As things open there is a high likelihood that you’ll have a chance to ride with your reps. How will you take full advantage of the coaching opportunities available when you ride with one of your sales reps? How are you managing and controlling the conversations you have with your rep in between customer sales calls? You get so little time to individually coach and strategize with your reps, join me on this video to learn what you can do to recapture this private coaching time…so you can sell even more!
Are you starting to ride and make sales calls with your sales reps again? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And the reality is because of the way COVID is now progressing we're starting to see things open up a lot. Especially in distribution and equipment sales. And as part of that, we're starting to see the opportunity for managers to start riding with their sales reps again. This is a tremendous coaching and leadership opportunity of one on one time with each of your people. How are you taking advantage of these opportunities? My problem is that I watch that most companies, especially most managers, tend to not take full advantage of this writing opportunity.
Too many times I watch it that the manager and the sales rep meet at the office to go out and make sales calls for the day. And as soon as they get out in the car, both the manager and the salesperson get on their cell phone talking to other people. They talk to others all the way to the customer, and then just as they pull onto the customer's property, the manager turns to the sales rep says, "Let's talk about this call." Then the whole time they're parking the car and walking into the customer and waiting in the lobby, they're having conversations about what they're going to do, who should do what, who should say what, and all the other positive things. But then the call happens. And then as they leave the call, they'll talk about what the next steps are going to be, only until they reach the car. Then as soon as they get in the car, they both get on their cell phones again talking to others and not really taking advantage of this time.
This ride with time is critical not just because of you getting in front of customers, but because of the one-on-one private coaching opportunity you have. I hope that you can encourage your sales reps that when you are riding with them, that we're going to minimize cell phone time as much as possible. And during each of those ride with times between different customer locations, have an agenda as the manager. Ask them about their territory, review their plans for their accounts, where their numbers are year to date, how they feel about the company and what they think would make things stronger. This is just a great time to have dialogue and discussion, but you got to go off your cell phone first and make sure you actually focus and concentrate on the sales rep you're riding with.
Would love to know how you're doing these and how they're going for you, especially now as things are picking up again. Would love to answer it of your questions. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.