Historically, executives have been split about the answer, but that’s starting to shift. According to Peter Finkelstein, South Africa’s leading sales coach and head of the country’s premier sales consulting practice, 63.0% of executives interviewed in a study the consultancy conducted in November 2005 believe that a good salesperson is made. And that conviction puts some real pressure on the shoulders of sales managers, who have first-line responsibility for making great salespeople.

If you’re not among the 63.0% who believe good salespeople are made, it may be because you aren’t giving enough attention to the three things that build a salesperson’s performance – i.e. training, coaching, and a defined sales process with metrics and standards.

The biggest gap is in coaching. How big is the gap? In roughly 85.0% of the companies which DaiShõ surveyed sales managers are spending just 2.0% to 3.0% of their time coaching. Furthermore, company leaders are unaware of the gap. CEOs believe that their salespeople are being coached by their managers, but when the salespeople were asked whether they are coached the response is a resounding no.

One of the key implications of the “are salespeople born-versus-are they made question” is that managers need to spend more time coaching their people. While there’s no magic formula, Peter suggests that sales managers should be devoting at least one full day, per month to coaching each salesperson. That means if a manager has a force of 10 salespeople he should be spending around 50.0% of his time coaching. Think that’s a lot?

Coaching is just one piece of the puzzle when you buy into the view that good salespeople are made rather than born..

Another piece is training. The “born-versus-made question” puts the spotlight on the need for good, consistent, and reinforced training. That means that sales training has to take on a structured approach. The one-size-fits-all type of classroom training that has been the staple of sales development doesn’t cut it any more. For training to deliver the kind of incremental performance expected companies have to re-evaluate what training they are giving their salespeople.

Instead of the canned, formula-type sales training, every individual should be exposed to training that demonstratively addresses specific, personal weaknesses in his / her armoury rather than a general programme that provides overall training. And even this training has to be personalised. That means that the training is almost individual, rather than classroom based, allowing each sales executive to learn and internalise the training concepts in his / her own way, thus encouraging the individual to aligning the learned concepts with personal selling styles.

The third piece is having a sales process and a management operating system in place to measure progress. A system is a combination of reports, controls, metrics, and standards that support the sales process. It’s a system that measures key performance ratios such as the number of phone calls needed to get a prospect, the number of appointments needed to get a presentation, the number of presentations needed to close a sale, and so on. It’s about converting a company’s goals into numbers, then measuring progress along the way.

Three-quarters of companies don’t do a good job of managing in this proactive way. They get close to the end of the quarter, realise they’re 10 percent behind their goal and urge everyone to get moving! Usually at this stage incentives and special “motivational promotions” are introduced which seldom have any real benefit.

A more pragmatic approach is to systematically work out a programme that breaks down the activities needed to achieve a goal. So, for example, if your goal is R 100 million in sales revenues for a year, managers should know from their operating system that they’ll need, say, R 500 million in their prospect pipeline, then they need to manage the funnel and the people on a daily and weekly basis so that activity targets are reached.

Combined, this kind of management of targeted activity and consistent coaching with regular training, which is reinforced and honed through mentoring will result in revenue improvements.