It’s important to have a meeting rhythm and to hold your sales people accountable for their commitments and their results. But in doing so, we can train sales people to answer the same set of questions over and over again. By training them to answer a certain set of questions, we encourage certain behaviours that produce certain results.
New and different results require new and different questions.
My Focus, My Blind Spot
Personally, I ask a lot of questions about opening and about front end, pipelinebuilding activity. This is my personal bias because I have seen more sales people succeed by prospecting and creating opportunities.
I ask about newly opened opportunities, whether they are super-qualified ideal prospects or not, how we are going to create compelling value, and I question why we deserve to win. It’s impossible to help train, develop, and coach the later activities if there is no opportunity to coach, so I like this activity.
My focus here is predictable, and as much as it helps to produce better results, it doesn’t mean that other questions that help to train, develop, and coach sales people aren’t also required. The progress sales people make as a result of coaching is often due to challenging questions that they don’t already know how to answer, rather than training them to answer the same set of questions repeatedly.
Some sales organisations get trapped into a set of questions later in the sales cycle, or they stick to a set of questions about commitments and numbers. Some sales managers fall into in a routine of simply reviewing every deal instead of training, developing, and coaching the whole range of activities their sales force needs to engage in to succeed.
Just like the plateau you reach when you do the same exercises over and over again, you need to change things to make gains in your performance.
A New Set of Questions
To shake things up, think about the new outcomes that the sales person needs, or the areas in which they need to improve.
Instead of asking them the questions you have trained them to answer, write a new set of questions that will require them to take new actions, adopt new beliefs, or think differently about what they are doing.
Be prepared to challenge your sales people with questions that they cannot answer, and forgive them for not knowing the answer. It’s not fair to hold them accountable for something that they don’t yet know they are accountable for.
Continue asking the questions until it is clear that they understand them and can answer routinely. Over time, your sales people will do what is necessary to be able to answer your questions, they will know it is expected of them, and they will know that you are holding them accountable for the activities.
Then, find some new improvement and change the questions again. You don’t need to abandon the old set of questions. Spring those questions on the sales people from time to time to ensure they are still taking the actions that allow them to answer those questions.
