Coaching Testimonial Transcript
This is the transcript from Belinda's business perspective coaching testimonial:
About Belinda and Sliptest:
I'm Belinda I'm the co-owner of Sliptest which is a small business which focuses on measuring the slip resistance of floor surfaces in various markets around the UK and Ireland. We also provide a consultancy service and a training service to our customers to help them manage the way that they clean and maintain their floor surfaces to ensure that they perform at the optimum level so they can demonstrate their duty of care to the people walking on them.
During Covid, we furloughed our business development manager and we felt that when he was coming back to work following the break for Covid that he would need some support to assimilate back into the workplace.
He'd been struggling prior to covid and I was getting quite frustrated with hearing the same information come out of his mouth week in and week out but was struggling to unlock what was going on for him. So in about the April May as we all started to come back to work post Covid, I made a call, well I got onto the internet and had a look for various uh companies that did business-to-business sales training and development and made a call to Clive at SalesSense and really the rest is history.
Clive listened to me rant for about an hour and very patiently held the mirror up at me as to the things that I might have been doing differently that might have helped to support Harry, our business development manager, better following that I had a chat with Harry and said that I'd found someone that I thought he would relate to.
He was a little bit suspicious at the time and didn't really feel he needed any training or support but I insisted that he needed it, we wanted to support him as he as he returned to work after Covid and giving the best opportunity of succeeding once he got back to work. So he's slightly reluctantly went with the support.
Meanwhile, Clive had a session with myself and our MD to really help us understand the things that we were missing in terms of the way that we were going about managing Harry and how we might be able to get better results from him by taking a different approach.
So Harry started with his sessions with Clive. His initial feedback was "Well yes it seems OK. It reminds me a bit of my first sales manager but I'll see how I get on Belinda. And then after about session two or three, he really was starting to talk in an animated way about how helpful it was to have somebody to talk to who really understood what it was like to be at the sharp end.
I've never been a salesperson. I've always worked on the service side and people management side of the business and realized that actually, I was Finding managing a salesperson extremely difficult and that the skill set to get the best out of him was different to the skill set that I had it's been a development path for me as well as for him.
And Harry seemed to really respond to Clive who's working closely with me in terms of what the pressures were on the business and what we were looking for Harry to achieve over the six remaining months in the year as we returned from covid. He really helped Harry to structure his thinking um helped him to use a CRM system which he could really relate to and to extract the most out of that system for himself, to put processes in place to make sure that he was managing his calls, managing his callbacks, and generally structuring the way that he was working.
It was very basic stuff to begin with, very simple stuff but it really gave Harry the leg up to get him focusing on what he really needed to focus on and recognize where he needed help, which was something that he hadn't appreciated he needed quite so much help with. And by the end of the year, he smashed his Target which when you consider prior to Covid he'd really been struggling to hit his targets month on month, was a real achievement.
So that was the first six months. Then Clive and I had a conversation about whether or not we should continue with his work with Harry and really what Clive does for us is he provides that Sales Management without working within the business.
So we we get a hybrid of an external perspective on the business and which gives us good insights into maybe how we're behaving, how we are performing and the things we could do differently but also provides Harry with that as, Harry would describe it old style Sales Management approach where he's called to account on things and is challenged quite robustly about some of the words that might be trotting out of his mouth at times, where I've seen straight through, so there is absolutely no pulling the wool over his eyes.
And that balance of working in tandem with each other and being clear with Harry about what we want him to be working on with Clive, being clear about uh, Harry now being clear about the areas that he needs extra support on, that's just mushroomed and so where initially Harry and Clive are working together once a week they now touch base with each other once a fortnight.
Clive's taken Harry through a management training program as well which has given Harry insight into different ways of approaching different types of people, different ways of looking at different situations, and an insight into himself in terms of the areas that he needs further development on.
And also Harry's background was very much working from a sheet of opportunities and just ticking those off as he went along. He was selling a product. He'd not really got a lot of experience of bigger, more financially rewarding opportunities which are a slower burn with the customer.
Clive has really helped Harry to totally change his style in his approach with those bigger opportunities which he was really struggling to land.
Harry's conversion rates have always been really really good on the small straightforward 'are you going to buy?' yes or no. It was way above 95% in terms of his conversion rates on that sort of sale. But for bigger slower ones he struggled with because, I think what Clive and Harry identified was that Harry was asking for the business far too early in the process.
Since working with Clive and that's very much been in the last year on those bigger opportunities, Harry has had so much success and it actually makes meeting his targets so much easier for him so he's feeling the success on two levels he's hitting his Target with ease and in fact smashing them and he's realized that actually just building the relationship, building the Rapport between him and the customer, and just moving gradually through a process to the point where they get the to the nitty-gritty of well are we going to work together or not. And actually that brings him much much more success.
And even this morning on our team meeting he was talking about that in the context of a very big customer that we've just landed and how in terms of now moving that relationship forward he wasn't going to push it, he'd got a plan in place as to how he was going to approach it and that didn't involve saying give us your money today, please. He has grown enormously.
When I called Clive, it's fair to say I was pretty desperate. Clive very patiently listens to me ranting and I mean ranting for a very long time on the phone. Why I didn't put the phone down I really don't know.
I don't think I've ever done that to anybody in the past.
But the difference, and Clive and I both felt we didn't know whether or not this process would work but it hasn't just worked it succeeded my expectations. Harry's grown enormously, he's maturing as an individual but also as a person in his role and selling and growing the business.
And that partnership between us and Clive has really helped to achieve that. I don't think it can work if you work completely independently of each other. I think there has to be some interlocking of our relationship but then, and that needs to happen very early on in the process to make it work, you have to make sure you're really on the same page and we're very very clear about what our expectations were in both ways.
In fact in all three ways our expectations of Harry our expectations of what Clive would do with Harry, and his expectations of us. But having done that for the most part, their relationship manages itself and Harry reports back on how things are going. And every once in a while, I might say to Clive actually you probably need to just have a conversation with Harry about this because he seems to be struggling or he needs a bit more focus on that.
But for the most part, it's very light touch now and we're really seeing the benefits and Harry is seeing the benefits because he's growing as a person.
If you would like to learn more about this coaching testimonial or if you need to increase sales, improve management effectiveness, or raise revenue levels, we can help. Telephone +44 (0)1392 851500, send an e-mail to jimm@salessense.co.uk, use the contact form here or arrange an informal call with Clive Miller.
