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The following table highlights the different levels of the Sales Game and the lesson that salespeople need to learn at each stage.

Coaching salespeople at the Professional level is challenging and rewarding. At this level they have the core sales skills, they have good sales disciplines, and they are achieving good results. They are typically amongst the top performers in the company, and are receiving praise and recognition from their peers and bosses. Because of this they can easily become complacent and comfortable with their current level of performance. But they can do better.

Remember, great leaders see the potential in others and make them believe anything is possible Your job as coach is to help people realize their potential and achieve their goals. Professionals need to be challenged to push past their comfort zones if they are to progress. Often, this means a change in strategy to target higher value customers with higher value solutions. By refining their sales strategy, re-setting the game plan and encouraging them to ‘give it a go’. Professionals will realize that they have another gear and can achieve more.

For Super-Pros to become World Champs, they must leverage their time and energy solely on selling high value solutions to high value customers. By setting up the support structures, systems and staff, they can do more of what they do best and advance to the next stage. There is a three-step process for freeing yourself from low value activities and leveraging your time to focus on high value activities: eliminate, automate and delegate.

The first step is to eliminate activities from your work that don’t contribute to results. This is similar idea to Australia’s mantra in their America’s Cup Campaign, ‘Whatever makes the boat go faster’. This essentially means that anything that slows the boat down or doesn’t make the boat go faster, doesn’t get on the boat.

In automate we simply look for technology solutions that can take care of essential tasks for us. The idea here is that you don’t want to employ that (delegate) to do work that can be done by a machine. When looking to automate tasks, you want to use technology solutions that fit with your workflow, rather than getting seduced by fancy software that requires you to change the way you do things and ultimately ends up slowing down the boat.

The final step is to delegate. The conventional mindset in business is to delegate as much as possible to free yourself up to do the important work. We suggest that you should look at delegating as little as possible by eliminating unnecessary activities first and automating essential activities next. Delegation is expensive, time consuming and prone to human error and should be done sparingly. Only after you have eliminated and automated should you look at delegating the lower value activities that still need to get done.

In applying these lessons to Super-Pros, you must change the way their role is structured (by eliminating the unnecessary), systemize key activities with technology (automate the essential) and get support staff to take care of any lower value tasks that are left over (delegate the necessary). Creating leverage is a challenging process that requires a lot of involvement from the Sales Leader. It’s also a process that Sales Leaders need to do for themselves. Imagine the impact you could have if you could spend more time leading your team rather than filling in reports.

In the Sales Game, World Champs need to be challenged. For World Champs to stay on top and stay interested, you need to innovate the game and how it is played. Companies that fail to innovate the game, limit the potential of World Champs, and risk losing them altogether. Innovation involves creating a new game by re-imagining the object of the game, re-writing the rules of the game and re-inventing the tools of the game.