Coaching The Coaches

Sales training and development can make or break an organization. Whether auditing your existing program or designing something from scratch, it doesn’t have to be hard. We recommend the following five key points:

1. Leadership must make the mandate for coaching clear. If coaching is not a priority in the organization, it will only be conducted by those who are interested. Many of the top performing sales organizations around the world require that their managers spend target amounts of time weekly on coaching. To ingrain the process in the organization some companies will go as far as requiring managers to post their coaching time on a public calendar, making it visible to the organization. Like most business priorities, coaching has to be viewed as essential by leadership in order for managers to make it a priority in their own jobs.

Build a coaching program and methodology that fits your organization. Using a standard coaching program – one off the shelf or one being used by another company – is certain to fail. A program that is a good fit for one organization may be a poor fit for your organization. Determine the priorities for your coaching program. Understand from a customer perspective where your weak points are and engage your leadership team in developing the right program for your business.

3. Decontaminate your management roles and your sales roles. One of the greatest robbers of coaching effectiveness is lack of time. Define the top three to four critical roles for your sales managers. Make coaching one of those critical roles and determine the amount of time managers should spend on coaching. Identify any other roles – good or bad – that managers play or tasks that managers conduct and perform a value-added analysis on those tasks. For low value tasks for the manager, either eliminate those tasks or shift them to the right resource to make time available for coaching. Conduct the same type of decontamination process for sales roles to increase their available time to sell. The average organization spends 50% of time selling. Identify your actual performance and set an achievable improvement objective.

4. Lead ongoing deal level coaching with the team to challenge thinking. Take coaching down to the micro level, developing strategies for key customer pursuits. Use the sales pipeline as more than a review tool and leverage it for coaching. This can provide new accountability for pipeline management and challenge thinking around specific deals. It is also effective for collaboration between the sales rep and the sales manager so that coaching has a purpose and an objective: to close the deal.

5. Make the process transparent and measurable, including deal forensics, win/loss analysis, and living account planning. What gets measured gets accomplished. If you are not measuring the effectiveness of your coaching program, you risk missing some significant returns. Key to transparency and measurement are tools that provide customer responsive information to coach with. Deal forensics or win/loss analysis looks at major lost deals from the customer perspective and why we lost them. It helps us identify areas for improvement that can be used for coaching the sales team and making strategy changes in the organization as a whole. Living account planning takes the stagnant account plan off the shelf and assigns a process and goals to working the account plan on a weekly basis. The living account plan can be used by managers as a coaching tool to set objectives, track reps according to attainment of those objectives, and coach them to improve their results.

 

For guidance or help on building your coaching program or coaching your managers and reps to a higher level of sales performance, visit SalesGlobe or email mark.donnolo@salesglobe.com.