Archive for category: Guest Bloggers

Coaches Corner v.03.09.2023

In Coaches Corner v.03.09.2023, Coach Floyd Jerkins talks about management and leadership behaviors.

The New Everyday Coaching Behaviors

There is a lot of buzz about management and leadership styles today. While we’ve experienced changes in the workplace, people have always wanted to be treated as human beings. Respect, truly listening, and general compassion for our fellow humans win the day. 

Employees across the board are more vocal today about how they are treated, so be careful about following shiny objects. There are different leadership styles that work well. There is unmistakable evidence that when all the decisions are made by a given few or when employees are told exactly what to do all the time, it’s demotivating. When they don’t have input about the culture of their work environment, it’s demotivating. They quickly become disengaged because they have no say or are given an opportunity to contribute to their work tasks. None of us want to be told what to do, and neither do our employees. 

Coaching is a Participative and Situational Influencing Style 

The coaching profession has exploded in recent years, and it is diversified across many different fields and industries. Some old practices are now relabeled to new and what’s called exciting terms. Everyone is a coach, and coaching is the new thing to discuss. 

It is a noble profession and a management method that some of us have successfully taught and practiced for decades. To be good at it requires education, experience and some school of hard knocks. Just because you’ve attended a few classes and got the plaque on the wall, it takes more to walk the talk.  

Coaching Description

Coaching is a participative and situational management style that requires managers to help others enhance their own performance. They help the individual or team unlock their potential by supporting them to learn vs. telling them what the answers are. Fostering an environment to learn and think independently contributes to developing the individual or team to reach their fullest potential. The coach is a facilitator, helping the team members to achieve their results. 

Building Trust in Teams to Reach High Performance

Building trust in a team requires the leader to foster trust-building actions and decisions. When the leader stops thinking that people are there to be controlled or managed, this starts to open the culture to people not fearing a reprisal from the leader when they question something or take actions that turn out to be wrong. 

If you can’t trust people to do their jobs well, then one of the following situations needs to be addressed:

• You hired the wrong person to fit your organization’s culture and style of business
• You have the wrong person in the wrong position
• You haven’t sufficiently trained them.
• You have a manager who can’t let go of power and control

Progressive Coaching Focuses on Employees Strength

When you trust people to do the job, and it doesn’t come out right, that’s a coachable moment. If you have  good people in the wrong positions, you need to go back to the job description and ensure you have it correct. If your people are properly trained for the position, look closely at the manager. Maybe they just can’t let go of power and control. There are different leadership styles that work well.

When there are emotional or unhappy employees in your business, at some time they’ve tried to tell you about it. Maybe your ears turned off, or your reaction signaled them to think twice about bringing it up again. Spirited people may request more than once to change a system or process but eventually become frustrated and shut down because they don’t feel heard. Jumpstarting them again can be tough to do. 

A coach wants to know what is behind the conversation. What is behind the emotions? A coach is genuinely an interested listener. They make it easy for people to talk to them about almost anything. Effective listening is a learned skill set. Also, learning to listen isn’t always about what’s said. Watch what people do; that’s always revealing. 

When your employees are improving, and the culture of the business supports learning and teaching, their enthusiasm and abilities to be effective are greater. They become more connected to the business and its mission and purpose. 

A coach creates a focused approach to developing their people. Sure, we want to get business results, but that only happens after your people do what they do. As I’ve said before, good people can do extraordinary things when given a chance to succeed. Focus on each employee’s strengths and help them unleash their natural talents.            

Answer Man to the Rescue: Stop Giving All the Answers 

Managers are often promoted because they were problem solvers in their previous position. They had the ability to fix things when they were broken. The mindset is that it’s typically much faster to do the work themselves or faster to tell someone what to do vs. showing them how to do it. This management approach is a real challenge in an organization striving to move forward with new leadership styles. 

Nothing is worse than training a staff that you have all the answers all the time. It’s debilitating to the team and a significant factor in staff turnover. In my article, Answer Man to the Rescue I point out that you are not superman or superwoman who has all the answers all the time. 

Learning to let go of power and control requires the leader to delegate. You want team members to own the solutions. Being a good coach means helping them develop the best possible solutions that are good for the customer and good for the business.

The more you can engage your employees to contribute to the decision-making process and encourage them to speak up in a safe environment, the more they feel connected and empowered. 

I know some of you are thinking, wait a minute, it’s much easier and faster if I just give them the answer and then move on to other issues. The real challenge is that you are not creating problem solvers who then solve them without ever asking you. You are robbing your employees of the opportunity to figure it out, and that’s such a waste of human talent and energy. You, then, are the problem, not the solution. 

Psychological Management Practices That Foster Business Development 

In my article, “Improving Your Employees Psychological Income,” I address pieces to the puzzle of delegation and accountability through empowerment. This is an important step to learn how to help teams perform at a high level. The magic of dimes exercise is a useful tool to help your leaders transfer from “what’s going wrong” to what’s going right” and develop some focus on the things that matter the most. 

Intentionally becoming positive is a practice all by itself and tough to master for many. Instead of always pointing out what’s wrong, the coach accepts these instances as coachable moments and learning opportunities. The discussion centers on the mistake, how it happened, and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. We fix the source of the problem, so it doesn’t happen again and stays out of the emotional upheaval. 

Open and Direct Communications Style               

In today’s world of people management, there are new rules and new paradigms of people being sensitive to certain words and phrases. To say you should not patronize or be critical of others is an understatement. It all boils down to what Dale Carnegie wrote in his 1936 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Treat others like you want to be treated. Empowering and coaching others is not a new concept. 

Whether you are a small business owner, a leader in a business, or possibly a company preparing to scale your model to reach larger goals, mobilizing and cultivating your human assets is key to your success. 

There are duplicatable steps to implement empowerment. You can read more about it in this article. “Conditions of Empowerment.” This provides a general guideline for the information. Make it clear what teams are responsible for by following:

• Specify the Desired Results
• Set Some Guidelines
• Identify Available Resources
• Define Accountability
• Determine the Consequences

By using an open and direct communication style, you can make it clear what your people are responsible for. Give them the room to go about it their own way. 

Implementation isn’t always easy and there usually isn’t a clear road map. Habits can be hard to break, so recognize if you always see the negative in a situation. You’ll have to catch yourself if you start making negative remarks. You can relearn how to make a better and positive style of reply under nearly all circumstances through conditioning. Just do what an athlete does to get better, they perform the same moves every time under certain conditions, then tweak the responses to gain the maximum results they’re seeking. It is possible to phrase everything in constructive terms – even a negative sentiment. Practice makes perfect! 

In Closing…

It just makes common sense that people are better motivated when they are happy and focused. It’s also a lot more fun to work around teams of people who are excited to come to work every day and who share a common goal. 

The real success of a leader today is easily measured by the success of the people that work for them.           

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.

For our course lists, please click here.

Coaches Corner v.03.02.2023

In Coaches Corner v.03.02.2023, Coach Floyd Jerkins discusses sales mix and closing ratio analysis of behavior metrics.

In my last article, Behavioral Sales Metrics for Coaching Equipment Industry Sales Teams, I laid out some framework for measuring sales activities. This article is the second in the series to analyze the behavioral metrics sales mix and closing ratios.

CRM systems are full of good information that sets in a hard drive or the cloud waiting to be accessed. The data quality is only as good as what gets input into the system. Just like a financial statement, the numbers tell a story and provide a pathway to improvement. When you follow a sales system, some patterns emerge in the sales manager’s and sales team’s behaviors. 

 

Let’s look at an example:

10 salespeople x 20 days x 5 customers per day = 1000 customer experiences

% Per Category # of Customers

25% New Customers 250

35% Repeat Customers 350

20% Referrals 200

20% New Business 200

If this is your operation, it shows you a view of the customers engaging with your business. The mix of customers in this example is all face-to-face. Also, measuring whether the contact was an incoming call to the dealership is equally essential. These incoming calls can be more profitable with handling the call correctly. I address part of this in another article called “9 Tips for Handling Incoming Calls“. 

Sales Mix Based on Your Products and Market

In this example, 35% of your sales opportunities come from repeat customers. Based on the business model, that could be a super great number or not. 

With the Ag market, more corporate farms aren’t a fad, and the volume of customers is declining. Competition is fierce, and the notion that customers only buy locally isn’t the same today. Buying cycles can be long and require various strategies to make a sale, so sales teams must stay close to the customer and make the proper interpretation of why the customer isn’t buying today. 

New customers and customer segments are emerging every year in the rural lifestyle market. Many customers buy on their first visit, so the sales process must support that environment. Adding F&I sales is also growing, finally, as a means of adding additional revenue. Additional sales support may be needed to handle the volume of customers. 

Construction and heavy equipment related markets are booming. Brands that once could hang their shingle out and command sales and margins are being challenged. The sales cycle for these products can be long, with customer demands unheard of in recent years.  

Inventory 

In all segment’s, getting inventory is a current issue and who really knows when relief will occur. And to think of the market as having preordered only products may be closer and closer to reality. That requires new thinking to manage a salesforce. Your inventory value isn’t like fine wine. The “turn and earn” practices replace the “buy it and hold it” inventory practices.

Analysis & More

The sales mix analysis shows you a path and insights that you must look at your business model and market to reveal your findings. However, there is more to the story because we must sell stuff to make money. 

Closing Ratios That Cause Pain & Pleasure

If you’re following the rationale so far, then you start to get that there must be a sales flow followed. I call them the Steps to the Sale. A sales team can call them whatever you like or whatever your CRM system supports, but the key is to have a known system that you and your team follow. 

Following a sales system lets you know where you are in helping a customer buy. When a sales team works under the same guidelines, a sales manager can more easily identify how many qualified leads are in the pipeline. But wait, it shows you so much more because it’s like music to your ears, not excessive noise in the background. 

 

What if the Closing Ratio of each of these were:

Sales Mix Total   Closing Ratio            Sold Unsold

25% New Customers 250         10%              25 225

35% Repeat Customers 350         15%           53 297

20% Referrals 200         18%           36 164

20% New Business 200         20%           40 160

1000 154 846

 

Face-to-Face Contacts

Sold Units

Closing 10% of your New Business isn’t a great number at all. To improve, you must start by addressing the interpersonal and selling skills of the sales team. The average closing ratio of 20% should be the very minimum standard of sales performance. A focused effort is required to increase this number regardless of your sales environment. At 10%, you are walking around one-hundred-dollar bills to pick up nickels. 

In a dealership where sales teams are seeing 35% Repeat Customers, a 15% closing rate is alarming. Repeat Customers close at a high ratio because they already know about your products and services. Carefully examine the sales team and sales manager’s behaviors because you are losing and churning through customers’ experiences. And don’t be naive here; to increase the repeat business ratio, a key ingredient is looking at the personality style between a salesperson and their customer. Just because a customer is in a salesperson’s territory doesn’t mean they have matching personalities. Trade territory management in many operations has too many old-school attributes.   

The 225 “New Customers” that were priced and not sold require immediate and calculated strategies to close deals and create a customer for life. Each of them should have an NDOC (next date of contact) assigned with a prescribed plan based on where they are in the steps to the sale. Often, prescribed follow up doesn’t happen because the salesperson is told to go out and get the next sale vs following the customer for life. 

For a customer to refer to the dealership is different from being referred to a particular salesperson. For a commissioned salesperson, they want that referral. They also have to “train” the customer to receive these referrals. In this example, 20% of customers were referrals. If this was your operation, then a big tip of the cap to you. That means your marketing and parts and service are doing a good job. 

Referral-based selling and servicing offer a huge upside to creating more sales and margins. They will naturally come forward because of your dealership’s presence in the market, marketing efforts, and various relationships with team members. The goal is to make asking for referrals an intentional practice vs. something that happens occasionally. 

In closing…

Ok, we’ve made it this far, and you are still reading. That’s a good sign because we’ll continue exploring these new sales metrics in more detail in the next article.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.

For our course lists, please click here.