Let’s assume that you started the year with a review and plan, and you are conducting consistent goal setting meetings, sales meetings and skill development training. One way to follow up on all these coaching activities is to do brief check-ins on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to ensure that your sales team is on the right track.
These brief interactions allow you to engage with your sales team and create opportunities to give recognition on success, uncover obstacles, and create a greater connection with your sales team.
Consistent check-ins are a great way to keep the conversation going. One way to be successful at this is to proactively seek out formal and informal opportunities to check in with your sales team. Here are eight goals that being proactive with check-ins enable you to accomplish:
- You can share and ask for good news.
- You can invite ideas and opinions on relevant topics. For example, you are planning a regional sales meeting and would like input from your team on what type of speaker they think would be good for the event.
- You can have conversations about what is going on outside of work—family, hobbies, vacation, etc.
- It provides a means to reinforce messaging from sales meetings, review and plan meetings, goal setting meetings, etc.
- Give individual attention to each salesperson. Some attention is better than no attention. People don’t like to be ignored.
- Catch your salespeople doing something right and give them positive feedback.
- Allows you to uncover any obstacles or challenges they are facing.
- You can take advantage of a just-in-time coaching opportunity
Check-ins can happen through multiple modalities of communication such as: text, chat, video, voice, email, or conversations around the water cooler. They are a great way to stay connected to your sales team.
