How to benchmark your sales team against the best in the world

Hello Sales Reset Leader

How does your sales team compare to the best in the world? Or the best in your market?

What would be the benefits to you of leading the best sales team?

You might expect to find better opportunities and win more business with better margins and more reliable sales results.

My goal this week is to convince you of the value of regular self-assessment benchmarking with every team member. We’ll then look at how this works in practice and suggest an agenda for your coaching sessions.

The rest of this email newsletter assumes you have read this week’s Weekly Sales Reset:

• Title: How can self-assessment benchmarking improve your sales results?

• Subtitle: Compare yourself to the best in the world to know what you can improve

How to improve your team's results this week

• Plans for continuous improvement in sales skills

• Recommended coaching session agenda for self-asses …

• Expected pushback about self-assessments

• Self-Assessment Role-Play Recommendations

• Leadership Reflective Practice

Plans for continuous improvement in sales skills

Ideally, you’ll have a plan and a process for systematically developing and improving every team member's abilities to become and remain the best team.

To underpin progress, you’ll need reliable assessment reports. Using these reports, every team member will have their own “Learning and Earning Plan” to improve their sales skills, results and rewards.

You could repeat assessments every 90 days to report progress and reset Learning and Earning Plans.

You’ll be able to keep separate your reporting of sales results from your reporting of HOW those results had been achieved.

This is what the process of continuing Sales Reset looks like in the real world!

Recommended coaching session agenda for self-assessments

Before leading your coaching sessions on team members' self-assessments, ask each team member to review the current edition of Weekly Sales Reset and complete their self-assessments.

If both you and your team member are comfortable with this idea, ask them to share their self-assessment report with you.

Here’s this week’s recommended coaching session agenda:

1. Ask this team member for their observations about their self-assessment report.

2. Coach your team member about the quality of their self-awareness as reported in their self-assessments. Try to use evidence from their recent selling behaviours and opportunities to support your coaching.

3. Identify and prioritise the most significant areas of available improvement for each team member based on their self-assessment reports. Clarify specific practical things that this team member can do differently and better to practice and improve.

4. If you think it will be valuable, spend some time role-playing (working with these guidelines).

5. Finish the coaching session with agreed and specific action conclusions.

Expected pushback about self-assessments

So you know what to expect and can be prepared, here are three areas of possible pushback from your team members on the theme of self-assessment review and planning.

1. My results are OK: Your team members might cite evidence that their sales results are acceptable. They might also raise concerns that making changes could damage performance.

2. You’re undermining my confidence: Some members of your team might lack resilience. They might state explicitly, or you might pick up through their reactions, that they don’t welcome what they perceive as criticism.

3. It’s all very theoretical: Some of your team members may not have had much experience with structured self-assessment and reflective practice.

Now that you’re aware of these areas of potential pushback, what are your best responses?

Self-Assessment Role-Play Recommendations

1. A chosen area of planned improvement: Clarify one or more areas of planned improvement between now and the next assessment. Choose a current or recent opportunity to role-play and practice improved skills in the chosen area of ability.

2. Conversation with this team member in the future: Ask your team members to picture themselves in the future when they have achieved significant progress in their chosen areas of improvement. Ask them to imagine how it will feel to have made this breakthrough. This is a surprisingly effective way of making emotional connections to coaching goals.

3. Reverse roles: Ask your team members to put themselves in your shoes. Put yourself in their role. Ask your team member to coach you through your chosen area of performance improvement.

(You may find these recommendations about using role-play helpful.)

Leadership Reflective Practice

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this edition of Sales Reset Leaders valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Here’s a link to a page explaining how these weekly Sales Reset Leaders newsletters are designed to help you improve your sales team's results every week with structured coaching and practice.

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Community of Practice

Ask Questions, Share Your Experience

If you have any questions or experience to share:

• LinkedIn Group - Join our World-Class Customer Success Selling Group on LinkedIn to ask questions or comment.

• Sales Reset Together Community - Click here to learn more about our private community of members committed to achieving and maintaining their Sales Reset.

Do your team members subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Weekly Sales Reset?