Managers riding with their sales reps to observe them selling and to offer coaching support has been a foundation of good sales leadership for years. But, due to COVID, most managers stopped riding with their reps (as their reps stopped traveling). Things today are finally starting to open again. Join me as I offer ideas to help you strengthen the impact and results you receive from you riding with your sales reps…so they can sell even more!
Hi, Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. One of the ways we can increase your success as the leader of your team is to make sure you have more time to coach and connect with your people. This is a great time to restart ride-alongs, the idea of you as a manager spending the day or multiple days, riding with an individual sales rep so you can visit customers and connect with the important accounts in their territory. How you can spend time being able to coach a person on their skills, and offer ideas that can improve and make them more effective and more persuasive. And also just to get a chance for you to connect and give feedback and for you to really have a chance to have a good one-on-one conversations and talk about their territory and where are going with each of your salespeople. Ride-alongs have been so important for so many years. The problem today though, is, a lot of managers just don't have the time.
The impact Of COVID, the impact of distribution of inventory disruption, the impact of all the other distractions that are going on have caused, for a lot of managers, they just don't see they have the time today. And they're missing such a valuable coaching opportunity with their team. What can you do to make sure that you are investing in ride-alongs? Spending time, not just going out and visiting customers, but talking with your reps, discussing their territories, discussing how they feel about the job, discussing their satisfaction. This is a time to connect with your people, especially when things are so volatile and so many people are changing jobs today.
I believe one of the best ways you can ensure that you do have a stable and successful sales team is by you spending more time one-on-one riding with them, observing them, and just visiting and talking. What can you do to increase the amount of ride-alongs you're able to do? This is such a competitive edge for a manager to really understand their sales team, and to have more effective leadership because of it.