Best Practices for Coaching Your Medical Sales Team

28 Jun, 2018

While effective screening and hiring are essential to your recruitment process, these two tasks represent only the beginning of your path to successful management. Once you’ve identified great candidates and welcomed them to your team, your job isn’t over; it’s actually just getting started. Even expert sales pros and highly experienced team members can still find room for improvement and growth; and as a sales manager or team leader, the responsibility for this growth lies in your hands.

How can you do everything possible to build a relationship of trust and bring out the strength and talent in your medical sales staff? Start with these simple tips:

Review sales calls like you mean it

Don’t just skim quickly over your major notes after a sales call. Set aside some time to really dig into every detail and analyze what worked and what didn’t. Clear your schedule, put your phone away, and work together with your team to assess each minute and each interaction.

Go beyond praise and criticism

Instead of simply checking off a list of “positive feedback” and “areas in need of improvement,” engage in a conversation with your sales team to examine different moves from different angles and determine how well these went over. Encourage them to really understand where they lost the client’s interest or trust, and help them understand the mechanisms behind each victory or each moment of positive connection as well. Think of yourself as a coach or theater director, and make sure your medical sales professionals walk away from these conversations with new — and valuable — insight.

Practice together

If you’re leaving the meeting with a clear plan for future sales calls or a clear, shared understanding of how to handle the next interaction so it proceeds even better than the last, that’s great. But just to put a lid on the lessons of the session, practice a little bit with your sales pro. Ask some tough questions from the perspective of the next client. Throw some curveballs so your medical sales teams have a chance to use what they’ve learned.

Iron out mistakes

In medical sales, there are almost always multiple paths to the same goal and multiple right answers to every question. But sometimes a mistake is just a mistake. If your sales pro made a misleading statement, missed a huge opportunity, left money on the table, or flubbed an easy chance to make a connection, get this worked out. Leave no room for ambiguity and make sure all parties know exactly what went wrong and how to fix it the next time. Mistakes that are left unaddressed tend to return in the next round, and bad habits often become entrenched over time.

Start by hiring the best reps

To find the right medical sales professionals who are ready to improve with every successive call, turn to the medical sales recruiters at Buckman Enochs Coss and Associates.