There is a growing community of sales managers who prioritize people over metrics. They have emerged as leaders in the trenches who lead by example, guidance, and quality coaching. Few people know about these leaders because they’re heads-down, focused on building and developing their team. Sales team metrics…they know like the back of their hand. Some even know the individual reps’ metrics as if memorized on the back of a baseball card.  

Collecting and analyzing the data is easy. The hard part is knowing what to do with it. 

Great sales managers lead like a manager in baseball or a head coach in football. They review game film, watch players during batting practice, make sure technique and skill development are on par with the capability and potential of each player. 

Sales is no different. This type of “managing” is becoming the standard of a modern day sales manager. 

Of course we come across countless sales managers who are less focused on their people and more on spreadsheets. They tend to lead behind a desk. 

The next steps — the very hard steps — require superior leadership skills revolved around improving people. 

Enter sales coaching. The following 3 steps will help you start your sales coaching efforts. 

1. Identify Your Sales Leadership Style

As a sales manager, knowing where you stand on the following traits will help you identify ways to coach at your best level. 

- Belief in the team: Is the team more important than the individual?

- Conflict management: Do you leverage conflict?

- Involvement: Do you act before a response is needed?

- Employee focus: Do you pay attention to top performers too?
- Team building:  Do you mandate everyone practices?

Your coaching mindset is the first step. 

2) Assess the Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Team

After self-identifying leadership styles, start directing focus towards your team. You may know the characteristics of the team but do you know where every rep stands to the key metrics that create success? 

This is where sales managers leverage the sales operations team or as we call them at Rivalry, the “offensive coordinators.” 

Many sales leaders get stuck here. They over-focus on the metrics, subsequently, the individual team members lose priority. Sales reps should have clear sales activities. When performed well, those activities (example: calls, emails, demos) should convert to desired sales objectives (example: opportunities created) which produce quality results (example: revenue). The sales activities should be simple, clear, and easy to enter in the CRM. 

Dodging Road Blocks: if you’re spending more than 2-3 hours a week in your CRM running reports, you’re spending too much time in it. 

Setting up those metrics is critical to success but don’t over think them. Stay focused on what the sales reps should be doing as a start. 

3) Put a Coaching Cadence in Place

Coaching is hard. It’s also the most important thing that never happens. When we ask sales managers about their coaching efforts, a wide variety of responses arise.

Coaching includes the follow fours areas:

- Building trust with every sales team member. 

- Establishing the safeguards in place to ensure that the concepts learned in training are understood, effective, and long lasting.

- Facilitating discussion for discovering the areas reps are still struggling with in order to develop a better solution/process.
- Creating the process for holding people accountable for applying what has been learned.

Sales managers do these 4 things in a variety of methods including holding one-on-ones, monthly reviews, spot coaching, weekly team meetings, and more. Yet, when we ask sales managers how often their one-on-one’s actually occur we found the common answer is “not nearly enough.”

Regardless of how you do it, hold yourself and the team accountable to make sure it happens. 

Sales coaching is one of the hardest things to do in sales. Start your sales coaching efforts with these 3 steps and watch your reps close more deals, stay longer, and ramp to quota quicker.  

About the Author

Jon Birdsong is the CEO of Rivalry which is head quartered in the Atlanta Tech Village. Rivalry is a sales coaching platform that increases sales team output 19% by putting the safeguards in place to ensure the concepts learned in training are effective, facilitating discussions for discovering areas of improvement, and maintaining the discipline for holding people accountable. Rivalry's software is used by publicly traded companies as well as early stage startups.

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