You'll flip over this: this innovative tutoring approach for salespeople turns traditional training on its head by identifying areas for further personal study and improvement.

• Author: Brown, Tom
• Position: Sales Coaching

Sales coaching and sales training are two sides of the same coin. They both focus on the same end, improved sales performance, but they use very different means to achieve that goal.

The purpose of sales training is to teach a skill that the bank deems to be of value. The bank sees training as something that employees am required to take as part their pursuit of organizational goals. Sales training is top-down; it's an external force applied to the trainer's mind.

Sales coaching is focused on the individual's aspirations, not organizational goals. The purpose of sales coaching is to help individual salespeople (the players) move beyond sales training by identifying areas for further personal study and improvement. Coaching is bottom-up; it's a response to an individual salesperson's internal motivation to improve or acquire a trait or skill.

Thus, sales coaching is sales training turned upside down.

The purpose of sales coaching

"Coaching is the process of helping people identify their unique strengths and weaknesses, targeting areas for personal and professional development, and tying the outcomes to achieve personal and career aspirations" wrote Richard Boyatzis, chairman of the Department of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and co-author of "Primal Leadership." Note that this definition of the purpose of coaching doesn't mention anything about organizational goals--it focuses on individual aspirations. While sales coaching should focus on the individual's needs, banks with effective coaching programs realize that meeting the individual's needs is in itself an important organizational goal.

While the purpose of coaching is fixed, its strategies and tactics must not be. They must always be adjusted in response to changing times or they may become ineffective. "Upside-down coaching" is one type of coaching strategy that works effectively in today's challenging times.

Ron Willingham, in his book "Integrity Selling for the 21st Century" writes, "Selling success is more an issue of who you are than what you know." Too often sales coaching focuses on skill development, in other words "what you know," and ignores the emotional part--"who you are." Upside-down coaches focus on skill development too, but they also focus just as much effort on the emotional part of the process. This difference is why it's called "upside down." This is what give this strategy its power.

Upside-down...