Developing salespeople is easy when you can understand and apply three basic concepts:
1. “Winning is fun, losing isn’t!”
2. “Winning is different for every person!”
3. “Your job as a manager is to help your people win everyday!”
When you discover what winning is for your people, then you are well on your way to helping them succeed. The quickest way to help salespeople win is to have a clear description of where they want to go or what they want. This is called an outcome. Using their outcomes to achieve business goals is an effective method of getting results and developing salespeople.
One way to organize a plan for achieving an outcome is the OREO Method developed by corporate trainer, Gerry Schmidt.
- Outcome: What is the desired result?
- Reality: What is the current situation, including the resources available and the resources that are needed to change the current situation?
- Evidence: What evidence will be used to demonstrate that the outcome has been achieved?
- Operations: What will the salesperson do to achieve the desired outcome?
Here are some important guidelines for Applying OREO while developing salespeople:
1. Key to successful coaching is having a clearly stated and well-formed outcome. To discover someone’s outcome ask, “What do you want?”
To ensure that the person’s outcome is well-formed, make sure that it is:
• Stated in the positive (describe what the person wants and not what the person doesn’t want).
• Within the person’s control. The actions that will lead to the desired outcome must be within the person’s control.
• Actions must be small enough and specific enough to facilitate immediate action.
• Actions must have time frames.
• Achieving the outcome will produce or lead to achieving a larger goal or outcome.
To determine the larger goal or outcome ask, “What will ________________ (insert desired outcome) get you or allow you to do?
2. The next step is to assess the person’s current reality and compare it to the desired outcome. To assess a person’s reality, ask the following questions:
• Compared to your desired outcome, where are you now?
• What stops you from having the desired outcome now?
• What are you doing that is keeping you from having the desired outcome?
• What resources are available?
• What resources are needed?
3. Evidence defines how people will know that their outcome has been achieved. To determine a person’s evidence ask, “How will you know when you have achieved this outcome?”
To help clarify the evidence, ask the following:
• What will other people see, hear, and feel when you achieve your outcome?
• What will be the first indications that you’re making progress towards your outcome?
• What other benchmarks will you use?
• What will be the long-term impact of achieving the outcome?
• How will achieving this outcome impact other areas of your life?
4. Operations outline the person’s plan of attack. To discover a person’s operation, ask “What will you do to achieve this outcome?” To make the plan as practical and effective as possible, ask the following questions:
• How else can you achieve the outcome?
• What are you going to do first?
• Specifically, when are you going to do it?
• What could get in the way of your success?
• What support do you need to be successful?
• How certain are you that you will carry out the agreed upon actions? (Use a scale of 1-10, with 10 being absolutely certain.) If the rating is less than an 8, find a new outcome or a new plan of action.
When salespeople do things for their reasons they are far more motivated than if they were doing things for yours. Using the OREO model for developing salespeople helps you keep them focused on activities that produce meaningful results.