What Winter Sports Teach Us About Effective Coaching

Mountain vacations are often an opportunity to spend time with family or friends, clear your mind, and experience thrills. But this time of year can also inspire you to motivate your field sales teams. Discover the 4 lessons from winter sports to improve your sales performance.

Define a clear path

Before hitting the slopes, it’s essential to plan your teams’ route so they don’t get lost or stuck facing a cliff. To optimize their professional journey and maintain their motivation, it’s important for a salesperson to evaluate the best trajectory for their career. To help them with this task, you must support the growth and ambition of your sales representatives, particularly by developing their skills: provide them with all the resources they need to learn, to train daily, and at any time.

Paradoxically, guiding your sales teams requires empowering them with autonomy and confidence. Indeed, your sales representatives must be able to self-manage and only call upon you when they feel the need or encounter difficulties during an assignment. By being thus empowered, they will have a better overall vision of their career development prospects.

Get well-equipped to tackle the field

To perform well on the slopes, it’s essential to have suitable equipment. Being well-equipped is also a key element of sales performance. More than 85% of French people use their smartphone at work (1): why not transform it into a performance tool for your sales force? Indeed, salespeople are now often all equipped with a smartphone or tablet, but they also need simpler, more engaging interfaces adapted to their activity. Digital transformation can support the engagement of your field sales force, but also reinvent it and mobilize collective energies in three ways:

• Organize modern sales challenges: mobile and interactive
• Facilitate communication and sharing within teams in collaborative spaces
• Manage qualitative and quantitative indicators in real time and in a motivating way

Master the Pole Plant

With an optimized route and good equipment, all that’s missing is perfect technique to be able to tackle even the black runs. Indeed, mastering the fundamentals of one’s activity allows for greater confidence in one’s abilities and offers the possibility of further improving performance. To perfect your teams’ professional knowledge and teach them new skills, you need to implement complementary training materials, such as micro-trainings accessible on smartphone or tablet in a short and interactive format. You can imagine short sequences of 30 seconds to 3 minutes using text, image, and sound, or testimonials from salespeople facing the camera. Quizzes, or other gamification mechanics, can also be a good learning tool for sales teams. Furthermore, this method offers a higher information retention rate.

Beware of Off-Piste

Risk-taking can be tempting, both on the snow and in sales activities. But by straying too far from the beaten path, the salesperson can lose sight of their objective(s). Setting measurable daily or weekly goals, preferably short and precise, helps to stay on track. For example, define daily call targets or weekly appointment-setting goals.

Also offer sales teams the opportunity to track their progress in real time so they can organize themselves and define their priorities. Thus, your sales force will be able to gauge their position and be more involved with their objectives.

Like a good ski instructor, the sales director must guide their sales representatives in learning these four points. Unlike the ultra-tanned man in a red suit, the manager should play the role of a coach rather than a teacher. By adopting open, flexible, and reassuring communication, you will establish a climate of trust and respect, allowing your teams to reach new heights!

If you are looking for other ideas to improve your teams’ motivation, download our white paper: Creating an Over-Motivated Team in the Digital Age

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• Commissions: A Barrier to Your Sales Team’s Motivation?
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