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Sales coaching has become a necessity for effectively managing a sales team. Yet sales coaching is no guaranteed cure-all for all of your organizational ailments - it takes much more than simply rolling balls out there and blowing a whistle to implement effective sales coaching.
Here are five key reasons that sales coaching can fail when executed poorly.
The dean of modern management, Peter Drucker, said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it." That classic adage is even more important today in the age of analytical sales management. Without data analysis that is right at your fingertips in your CRM, sales managers will have less productive coaching sessions with their sales reps.
On the other hand, actionable points - supported by sales performance metrics - can increase buy-in from the rep and, eventually, improvements. If data suggests that a rep struggles to convert between the team’s first two opportunity stages, sales managers can hone in on this area of weakness. Is the rep not qualifying top-of-the-funnel leads stringently? Are they struggling to execute the demo at the second stage? A data-driven approach to analyzing weaknesses can lead to more demonstrable improvements.
Tony Robbins who recently did a Salesforce webinar said “Know that everyone is unique, different and amazing.” A serious commitment to sales coaching must be made, and that begins with blocking out sufficient time on a regular basis dedicated solely to sales coaching. More importantly, coaching sessions should be individualized to each unique rep for them to get as much out of it as possible.
Dedicate half an hour each week to coaching each rep. Help them discover their own struggles on their own volition, by asking poignant questions that can guide their path in tackling obstacles and solving their own problems to be more effective reps.
It’s not enough to simply adopt a data-driven approach to sales coaching - there must be a razor-sharp focus on the right sales performance metrics and deriving meaningful insights from this set of data. All the right data is in your CRM, you just need to look at what is most critical.
A sales manager looking to increase his or her prospecting reps’ output might seek a report of raw activity numbers in Salesforce.com, such as how many calls each rep made over a month or quarter. In this case, a better set of sales performance metrics to study might be the reps’ activity conversion ratios, or how efficient the reps are with their activities. This can be presented in ratios such as Calls : Conversations or Conversations : Meetings Scheduled for a better indicator of which reps are effectively and efficiently producing, instead of just going through the motions to hit raw number targets.
The bottom line is that sales is a bottom line business - revenue, and growing it, is the goal for every member of the organization, from the CEO down through the sales team.
Yet, as a sales coach, it’s important not to foster such a myopic focus on purely the bottom line. This sounds counter-intuitive but this type of results-oriented thinking in lieu of focusing on the actual sales activities can be dangerous. Reps need to understand how to do the "right things the right way", as prescribed by you, your team and your selling process. By focusing on the right activities and doing them right, the results will come.
Finally, sales coaches must engender a culture of mutual trust, respect, and collaboration between not just themselves and the reps under them, but between every member of the team. For reps to fully buy into what their managers are coaching them through, it’s critical that their relationship is built on a trusting foundation. Once that level of trust has been established, both parties will be able to speak openly and honestly, setting the stage for truly effective sales coaching that focuses on improving skills.
Is your sales coaching working well for you? What other issues have you faced that could make sales coaching ineffective? Tell us about it in the comments.
Zorian Rotenberg is a recognized authority on metrics-driven sales and marketing management. He is a VP at InsightSquared and was on management teams of several successful software companies each of which he grew by over 100% in sales every year, going from $8mm to $100mm in a span of a few years. He was also CEO at StarWind Software. Zorian has a degree in Finance and with minors in Applied Mathematics and in Computer Science from Lehigh University and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.
For more sales tips including a look at moving from sales manager to sales coach, download the free ebook below.
