sales Development Leader at Reward Gateway in the UK.

You may no longer be in the office every day or having those 5 min check-ins as much. However, your team still needs that visibility to manage their performance. In the post-pandemic world, the structure of how you manage your hybrid team needs to change.

Rich believes that flexible working is such a core component of attracting the right talent for your team.

Today he’ll be talking to me about how you can develop a flexible and hybrid team that fully understands their roles and performance goals.

As Rich says - "Coaching is vital, it’s important to have that culture of coaching and being able to have conversations to give feedback at any time.

With remote teams, it is quite difficult if you need to find time in someone's diary.

But having that culture to be able to give your team member a call, without them feeling concerned they are going to receive a call out of the blue from their manager or team member is important.

They know you are going to have that conversation with them the same way you would in the office, for example over a coffee.”

Check out the rest of today’s episode now, follow the link in the comments!

Today’s Tip for Sales Leaders is from Lee Buckle who is a Sales Leader at Access in Banbury, England.

Do you struggle to empower your team 100%? Would they move mountains for you to get top results?

If you create a positive culture for your team that everyone can buy into, your team will feel valued and want to go the extra mile for you or the business.

Lee Buckle believes in the power of a positive ethos and today he’ll be talking to me about why it works.

As Lee says - "You’ve got to show belief and faith in your team.

They need to know you believe in each one of them, and that they can turn to you for help in the good and the bad.

It’s also important to give your team members the space to be authentic too and share their ideas for an effective team ethos too.

Then the results take care of themselves.

Over two years ago I lead a team in a series of acquisitions where we were all starting from scratch. By giving my team support and confidence, being there for them, and empowering them, we had a great first year and an even better second year!”

Check out the rest of today’s episode now! 

Listen more to learn more with Richard Smith

Today’s Tip for Sales Leaders is from Richard Smith who is the VP of Sales EMEA at Allego from Newcastle upon Tyne.

By making the time to listen more to your team’s sales calls than you currently do you will learn more about your teams selling strengths/weaknesses, be able to forecast more accurately, and understand where you are winning/losing deals.

As Richard says - “I think the main reason that people don’t listen to calls is time and secondly people might have never done it before, and so they’ve just managed their sales teams by word-of-mouth and anecdotal soundbites from salespeople.”

“But, you cannot effectively coach your sales team if you cannot listen or see how they are selling in their real-life sales conversations. The key point is, if you can’t prioritise this you need to re-evaluate your priorities.”

Check out the rest of today’s episode now!

How marginal changes make big improvements with Louise Holmes

Today’s Tip for Sales Leaders is from Louise Holmes who is the Regional Sales Director of Slack in Ireland.

Louise will be discussing how to use marginal changes to regularly reflect and incrementally make big improvements to your own, and your team’s, sales performance. You will find the benefits of how by implementing small, easy-to-apply changes, you will start to see real progress in your team’s performance. We’ll also be chatting about some examples of changes you can make and how these can be applied in your team.

As Louise says - “The illusion that you can be a great salesperson within the first year is something that, as an industry, we need to quash.”

“If you’re not open-minded and have that growth mindset around your own skills you’ll NEVER be a top performer. So, it’s understanding the ‘Why’ and then really breaking it down, and this actually makes your life easier because instead of thinking ‘I need to be the best salesperson in the world’ you can think ‘I need to just improve my introduction’ It’s easier to work on that and forget the rest. Knowing you are improving is much better than trying to boil the ocean.”

Check out the rest of today’s episode now

This week’s guest is Alex Manwaring, Director of the Sales Team at Privy in Boston Massachusetts.

Alex believes that sales leaders and managers impress the importance of discovery and personalisation on individuals but that they often forget to do this themselves and end up creating a cookie cutter type approach to their leadership by appraising team members in the same way and assuming everyone wants the same outcomes for themselves and the business.

Alex comments: “You need to take the time to understand how everybody likes to be recognised when they do well, what their career ambitions are and understand that not everybody is going to respond the same way.

It’s up to us, as leaders, to make sure we understand what motivates people so we can keep them engaged, retain them for longer and ultimately have more productive employees long term.”

Listen to the rest of today’s Sales Coach interview with Alex now!

If you’re a sales leader and you want to share your #1 tip to getting the most from your salespeople, I’ll send you a signed copy of my book if you’d like to appear on the show.

This week’s guest is Ruta Sinkeviciute, Inside Sales Manager - Corporate Sales UK&I at British Airways.

Ruta believes that you and your sales team will benefit when you include them in your decision-making

Including your people helps to achieve results and makes for a more inclusive and positive environment people want to contribute

You need to tap into your team's resourcefulness to create a higher performing team as well as an inclusive and positive environment.

Ruta comments: “I’ve been a people manager for almost 12 years and over the years I’ve explored different ways of managing people and I’ve noticed that including people in the decision-making helps to achieve results and also creates a more inclusive environment that people want to be a part of.”

"You will be able to tap into your team's resourcefulness and it will create a co-dependent environment. Results will be achieved faster by creating a high-performing team where people feel part of your organisation.”

Listen to the rest of today’s Sales Coach interview with Ruta now!

If you’re a sales leader and you want to share your #1 tip to getting the most from your salespeople, I’ll send you a signed copy of my book if you’d like to appear on the show.

This week’s guest Ramsey Al Ramahi VP of Sales suggests that you need to coach your team for their future not yours.

“There is a reason why athletes make some of the best sales people out there”

They have the discipline and the self-leadership to hit sales goals and win.

“When you coach your sales people, you are preparing them for (self) leadership”.

Listen to the rest of today’s Sales Coach interview with Ramsey now!

If you’re a sales leader and you want to share your #1 tip to getting the most from your sales people, I’ll send you a signed copy of my book if you’d like to appear on the show.