The idea is simple. The moment a sales team starts to get used to sharpening its skills, the inevitable result will be a premium, self-correcting team.

There’s a subtle verb in the last sentence: “get used to”. Few would disagree with ideas about skills sharpening. Whole industries have been built on the idea. The gap is getting people used to it, to seeing it as “normal”, expected and worthwhile. That of course has always been the great gap in the sales world and why so much “sales training” has not worked.

The role of the manager

The world of sales management puts a lot of store on “improving performance”. It’s an impossible goal when seen as the manager coaching the individual to high performance – even if the manager dedicated all of his or her time to that one person. And it’s not their job. Improving performance is an outcome, not a job.

A far better approach is to build an environment where improvement happens naturally – and where the team sees improvement as normal, daily and weekly. What if:

• The team sees daily and weekly skills improvement as part of their job but also part of their success.
• The team gets used to sharpening their skills.
• The team protects skill sharpening – skill sharpening becomes the accepted culture, with daily advancement considered normal.
• Each seller takes ownership of self-correction. That’s the great multiplier.

The manager’s role is to do 3 things:

First, clarify the direction by setting a standard

What exactly are we trying to get better at? Not everything at once. Something specific to begin with that will have a frontline impact we can celebrate by the end of the week. For most commercial teams, that starts with the standard of fluency in the company’s value story, expertise, insights and customer conversations.

Second, explain why it matters.

People don’t sharpen skills because they’re told to. They sharpen skills when they believe better execution will make their job easier, improve results, and help them stand out.

We also tend to pay attention when we see that the world has changed; buyers don’t have to go into the sales drive-thru anymore; they can do so much more on their own now, and the sales channel is an option that needs to be better than other sources of information, knowledge and advice.

The team needs to see the connection between today’s practice and tomorrow’s performance.

Third, put a mechanism in place.

This is where most sales improvement initiatives fail. Managers define a standard, explain the standard, preach the sermon, rally the troops, and then hope the standard survives. It rarely does.

The missing ingredient is a mechanism that makes engagement with the standard part of the working day.

• A rhythm, e.g. 5 – 10 mins each morning.
• A tool for practice

Something that repeatedly brings people back to the behaviours and language that matter. And that can be done in 5 – 10 minutes, ideally daily, but even every second day.

This approach would have been fantasy even two years ago. Today the manager has new levers to build a daily improvement environment …

It’s unlikely sales leaders would disagree with the ideas in this article. Most would agree that salespeople should continuously sharpen their skills. Most would agree that fluency in a company’s value story matters. Most would agree that teams improve when development becomes part of everyday work. The problem was never agreement. The problem was execution.

Until recently, there was no practical way to make skill sharpening part of the working day.

Advances in technology, combined with the emergence of AI, have created something that simply wasn’t available before.

Sales teams can now practise every day – to a defined standard.

Sometimes you just need a better tool to change something.

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