How many times have you heard the phrase “feed your eagles” (a phrase coined by Professor Derek Newton of the Darden School of Business and Management at the University of Virginia)?  Eagles are the élite sales people, those who hit their targets, no matter how difficult.  While many sales leaders want to think that their organization has a disproportionate share of these elites or that they only hire elites, the truth is that all sales organizations have similar staff profiles.

The real “core” of your team

All sales teams are composed of elites, core and straggler performers.  The typical sales team with have a few elites who represent the most effective and efficient portion of the team’s performance curve and a few stragglers whose performance represents the least effective portion (new hires, complacent veterans and the less talented and motivated).  Between these two extremes is found the core performers.  These usually make up the largest group of the sales team.  They are important to the organization because without the core performers, revenue targets will not be met.

Core performers are the “middle child” of the “sales family”.  They are many times over looked for promotions, their achievements go unrecognized, and they are never held up as examples to follow by their managers.  Since most sales leaders come from the elites, they, many times, cannot relate to the core performers.

What works?

So how do we feed our eagles, strengthen our core and motivate our stragglers?  There is an empirical body of scientific research around sales performance and effectiveness which indicates the correlation between performance, support of the sales team by the organization and coaching/training from sales leadership.  The studies show that, in addition to selling skills (elites, core, and stragglers); organizations that provide more sales support in addition to training and coaching perform better.  In addition to better performance, the better trained and coached teams focus on the sales activities that have a greater impact on performance.  Activities such as setting personal goals and tracking the results, developing call strategies and questions to uncover needs and motives, team selling, leveraging organizational resources and clearly articulating the business proposition to highlight the customer’s ROI.

Everyone wins

Train, coach and support the sales team and the whole organization wins.  Even the best, the elites, improve with training, coaching and organizational support.  The group that shows the greatest improvement is the core performers.  For the stragglers, coaching and training will provide and early indicator of success or failure which will mean a quicker “call to the bench” for the replacement. Like every organization, you have a mix of performers. The key to feeding the eagles plus the others lies in making sure everyone gets training and coaching.