Your responsibility is to determine what it will take to get a salesperson to be a better salesperson, as well as a contributing member of the organizational community. Next, you need to help the individual incorporate your knowledge and expertise into his or her skill sets in a complementary manner.

• Coaching: A series of steps or activities designed to improve the performance of a salesperson or any other employee.

• Counseling: A series of steps or activities designed to correct a problem affecting a salesperson or any other employee.

• Mentoring: A series of steps or activities designed to guide and help a person’s career growth—usually not in a direct report relationship that exists between a sales manager and the sales team members.

We will not discuss the third approach. It is certainly worthy of review, but that will be reserved for another time and another book. Your interest is in coaching and counseling and in making sure that you are getting the highest performance possible out of each and every person on your sales team.

Other leaders who have coached me demonstrated such qualities as being great listeners (and adjusting their coaching to what they heard) and being open to ways of achieving results that were different from the ones they might have taken. These people also showed respect for knowledge and diverse experience, and authentic integrity. Other leaders who I didn’t find as satisfying tended to fluctuate too much, to be inconsistent, have hidden and secretive agendas, and create an air of dishonesty and deceit.