Sales Reset Leaders

Introduction

• Sales Reset Leaders is our weekly email newsletter that helps B2B sales team leaders coach and develop their team members more effectively.

• Every week, subscribers receive insights, fresh ideas and coaching recommendations.

• Sales Reset is all about Customer Success Selling.

• In our Weekly Sales Reset email newsletter, we provide frontline salespeople with highly practical recommendations for improving their skills, confidence, and sales results.

• This guide is for our companion Sales Reset Leaders email newsletter, which Sales Team Leaders can use to provide the best support to their team members who subscribe to Weekly Sales Reset.

• (Sales Reset Leaders is also an excellent resource for Emerging Sales Leaders and anybody who wants to develop a better understanding of our Sales Reset themes.)

• You'll get fresh ideas and recommendations about how to coach and develop every member of your team every week.

• You can choose to introduce the key elements of each week's newsletter theme in the agenda of your weekly sales meeting. This might lead to more effective integration of sustained skills development with your unique goals and priorities.

• This guide assumes that you have already read our guide for subscribers to Weekly Sales Reset.

• Follow the recommendations in this guide to improve your team's sales results continuously as a Sales Reset Leader leading a Weekly Sales Reset!

Pivotal Coaching Role of Sales Team Leaders

• As a Sales Team Leader, coaching team members is the most valuable way to improve your team's sales results.

• In our experience, if Sales Team Leaders do spend time coaching, it's much more common for them to spend their time on Pipeline and Deal/Opportunity coaching than on coaching to improve selling skills.

• A further challenge is finding the required time to coach. One key reason is that time must be spent preparing effectively for coaching sessions. We hope that your subscription to Sales Reset Leaders will help.

• With your team members' Weekly Sales Reset and your Sales Reset Leaders email newsletters, you'll keep things fresh in order to sustain your coaching continuously.

Connections Between Email Newsletters

• Weekly Sales Reset and Sales Reset Leaders emails share the same theme every week.

• We expect Sales Team Leaders to subscribe to both email newsletters to keep them informed about what their team members have received.

• Your Sales Reset Leaders email newsletter will provide detailed practical ideas and insights every week, enabling you to coach team members more effectively on that week's theme.

• You and your team members will learn and improve skills faster and more reliably, and you should expect to see your team's sales results improve.

Coaching Focus

• Every edition of Sales Reset Leaders follows a standard structure.

• After an initial introduction, the next section discusses the recommended coaching focus for this week's theme.

• Every week, you'll receive ideas for how you can approach the coaching conversations with your team members.

• Our hope is that your team members will already be familiar with the theme of your coaching because they have received their Weekly Sales Reset email newsletter.

• With Sales Reset Leaders, your coaching will continue to be fresh and effective week by week.

Evidence

• Now that you know the coaching focus for the week, you'll be given specific recommendations about the evidence you can review for each team member that relates specifically to this week's theme.

• Your coaching should ideally be based on specific evidence with each team member, not vague generalities. Without reference to specifics, your coaching is likely to be less effective.

• It can be valuable to gather some evidence before and some evidence during a coaching session. Subsequently, you'll likely want to review evidence of improvement.

• In each edition of Sales Reset Leaders, you will receive guidance about the specific evidence you can seek to underpin the most effective coaching.

Recommended Coaching Session Agenda

• Every week, we recommend the agenda of a structured coaching session for the week's theme.

• This agenda will give you a starting point to lead an effective coaching session with each of your team members.

• We recommend that you prioritise these weekly coaching sessions with your team and protect this time from the huge range of other demands on your time, even if your coaching session is only 10-15 minutes with each team member some weeks.

• You should expect that every week, your structured coaching will steadily improve your team members' skills, confidence and sales results.

Expected Push Backs

• It's highly likely that you'll experience some pushback from some team members as you coach them.

• Based on our experience coaching sales teams for the last 40 years, we'll give you some pointers about what pushback to expect and how you might react.

• Our goal is that you are as well-prepared as possible for each of your coaching conversations. Your preparation will make it much more likely that you will accelerate your team members' sales performance and results through your effective coaching.

Role-Play Recommendations

• At Sales Reset, we're HUGE fans of role-play!

• Well-designed and effective role-play is one of the best ways to practice your Sales Reset skills.

• However, we know that far too many people in sales roles have had bad experiences with role-play.

• Here are our simple guidelines for Sales Reset Role-Play:

  • Fun - Ideally, there's lots of laughter in good role-play because we're having fun experimenting with new approaches.

  • Frequent - Role-play should be used frequently to improve skills, prepare for important conversations, and debrief significant meetings. It should be an everyday way of practising, not something reserved for rare occasions.

  • Short - Role-play is often better in short conversation sessions, typically no more than 2-4 minutes. This is long enough to experiment with skills before reviewing performance and then having another go.

  • Small - Role-playing in larger groups can be intimidating and risky for various reasons. We recommend that most role-playing be done in pairs or perhaps in a small group of three, with one person acting as an observer.

  • Swapping Roles - It's best when participants can play buying and selling roles. It's not good when a sales team leader is always the buyer!

• You will get recommendations for specific role-play that are focused on the theme of the week in every edition of Sales Reset Leaders.

Leadership Reflective Practice

• Reflective practice can be defined as the ability to reflect on our actions to engage in continuous learning.

• In addition to learning new skills and deliberately practising them in the real world, it's hugely important to take the time required to reflect on what worked and what didn't!

• We strongly recommend that you schedule a recurring time in your calendar when you can pause and reflect on your learning progress.

• In every edition of Sales Reset Leaders, you'll receive prompts for your leadership reflective practice. We recommend you copy and paste these prompts into your recurring calendar appointment to remind you about what you hoped to improve that week.

Community of Practice

• It can be difficult to make progress with new ways of doing things if you work alone. Most people find value in learning together to share experiences and support.

• If you'd welcome the opportunity to learn together with other people, it will be great to see you in our Community of Practice.

• You can join our LinkedIn Group: "World-Class Customer Success Selling".

• You might decide to join our private subscription, Community of Practice: Sales Reset Together.

• There are links in every edition of Sales Reset Leaders to the relevant Community of Practice resources and events so that you make faster progress learning together with other people.