Just like parents who are forced to coddle a problem child, sales managers end up spending most of their time coaching problem reps. According to research by Princeton, New Jersey–based management consulting firm Caliper, almost two thirds of managers say they spend most of their time dealing with poor performers.

This means that they inadvertently neglect salespeople who exhibit all the qualities of a sales star, but who have yet to crack the top ranks.

Considering how desperately companies are trying to ride the economic turnaround, smart managers should focus on those "nearly there" team members, sales experts say. "Most managers who spend time with poor performers are trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," says Herb Greenberg, CEO of Caliper and author of How to Hire & Develop Your Next Top Performer. "There are some players where everything adds up to a good salesperson, so you have to look at what could be wrong," he says. "If they have that much potential, see if there is something you can do to make them better." Here, then, are some strategies for turning your reps with potential into your next set of "A" players.

Let Them Take the Lead
Good sales reps are intuitive — not only with their customers, but also with themselves. They often know better than their managers where they need improvement. "The most successful salespeople don't rely on just their talents, but they will see skills that need to be developed and go after that," says Laura Benjamin, a sales coach and marketing consultant in Colorado Springs, Colorado. "They like autonomy, independence, and new and different activities, and they don't like to do the same things over again."

This means they'll often take the initiative to come up with their own strategies for overcoming weak points. When Robert Reed was hired as a salesperson in 1998 for Batesville, Indiana–based medical-equipment firm Hill-Rom, he had little sales experience, but quickly learned there was one thing he loathed about the profession: cold calling.

Although his managers still advocated it, they gave him the freedom to try his own strategies, provided he brought in the desired results. This is an approach that works well with potential "A" players, Reed says, because they have the drive to get to the top as quickly as possible. "An 'A' player is self-driven. They focus on their strengths, as opposed to developing their weaknesses. In the real world, you only have limited time for personal development," he says.

Reed says managers should suggest that their reps document a successful process which they can consistently emulate, or come up with a personal development plan. "Maybe over the course of the year, the rep can say, 'Here are books I want to read and some seminars I want to attend,' and the manager can provide those resources."

For Reed, his game plan involved exploiting the trait that made his managers hire him in the first place: his ability to build trust and credibility by appearing knowledgeable. He focused on prospects who were referred to him or whom he had researched and thus knew they needed his products. He chose to approach cold calling via e-mail, through which he could demonstrate his knowledge of the company and the industry, and could address decision makers uninterrupted. His more focused strategy gave him a higher closing rate than regular cold calling, and it made him the top seller by his third year, he says.

Reed left the medical-sales industry in 2002 to create a St. Louis–based organization called The H.I.T. Selling Network, which helps salespeople create a trust-based selling brand. But he says he still uses the same strategies today to promote his current business. "I hate cold calling. I don't think I'm good at it," Reed says. "I've always preferred e-mail, and I've had success so far with direct e-mails to top executives."

Make Them Coach
Although good salespeople are competitive, they don't seem to mind sharing their tricks of the trade with others. "There is no sales rep who is always successful, and everyone can learn from people who aren't performing well," says Shawn Greene, head of sales consultancy Savage & Greene, based in San Pablo, California. "One of the things I've noticed is that top performers get a kick out of helping their own colleagues."

This seems to be a tack that managers believe works well, too. According to an S&MM/Equation Research survey, 75 percent of managers use their "A" players to help coach other reps. Sales coach Benjamin tried this tactic with one financial-services sales manager who was well-liked by her bosses. But she had one thing holding her back: "She was extremely bright, eager, and knowledgeable in terms of the product and the client," Benjamin says. "But she had an abrupt way of dealing with people." As a result, the manager was not permitted to work with higher-level clients and wasn't given full management duties.

Benjamin decided to have the manager coach a member of her own sales team who was her opposite; this rep lacked confidence and was afraid of making mistakes. The manager worked with the rep over six weeks, and met two hours each week with Benjamin and her own supervisor to get coaching tips. The manager learned how to give criticism, advice, and feedback in a sensitive and constructive way, while her rep learned how to be more assertive — and steadily saw her numbers improve. "She was able to show her report how to be confident with positive comments, and also by cutting her slack when she made a mistake. Through this, she was also able to identify her own flaws," Benjamin says, which included being too much of a perfectionist at times. Soon after, the sales manager was promoted to a higher level that gave her access to bigger clients and hiring and firing decisions. "She was kind of in a no-man's-land before, which is a tough place to be when you're responsible for results but you can't really control things like performance reviews," Benjamin says. Her bosses saw she'd developed the ability to balance personableness and accountability.

Set Mini Goals
Ambitious sales reps like to know they are meeting goals, so creating mini victories gives them a sense of accomplishment. "Managers should track a person's performance over time and let them say, for instance, 'I went from eighty-five to ninety percent of goal.' Translate it to bottom-line results," Benjamin says. "That way you show them what those incremental steps mean in terms of value."

Dave Stein, a sales consultant based in Mahopac, New York, and author of How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale, recalls working with one technology sales rep who exhibited all the traits of a good rep, but who simply wasn't meeting his numbers. His manager was about to fire him because he kept promising deals that never came through, even though he exhibited great product knowledge and was an overall likable guy. After some probing, Stein realized the rep's problem was his inability to get access to the decision makers. His self-esteem would start waning once the doors opened. "If you want to call on a high-level executive, you've got to be pretty confident, but if you feel your skill level isn't up there, it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy," Stein says. "And you can't sell million-dollar systems to someone four levels down in an organization." So Stein coached him on everything from making small talk to, most importantly, learning to speak in a senior executive's language.

To keep the rep from feeling too overwhelmed, Stein set smaller goals that would encourage him and eventually lead to bigger results. "We put together a simple plan that said, over sixty days, he would attempt to get access to five executives. At first, he would get maybe two out of five successful calls, which was still a big improvement," he says. Throughout this time, Stein went through role plays that made the rep step outside out of his comfort zone. "He pretended that he was confident enough times so that he eventually became confident," he says. And by the time the rep hit five out of five, his confidence was palpable. "After two quarters, he was able to get executives to look at him with credibility. Now I know nobody who's better at that," Stein says. The rep became the number-one seller, and eventually moved on to successful sales executive positions at other firms, where he regularly closed million-dollar deals.

Change Their Point of View
Coming up with a new-and-improved spiff isn't always the answer to motivating salespeople. Sometimes, reps are simply viewing their challenges from the wrong perspective. "'A' players have courage and confidence, and they are thinking three moves ahead. They are in it for the customer, not just themselves, and they know how to orchestrate the sale," says Chris Lytle, founder of Madison, Wisconsin–based sales training consultancy Apex Performance Systems. "B" players, on the other hand, "accommodate the buyer. They focus on what their commission check will be at the end of the month and whether the customer likes them," he says.

Even Lytle's own sales reps, who've been through Apex's training programs, need to be reminded of this once in a while. Lytle recently had to coach his five-member sales force after too many deals were getting stalled during the sales cycle. "They needed to say, 'These are the steps we need to take for me to make an intelligent proposal,'" Lytle says. Instead, they were being typical "B" players, "saying, 'I'll call you in thirty days,' when a customer asks for material. They were thinking, 'The customer is interested, so I'd better do what they want.'"

So Lytle analyzed with his reps their top three prospects, strategizing next moves, and asking the reps to predict the best- and worst-case scenarios. "I asked them, 'What's your most important meeting? What could go wrong? And how can you prepare for that?'" Lytle also knows that follow-up is necessary for the coaching session to be a success, and he has planned times with his reps several weeks down the road to update their progress. Too many managers, Lytle says, seldom do follow-up. "You have to have an objective before you start and fix a review date to talk about what happened after," Lytle says. "Then you revisit it: What could you have done differently? How will that change for the future?"

Sometimes, even the best reps are motivated by fear — fear of failure, especially. "What good coaches do is help people focus on the prospect, not on the fear," Lytle says. When Melanie Adams, currently a stay-at-home mom in Colorado Springs, Colorado, started her sales career in corporate health-insurance sales, health-care costs were skyrocketing. She feared going back to clients with 20 percent rate increases, but her boss helped her get over that by accentuating the positive. "She was good at making you feel good about yourself," Adams says. "She would tell you two great things you did for the one thing you needed work on. That was motivating for me to have those positive strokes."

She needed the encouragement, because human-resource executives were none too happy about the hikes. One business owner even stood up from behind his desk and yelled in her face. "I was sitting there cowering, and of course, you drive back to your office and think, 'What have I done?'" So Adams' manager met with her, and helped her explain the business case for the rate increases and how to present it as a win-win situation. "And she said, 'If you lose the account, you lose it.' She never threatened me with my job." With this reassurance, Adams was able to salvage the major accounts, even with the rate hikes. "The realization that I could sell the rate increases came after several successes, and it got to the point where I could actually go in knowing I could sell it," she says.