Perspectives on Better Sales Coaching: An Interview with Kevin Pawar

At SalesGym, we interview dozens of leading sales executives every year to find out new thinking and trends on top performers, coaching, and building better sales teams. In a recent interview with Kevin Pawar – National Sales Trainer – NewsCorp Australia, he shared some fascinating insights into the current challenges of selling advertising strategies and how sales managers can generate better results with better coaching.

Early in the interview, Kevin brought up the more demanding expectations he’s noticed that customers have of salespeople…

“Salespeople have to bring something new to the conversation. What’s happening in that industry, what’s happening in that geographic area, what’s happening in the demographic of that particular audience? So every time a salesperson goes and meets the customer he or she has to take some more knowledge points that will in one sense continue to educate that Advertiser or customer and also have something new to share with them allowing them to look at multiple lateral opportunities to increase revenue. This is something new because many salespeople are used to walking up to customers every week and having revenue just flow through, are finding that it does not happen that way anymore. There are so many other people offering pretty much the same thing because with Facebook, Google, search engine marketing and search engine optimization, every man and his dog is flogging those products out there. Salespeople today have to get the customer to understand what our points of difference are as one of the oldest and largest media companies and what are the benefits of staying with us across multiple platforms.”

New selling approaches require better sales coaching

What we’ve found in working with thousands of sales teams over the last 25 years is that what used to work in the past, the high focus on relationship building, simply isn’t enough anymore. Kevin has noticed something similar…

“A habit that commonly holds a salesperson back is relying on relationship building alone. For salespeople who have been selling for a long time, at one point in time the relationship was key, so they are very strong in terms of the ability to build a good relationship very quickly and maintain and enhance that relationship but gone are the days where relationship alone is top of the list. Today it is more results, people buy from people who deliver results. So, it’s actually managing the customers’ expectations and getting the customer to realize that if that business does not evolve, the results that we once upon a time delivered purely on one product platform no longer work. So, it’s a shift of not only building the relationship but clearly communicating expectations and results.”

Sales leaders all over the world are telling us how difficult it is to get more of their salespeople to sell with the more modern insights-led approach introduced in “The Challenger Sale.” This approach requires more preparation and a more assertive questioning strategy that can fracture rapport and trust if not done skillfully. As such, more coaching and practice is needed to help salespeople develop the confidence and finesse to transition to this higher potential selling methodology. Interestingly, 90% of the sales leaders we interview tell us that getting sales managers to deliver this kind of sales coaching is one of their biggest struggles. Kevin agrees…

“One of the biggest gaps is effective sales coaching. A lot of older managers used to do curbside coaching. Our biggest challenges now is how do we get our sales managers to coach, know how and when to coach and when not to coach, and how often to coach.”

Who to promote to sales management?

One of the more obvious solutions to this problem is to promote people into sales management roles that have natural ability and aptitude to teach and coach. Often, the top performing salespeople are first to be offered sales management roles, but this is a key cause of poor coaching as Kevin has noticed…

“One of the biggest challenges, and I’m sure you’ve heard this a hundred times, most of our high selling salespeople end up becoming sales managers. In my humble opinion, that is the worst thing you can do because what happens is when you put a higher achieving salesperson into a sales manager’s role, while its fantastic for the growth of that salesperson, that person is rarely a good coach because they can do it for themselves but they cannot teach it.”