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Introducing Flyn L Penoyer
Posted by Colin Wilson
In 
Aug 08
Today’s post is a guest post from Flyn L Penoyer… “The Inside Sales Guru” as he likes to be known… he is an author, trainer, and the Founder of Penoyer Communications a California based sales consulting firm specializing in the development and revenue acceleration of inside sales groups. His company website is: http://www.penoyer.com.
Flyn has been very active within the LinkedIn community on the questions and answers… his appetite for both asking and answering questions is enormous and if this appetite was transferred to food intake he would be one very large individual… although in terms of his knowledge in the sales arena he is already a pretty large chap!
Flyn and I have been exchanging views on one of the questions that he asked and from that little exchange Flyn asked if I would like a couple of posts for my blog… absolutely… Flyn writes quality stuff… so here is the first…
Sales Leadership: How Do You Enable Salespeople?
By Flyn L. Penoyer
Enabling is the second biggest part of sales leadership following and closely tied to creating a vision.
Unfortunately, there is a far more common practice in use by many companies, I call it “sales prevention.” It is not, I think, practiced on purpose but more through a default lack of understanding by line sales managers on how to enable their salespeople.
Most companies think that “enabling” salespeople means as giving them a desk, a phone, some product training, a list of prospects / customers, and a kick in the seat of the pants to get them going.
Many sales managers seem to believe that if you hire a good salesperson, they will know how to sell, and more specifically how to sell your product effectively. Experience tells me that this is unfortunately not the case. It is this fact that makes the subject of enablement so important.
At its highest level enabling represents a “philosophy” more than anything. It is the philosophy of doing for your salespeople the things that allow them to sell more. It is a philosophy of focusing your time as a manager on making the little wheels (your salespeople) spin faster and thus leveraging your own personal efforts.
Years ago I managed an inside sales team at Logitech that sold to resellers. My practices of sales leadership or enabling were responsible for much of our success. Here are some of the things I did that help produce far more and effective calls by the reps.
1. Give them a story to tell –- Don’t assume they know how to sell the product, and more importantly that they know how to sell it well. Develop and document a sales process and develop a story for them to use. Then, train and coach them on it. This enables them to do it better.
2. Take away there “internal problem solving tasks.” — When my team members had a problem with shipping, finance, or any other internal department I had them give that problem to me and I handled it. First, as a manager I could get it done much easier than they could as I had far better leverage than they with other departments. Second, I could do it much faster and save them 30-60 minutes of selling time often more.
3. Run regular sales and communications skills training — I taught my team using the very story I’d developed. I showed them how to apply the principles of the major sales methods to the story.
4. Develop a system for organizing their calling time and efforts — In order to increase the time they could spend in front of customers give them a system. If you watch your folks work, or even better, if you do the work for a couple of days, you will discover that there are many inefficiencies that can be cleaned up. I was making some calls for a client last year and discovered quite by accident a couple of little tricks in my work flow that nearly doubled my calling numbers.
These are only a few of the things you can do. If you look for and focus on how to make your people more effective and efficient, you will find ways to enable them.
One of the great side benefits of such efforts is a sincere appreciation you will receive from your team for your efforts. Salespeople truly wish to do well, and when their manager actually helps them do so, they repay with hard work.
Make a difference; start enabling your team today. For some additional information on sales leadership try the educational quiz on our web site: http://www.penoyer.com/Quizzes/SalesLeadershipQuiz.asp
Copyright 2008, Flyn L. Penoyer, Unaltered reprints are encouraged.
