Creating and maintaining an impactful sales coaching framework in the modern age isn’t as easy as one might think – but with the right mindset and the right tools, it’s not out of reach. In a recent article published by CustomerThink, Mindtickle’s Senior Director of Product Management, Himanshu Bari, discusses what makes today’s sales coaching such a challenge for businesses.
While coaching has always been an important part of the training process, for sellers navigating today’s digital-first buying journey, coaching is now critical to helping reps learn how to control the sales process and win the customer’s confidence.
Himanshu identifies a lack of time, feedback, visibility, personalization, and specialized skills as the most significant obstacles to overcome when implementing coaching efforts.
For many companies, building out a successful and targeted coaching framework can seem daunting or time-consuming – but that’s exactly where there’s room to grow with coaching automation. In the article, Himanshu analyzes the six major things a next-gen, AI-supported approach to sales coaching can help your company accomplish better.
Among them:
Enhanced visibility and incentives to influence culture.
Team-level remediation recommendations.
Machine-assisted reviews and progress reports.
For an in-depth look at improving your sales coaching, read on here!
In McKinsey’s new blog, read about just what this kind of change means for your organization – and how to address it as your team grows and moves forward. For example, the article establishes the three underlying causes to this shift in coaching effectiveness:
there’s often less coaching taking place than companies expect
coaches often approach their work with the wrong mindset
coaching is often poorly targeted
After addressing these pain points, the article points readers to a comprehensive analysis of how to address them by improving the availability, targeting, and delivery of coaching inputs. McKinsey suggests focusing on analytics, creating more user-friendly digital content, and automating administrative tasks – just as a few suggestions.
We know that sales coaching is an important part of sales management. It helps your reps become better salespeople overall, improves their skills, increases their engagement with your organization and, of course, improves your topline revenue. Studies have found that effective sales coaching programs can improve sales reps’ performance by up to 20%. But many managers actually don’t know how to coach well. Despite their abundance of experience as a rep, the promotion to a management role doesn’t always come hand-in-hand with specialized training.
Effective sales coaching isn’t about occasionally auditing your reps’ activities, or giving some in-person feedback every once in a while, but about building a regular cadence to provide useful, insightful and specific coaching in areas where individual reps need help. After all, coaching sales reps can be tricky for management because each individual has unique areas that they excel and others where they need extra guidance.
Here’s the thing: Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are one of the fastest growing teams inside B2B sales organizations. But when you look at some of the data about these specialized sellers you find out that over 80% of them have less than 2 years of experience and their average tenure at companies is 1.5 years, according to the Bridge Group.
This presents a few challenges for sales managers. First, very inexperienced sales hires require a lot of information about industry, processes, methodologies and overall basic sales knowledge than your tenured salesperson, and their short tenures mean you will be constantly onboarding new sales development reps which may strain your onboarding program but most importantly, you need to ensure extremely short ramp times.
To best enable the SDR team you have to think of your enablement program as more than just onboarding. Having a great sales onboarding program is great and the best way to ensure quick success for the SDR but think of it more holistically including:
Ongoing knowledge reinforcement
Experiential training and practicing
Coaching and career development
For example, if your rep has five areas where they need coaching, how do you know if their sales managers can address every single one? And how do you prepare your managers to find these gaps in the first place? Perhaps they’re great at pipeline management but struggle when it comes to deal coaching.
Given the breadth of the role of sales manager, it’s simply not possible for them to know how to coach sales reps on everything. But, just like their reps, they need sales leadership coaching so they can fill their own gaps.
Look in the “too hard” basket
Another issue that all sales leaders deal with at one point or another is “avoidance”. If something is difficult to do, or someone simply doesn’t know where to start, it’s much easier to put it in the “too hard” basket and forget about it until something bad happens.
Trying to coach sales reps only in adversity, like when they’ve just lost a big deal, is hard for both the manager and the rep. After all, no one wants attention just because they haven’t done their best, and coaching isn’t about yelling at someone for not performing. It’s about encouraging and developing reps to be their best.
That’s why it’s sales leadership coaching is so necessary; it’s important to ensure sales managers are coached to provide their teams with the skills and behaviors they need, proactively rather than reactively.
So what exactly is sales leadership coaching?
Before we get into the detail of how to help your sales managers learn how to coach their reps, it’s important to differentiate between coaching, training, and managing.
Management is about overseeing things and making sure they stay on track.
Training focuses on learning new knowledge.
Coaching is about developing skills, improving performance and/or changing behaviors.
Sales coaching is the ongoing, one-on-one mentorship of each rep on a sales team. It is a conversation between the rep and a coach, where the rep does most of the talking while the coach listens, observes, and offers feedback.
It’s not about telling someone what to do, but about helping them look at different ways to achieve better results. When done well, sales coaching can drive sales’ productivity and effectiveness.
1. Develop a coaching framework
The first step in helping managers learn how to become an effective sales coach is to develop a sales coaching framework. But beware, there is no one-size-fits-all solution because every business is different. To work out what your coaching framework should include why not ask your sales reps what they need. Speak to your sales managers to find out what they would find useful, and ask your executives about the overall objectives.
This information can then be used to build your aX + bY + cZ formula for effective sales coaching. This framework is tailored to your organization’s needs while ensuring you cover the necessary aspects of sales coaching including knowledge, messaging, sales skills, process, and execution rigor and discipline. While no sales coaching program will be identical, it’s critical that each ensures that managers have:
The knowledge required to coach in all the areas
The skills to actually coach
The tools required to build a cadence for coaching
The discipline to execute the coaching framework consistently
2. Put the sales coach into training
Once you’ve identified the key areas that your salespeople need coaching, you’ll need to identify whether your managers have the requisite skills. The best way to ensure managers have the knowledge and skills to coach is to provide them with formal training. There are many ways this can be done, from formal in-class training to peer to peer learning.
Football coaches have to be certified before they get to coach players. In fact, the process for certifying a football coach is thorough, with several levels, depending on the experience of the coach and the level of the players they seek to coach. It should be the same for sales coaches.
One of the most effective ways to coach is to give both the reps and their managers the same information and knowledge and make sure they are certified in key areas. This ensures they have the same baseline knowledge, and the certification ensures they have absorbed the information and are able to apply it.
For example, one of our customers, a high growth tech company was launching a new product and wanted to ensure their sales team delivered a consistent message to prospects. To enable their sales managers to coach sales reps through this they first certified them on how to sell the product themselves. This ensured that they knew exactly what the reps had to do, and when combined with their own experience and skills were prepared to coach their teams effectively.
When this approach is complemented by guidance on how to coach, it can be powerful.
Provide live examples to managers on how to have coaching conversations. Help them understand what they should be looking for and what areas to focus in on for the greatest impact. Provide them with the opportunity to role-play their coaching so they can play it back and learn from it.
3. Leverage reporting and tools
All the training and practicing in the world won’t be of any use to a sales manager if they’re going into their coaching sessions blind. That’s where good reporting on the right things is critical. When determining what they should be coaching sales reps on, most managers just look at lagging indicators like pipeline activity and what deals reps have won or lost. But this doesn’t always provide enough useful data. That’s where efficiency and capability indicators are important.
While effectiveness indicators look at the behaviors that sales reps can demonstrate to drive lagging indicators. Coaching is about behaviors, not quotas, this qualitative information needs to be available to managers so they know what to coach on.
This information can be identified by bringing together information from several places, whether it’s from a CRM, sales enablement software or competitive intel. The key is giving managers the tools that can help them identify which indicators to look at and access to get the right information.
For example, if you’re looking at what the indicators are for salespeople who win deals, your sales enablement software can provide you with information on what content your best reps are accessing before a big meeting. This may provide data about what behaviors are correlative with winning deals, and in turn what behaviors may need to change in order to improve the results of some of your reps.
With useful data-driven reports in hand, managers are able to identify what specific areas individual reps require coaching in, and start working on improving their behaviors and results.
4. Mentor the coach
With the right tools, your sales managers will be much better equipped to coach. But they will still need to learn how to use tools to achieve the best effect. One of the best ways to learn coaching is to learn from peers. Your sales reps buddy up, so why not “buddy up” your sales managers? With role models to help mentor and demonstrate good practice, managers will be able to ask questions and share their knowledge with their peers.
While mentoring and buddying is usually a one-on-one activity, you can encourage collaboration and peer-to-peer learning amongst the management team by bringing them together. Some of our customers have organized manager workshops that give sales managers the opportunity to share what works and what doesn’t in a supportive and collaborative environment.
It’s also a great idea to encourage managers to share their coaching wins with the entire sales team. This has a dual impact for allowing the sales organization to learn from what works, and also demonstrates the value of coaching to any skeptics.
5. Provide regular feedback from executives
If your organization has a sales coaching culture then your sales leadership will want to know how your sales managers are performing. Rather than observing from afar, they should be encouraged to see how managers are coaching regularly and provide their own feedback and insight to the team or when appropriate, even individuals. By getting involved they can demonstrate just how important the sales coaching program is to the success of their sales team, and in doing so, boost engagement in the process.
6. Incentivize successful coaches
Along with executive buy-in, rewards and incentives are another good way to engage sales managers. While successful sales managers are incentivized when their team meets quota, how often are good sales coaches recognized or incentivized?
Consider adding in a coaching specific incentive to your KPIs for encouragement for those who learn how to coach well. When used as part of a structured coaching program, these six steps will ensure that you give your sales managers the knowledge, skills, and discipline to coach consistently.
Concluding thoughts
Ultimately, more than helping SDRs craft an email or hone their pitch, sales enablement training for a manager can help them coach their reps based on the competency model that was developed (or recruit the managers to help craft it). Part of the problem most companies face is not giving good guidance for managers on what to coach their teams on and ensuring all managers are consistently coaching their teams on an ongoing basis. While this can be tricky to implement initially, some organizations turn to Coaching Reports in the form of an Excel file, Word document or similar which although well-intentioned end up being a burden for the managers and makes it difficult for the enablement team when it comes time to compile information and glean insights from it.
Finally, technology here can help as well. With the ability to create electronic coaching forms that follow a competency profile and different online forms for different coaching situations you can ensure managers are all following the same guidance and the data collected can be analyzed and shared back with the managers to show them how their teams are doing in their expected competencies as well as guide the managers to where more coaching is needed.
The ultimate takeaway here is that it’s extremely important to treat your sales manager training differently from all others –making sure to tailor each program to the needs of your particular reps based on their experience, tenure, and skill level will help your managers’ coaching significantly both in the short and the long run.
It used to be that training and coaching were time-consuming and infrequent. As a result, less knowledge was retained, skill development was slow and behavioral change with minimal. Now, companies are getting great results by using gamification. Gamification is the application of the look and feel of games to engage people, motivate action, and promote learning.
According to Gartner’s Brian Burke, gamification has proven to be very successful in engaging people and motivating them to change behaviors, develop skills, or solve problems. If you’re wondering how to take advantage of this popular trend, here are some ways to leverage gamification in sales training and coaching programs at your organization.
Get them started with a familiar experience
Many people in today’s sales forces are Gen X and Y. They’ve been playing video games as they’ve grown up. This makes it easy to get them involved in learning when gamification is employed. Introduce the idea of simply getting through one learning module (or “level”) at a time before moving to the next. Rewards at the completion of the first level with points or digital badges reps can accumulate and display to coworkers. The sooner they see progress, the more motivated they’ll be to participate further.
Encourage competition
Although individual employees may be working toward individual goals, badges and points can be used to display levels of accomplishment. Post them on a dashboard or leaderboard that is accessible company-wide, office-wide or team-wide. This will register as a method of recognition too.
Identify SMEs or go-to resources
Gamification allows managers to identify who knows the most about a given topic, or who’s best at a particular skill, based on metrics. This helps identify team members who are becoming subject matter experts or excellent resources for others on the team. This may be used to facilitate rewards to officially acknowledge key accomplishments.
Motivate them to learn more skills
Rewards at the completion of one step or competency, inspire reps to move on to the next one. Elements of gamification incorporated in learning initiatives emphasize achievements and recognize them. People want to gain skills when they go through training but it’s better when others know about it.
Break learning into bite-sized segments
A complicated process, topic, or goal may seem insurmountable when approached through traditional training methods. Gamification can eliminate potential intimidation by breaking the subject down into small segments. This helps the rep focus on bite-sized amounts of information per lesson and makes complex learning more fun and engaging. Plus, as research has shown, small frequent sessions are more successful at facilitating the absorption and retention of knowledge or skills, than lengthy, infrequent ones.
Make deadlines fun
Work schedules are often packed with deadlines and activities. Gamification makes deadlines feel like fun. Instead of telling reps that they must have certain modules completed by a certain date, why not set up a competition around who can accumulate the most points by that date. You can still give them a due date and make it enjoyable in the process.
Gameplay
Incorporate short, engaging sessions that are timed or defined by the total number of questions. Quizzes that are converted into games at the end of modules, allow the measurement and reinforcement of knowledge while being engaging and entertaining. In fact, a study by the University of Colorado revealed that games improve knowledge and skill learning while increasing retention rates by 9%.
Scenario-based learning
Introduce new knowledge and skills in simulations of real-life scenarios followed by the participant recording themselves practicing using that same knowledge or skill. This allows coaches to provide timely feedback. These simulations make it easier for reps to apply what they learn without needing to adapt it to actual situations on the job. This method of gamification is not only practical but engages the team member immediately.
Capture and analyze data routinely
The data collected from all these games allows coaches to gain valuable insights. It facilitates the identification of individual coaching requirements and the provision of important feedback without the need to meet in an office. This way coaching easily fits into busy day-to-day schedules and progress continues.
Social elements
Including a news feed to share updates, recognize team members’ accomplishments, and more adds a social element to training and coaching. It promotes open communication between reps, allowing them to cheer each other on. This further increases program participation, engagement, and results.
Start to leverage gamification in sales training and coaching at your organization. These elements stimulate friendly competition, encourage a spirit of achievement, keep users engaged, and drive behavioral change. The game feels also motivates participants to continually advance, so you see ongoing growth and improvement. Now, isn’t that the result you’re seeking?
As a sales manager, you have a big impact on the success of each member of your team, and your team knows it.
Research has shown that 69% of salespeople who exceed quota rate their sales manager as ‘excellent’ or ‘above average’. While it’s great to be recognized, ultimate sales leaders don’t do it for the glory, they live to inspire their team to achieve greatness and know how to push all the right buttons to help them succeed.
While most good sales leaders have high-achieving teams, they have a lot more in common. Here are some of the sales leader traits that make the difference between being good and being an ultimate sales leader.
Lead for the long-term
No sales team is successful based on one deal. A good sales team requires a long-term and strategic approach and it’s up to their sales leader to provide the big picture. Great sales leaders develop a sales playbook with vision and makes sure there team follows it to achieve their end goal. The playbook looks at every aspect of the sales process, from prospecting to closing and communicates a clear plan on how they will achieve it.
While any manager can write a playbook, what separates great leaders is their ability to set the vision, communicate it and follow through. They don’t chop and change their mind or confuse their team. They communicate the plan clearly and make sure everyone understands what it means for them and for their customers. They also define clear development plans for their people and deliver on them.
After all, sales are only successful if the customer wins, and ultimate sales leaders know this and make sure the customer is front and center of their vision.
Be motivated by the end goal
Sales is a numbers game and the best sales leaders never allow their team to take their eye off the prize – achieving target. To achieve the sales leader may have to put themselves in a position where they absorb any noise, distractions, and negativity that may bring their team down. They’re good listeners and know how to remove roadblocks or just lend an ear when a salesperson needs to vent.
What sets an ultimate sales leader apart is their ability to know when to step in and fix something, and when to let it go. This requires good judgment and an understanding of what things can actually make a difference to sales results, and what are just irritations that are having minimal impact.
Hire the right people
Nothing wastes more time than hiring the wrong salesperson.That’s why good sales leaders take the time to recruit the right people and onboard them properly. There’s no time for bad recruits or sales reps that are struggling to ramp up in a high-achieving sales organization.
Hiring the right people is a skill. You can’t just look at someone’s CV and know they’re perfect for the job. It takes good judgment and instinct to know whether someone has the skill to build strong relationships and help customers find the right solution. Great sales leaders know how to spot someone who can close a deal or know when to fold and move on to better opportunities.
They can also identify potential where others may not notice. This means they don’t spend countless hours, weeks and months trying to get a salesperson to quota when they just don’t have the capability to make it. They can then devote their energies to other tasks that will make a difference when it comes to helping their salespeople achieve success.
Coach with passion
Salespeople are hungry to sell and have a thirst for anything that will help them do it better. Ultimate sales leaders not only know this, but they know how to tap into this desire and help their salespeople channel it. One of the best ways to improve how reps sell is to take them on a journey of discovery and learning about their profession through mentoring and coaching. In fact, dynamic coaching can improve win rates by up to 27.6%.
Structured coaching helps salespeople improve how they approach customers, manage their sales funnel and close deals. But to really make a difference, sales leaders need to customize their coaching programs to meet the individual needs of each sales rep. After all, different reps need different types of coaching. An astute sales leader will determine the best approach for the individual and adapt their coaching plan for it, whether it’s going out to sales calls with them or scenario-based coaching.
Ultimate sales leaders know that coaching is good for their team, but they also are passionate about it. They embrace the opportunity to tap into the needs of each rep and build a cadence for sales coaching. This allows ultimate sales leaders to build momentum and ensure their sales team grows and prospers.
Empower everyone through accountability
75% of high-performing sales managers hold their salespeople accountable for their quota, compared to 58% of underperforming managers. But it takes a lot more than tracking your sales reps quotas to make them accountable.
Great sales leaders strive to achieve consistency in all aspects of the sales team, from following process to the message that customers hear. They do this by empowering their team through data and process.
Research shows that 43% of high-performing sales managers have a sales process that’s closely monitored, strictly enforced, or automated, compared to 29% of underperforming sales managers.
The key to keeping a sales team accountable is in the data. They set transparent performance criteria and use this to monitor and assess their team. There are no surprises, but there’s also no room for ambiguity.
Ultimate sales leaders don’t focus on lagging reports, they’re driven by data that shows them what their reps are doing today and how they can improve tomorrow. This information can then be used to both improve and inspire reps by identifying knowledge and skill gaps before they become problems and rewarding achievements straight away.
Empowering and rewarding reps is important for accountability. It keeps high performers accountable for their achievements, gives them control over their own development, and puts a fire in the belly of the laggards who also want their peers to see their name in lights.
Listen and communicate with care
Last but certainly not least, a true leader cares about the welfare of their charges. They don’t want to take the glory for themselves, they want each individual to learn, improve and for them to succeed together. By demonstrating that they care about their team, ultimate sales leaders gain the respect and trust of their reps. This helps them open up and be honest about their concerns and fears. With this knowledge, sales leaders can then help their reps become even better at selling.
The reality is that ultimate sales leaders don’t spend their time sitting behind a desk and watching the sales come in. They’re part of the team and in the trenches with their salespeople. Whenever a shot is fired they’re there – leading the way and giving them the support they need to win each and every battle.
Coaching is at the top of everyone’s minds at the moment – for good reason. A good coach can help more salespeople achieve quota by up to 10% and when you combine training and coaching, sales productivity also increases.
With these results, it’s no surprise that everyone is jumping on the coaching bandwagon, but not all coaching impactful.
According to the International Coaching Federation, coaching is:
“An interactive process to help individuals and organizations develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results; improving other’s ability to set goals, take action, make better decisions and make full use of their natural strengths.”
Impactful coaching focuses on the needs of your reps and helps them improve how they approach different parts of the sales process or their customers. The results from impactful coaching go straight to your topline revenue.
Managers that are not impactful fail to move the needle on reps’ behavior and/or their performance. They just don’t have the skills required of a coach – perhaps they’re doing less coaching and more telling or controlling. Reps’ learn little from being told what they’re doing wrong, impactful coaching is a collaborative way to help them learn how to improve how they sell. Sometimes coaching is ineffective because managers just aren’t doing it properly — perhaps they’re just ticking a box or scoring their team more favorably in coaching exercises due to bias or even apathy.
It is possible to turn ineffective coaches into impactful ones, but in order to do that, you need to identify who is actually ineffective. Every sales manager is different, and short of watching every coaching session, it can be difficult to objectively know whether they’re making a difference to their reps’ performance. To do this you require data – but not just any data – the right data.
Identifying whether sales coaches are ineffective or impactful
The Sales Capability Index™ (SCI) is an index that has been developed by Mindtickle, which provides a capabilities score that, for the first time in the industry, provides a holistic, quantified assessment of sales rep and team readiness while also producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.
Essentially, the SCI provides a holistic, quantified assessment of individual sales reps and a manager’s entire team’s sales readiness. This is then linked to their performance, producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.
The SCI combines not only coaching but also knowledge and skill, so you can see what’s really impacting performance and what’s not. For example, if you’ve just launched a new product, coaching program, competitor series or other sales enablement initiatives to your sales team, you can see what elements have had an impact and by looking at scores before and after.
The score gives you a high level of conviction about how prepared your sales teams are and identify what initiatives are making an impact and what aren’t. It will also give you an indication of whether coaching (or other initiatives) are likely to impact your sales results so you can predict revenue more accurately.
As the data can be broken down by individual and by team, you can also see whether individual sales managers are coaching effectively – are they making a difference to the sales outcomes or not. This brings issues with sales manager’s coaching abilities to the surface, so they can be addressed long before the quarter or year is lost.
Coaching is only effective if it drives a business outcome. There is no point having your management team spend hours each week coaching reps if your top line revenue doesn’t grow. By using this data, coaching can be directly linked to real outcomes.
The same data can be used for most sales enablement initiatives. So if you launch a new product you can also look at the curriculum that was delivered to reps and assess whether it’s helped them sell or not. This helps you measure your enablement initiatives and identify where they need to be adjusted to make a real impact on your sales teams.
Coaching needs to have specific criteria for maximum effectiveness
In order to be effective, sales managers also need to know what to coach. No rep needs to be developed in every aspect of the sales process, but trying to find what they need help with isn’t always clear-cut.
By breaking down down the entire sales process and connecting each step with the enablement data that you have, you can look at sales competencies across each stage. This shows you exactly where a rep or a sales manager may need help.
The chart below gives you an example that shows you a rep that is able to explore opportunities and manage objections well, but perhaps needs help upselling and in call scheduling. The data pinpoints exactly where opportunities fail and evaluates qualitatively and quantitatively what competencies are needed at that specific stage.
This level of granularity allows managers to do tactical coaching and allows you to identify whether sales managers have skewed competencies. It gets to the heart of the issue and allows you to hone in on what needs to be done.
When looking at your sales team as a whole, it means you can identify if there is consistency across how teams are coached or if managers are perhaps playing to their strengths to the detriment of their team’s performance.
This kind of data has the potential to be a game changer. It can help identify bias in coaching performance and gives you the opportunity to address it objectively.
Empowering end users
A final way to improve impactful coaching across your sales teams is to give users the ability to approve or disapprove coaching feedback. Rather than just letting the sales managers have a say about how a coaching session went, let the reps tell you if they felt the session made a difference to them. This data can also be telling, because if your reps don’t feel like they’re benefitting from their coaching sessions, then it may be symptomatic of a broader problem – either with your coaching program or with individual coaches.
We all have so many tools in our sales stack, each providing an array of data. While it’s nice to have these numbers at our fingertips, they’re irrelevant if they can’t tell you how to improve your sales outcomes. After all, who has time to look through every data point available to them and work out what they’re saying.
For the Year of the Coach to make a real difference to your sales outcomes, you need to ensure that you have access to data that clearly and succinctly helps you link your coaching plans to your sales outcomes like the SCI does.
As a sales manager, one of your many challenges is continuously developing different sales reps. The needs of reps who are relatively new to the job are very different to that of seasoned reps, as is their attitude to development. While your newbies may be thirsty for knowledge and ideas, it can be harder to bring a veteran salesperson along on the ride with you. And while an experienced rep may hit the ground running, but they may not be able to sustain improvement in their sales results over time unless they overcome their reluctance to change.
In the past, it may have been alright to leave veterans to their own devices, but now the velocity of change in products, consumer buying behaviors and industry dynamics are just too quick to leave development in reps’ own hands. Your rookies and mavens must both be constantly on the ball. To achieve this they must be open to learning, developing and changing their behavior. There are several things that you can do to help bridge the training gap between your mavens and rookies.
Understand who you’re working with
Before you can determine how to approach your reps, it’s essential to understand where they are on the development curve. While years of experience may be an indicator of expertize, it isn’t necessarily the best one.
The best way to tell a pro salesperson from a novice is through observation. Experienced reps know how to get under the skin of a customer’s problem and present them with solutions that best address their needs. They can create a strategy even for the most complex of sales processes, that will see them through preparing for customer meetings to the demonstration of closing the sale. At each stage in the process, a seasoned rep will know how to adjust their game plan, question the customer in more depth, envisage the result and nurture the opportunity to completion. This takes vision, preparation, and skill.
In comparison, a rookie may be uncertain or less organized in their approach. Their lack of experience may see them missing crucial opportunities to uncover customer pain points or suggest appropriate solutions. While newbies may be good at following a sales process, that doesn’t mean they can see the end point and adjust to new circumstances as they arise. Following a process is simple, preparing and reacting to the unknown takes experience.
As you observe your reps, note areas where they have skill gaps that require development. This will then form part of their development plan.
Tailor development plans to meet the needs of your reps
Once you know who you’re dealing with you can start putting together a development plan for them. The key to helping both mavens and rookies get to where you need them to be is to tailor development to meet their needs.
While your standard onboarding process may go through the basics of selling, this may bore and potentially make your seasoned reps tune out. As soon as someone tunes out of your training program it’s very hard to regain their attention, even if something is relevant to them later down the track. That’s why it’s important to tailor development and training from the get-go, starting with your onboarding program.
Newbies will need to cover everything, from your sales process to who everyone in the sales process is. But your new seasoned reps may already know the basics of selling so focus on showing them your points of difference. Highlight the aspects of your sales process that are unique to your business, provide them with training on how to use the tools in your stack that they’ve never seen before and of course focus in on the nitty-gritty of your product. Even if they’ve worked in the industry before, your product is unique and every new sales rep will need to learn the finer points of your solution to sell effectively.
A good place to start developing an ongoing individual training and coaching plan is the skill gaps you identified when you observed your reps in practice. Regardless of whether your reps are new to sales or have been selling for decades, it’s best to customize training to meet their individual needs. If your newbies need more help articulating your value proposition then focus on role plays to coach them. Whereas your seasoned reps may need more help moving prospects through the sales pipeline, so focus in on techniques like gathering case studies and success stories to help them get prospects closer to closing.
A common technique to support new hires is to provide them with a mentor. While this may be a great idea for a rookie, because they can learn from a more experienced rep, a maven may find it a tad condescending. Rather than giving them a mentor, offer your seasoned reps the opportunity to meet with the A players on your team and hear their thoughts on the business. They can then connect with peers on the same level.
Show benefits and gain buy-in
Any adult who is being trained needs to understand what’s in it for them before they will embrace change. Relatively new sales reps may be a little more open to training because they understand how they will benefit – if they’ve never done something before they know they have a lot to learn. But it’s important to still show them the benefits of what they’re learning.
For seasoned reps, it’s no different, they need to know what the benefits to them will be, and this may be harder to show them. But if you want them to accept your coaching then they need to understand how coaching them on using competitive insights will help them reach their quota.
One way to help someone overcome resistance to training is to understand why they’re reluctant to learn – perhaps they’ve done training sessions before and it didn’t help them. If that’s the case then you may need to understand what their past experiences were and how your proposed development plan is different.
Another way to bring people on board with your training program is to get their buy-in. This can be used for both rookies and mavens. Ask them what areas they would like to develop and how they believe it will benefit them. The training then becomes their idea, not yours, and will help them commit to it.
Make them accountable
There’s no point training anyone if you don’t clear expectations and defined goals. Everyone involved in the training should be held accountable for the outcomes, not just the reps. This creates a team environment – you’re all in it together – and makes it easier to have enforceable consequences if someone starts slipping into old habits. This approach works for everyone, seasoned reps, and newbies because everyone needs to know what they’re shooting for.
Where it may differ between the two groups of reps is in terms of how you monitor and enforce behaviors. Micro-managing isn’t all that effective for anyone, but a new rep may be more open to hand-holding through the training process than a pro rep. If they’ve never sold before then they may find it useful for you to break down their goals further – rather than just showing them their monthly quota show them what that means in terms of the number of calls, meetings, and demos.
It may be a lot more difficult to get your more experienced reps to put their new skills into practice. Even if you’ve shown them the benefits and gained their buy-in they may need more coaxing to truly see the value in the skills. If talking them through it doesn’t work, try showing them the value by giving them hard facts. Measure the difference in their performance before and after they use the skills to demonstrate how it will impact their performance. This will not only demonstrate the value of the learning but may also encourage them to adopt the new skills faster.
If this still doesn’t work, make them accountable by putting in place hard consequences if they don’t put their new skills into practice. This shows them that you’re serious about behavioral change and lets them choose between playing ball or facing the music. It will soon become clear whether they’re committed to their own development or want to stay stuck in the past.
The reality is that no two sales reps are the same, so it makes sense to tailor training programs to meet their needs. Thanks to new sales readiness tools, it’s easier to create customized training paths and help reps, regardless of their experience levels, to learn new tricks.
As a manager, there is so much to do and never enough time. Research has found that sales managers spend just 32% of their time managing their team and only part of that is spent coaching.
To make the most of your time prioritization is key – and the top priority for any salesperson is their targets. So it follows that any task that helps your team reach its targets should be at the top of your list.
According to CSO Insights almost half of the businesses they studied left coaching up to sales managers. The same study found that quota attainment was only 53.4% when left up to managers, but this improved by over 10% when a dynamic approach to coaching was implemented and win rates increased by 27.9%. Coaching does make a significant difference in sales performance, so it’s imperative that you find time to do it.
So how do you find more time to coach when you’ve still got to do all this other work? Here are 6 ways that you can find more time in your week.
1. Look at what you’re reporting
We have access to so much data now that it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of metrics and reports. Take a look at the reports that you generate and review each week. How many actually give you or others information that can impact the performance of your sales team? If some of the reporting and analysis that you’re doing doesn’t have a direct link to meeting quotas, giving your reps more selling time or improving your ability to make decisions, then it may be time to stop doing it.
2. Give your meetings an overhaul
Meetings are a fact of life in any business, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be productive. Take an objective look at every regular meeting that you have scheduled in your diary and see if there are any that perhaps you don’t need to attend or can delegate. For those that are important and actually add some value to you or your team, consider whether they can be more efficient. Could you cut the meeting time in half with a clear agenda or pre-reading?
3. Control technology don’t let it control you
Many of us are slaves to technology. Every time we hear a ping we have to drop what we’re doing and check our email or pick up our phone. The reality is that most things aren’t urgent or don’t require our immediate attention but they are very distracting. Take back control of your time by turning off your phone or WiFi for blocks of time so you can concentrate on specific tasks. Alternatively, you could allocate a couple of times a day to check your emails and messages rather than having a look every time something new is in your inbox.
If your inbox is becoming quite overwhelming you can also use tools or apps to manage your messages. Color code your messages and move them to different mailboxes so that you can then look at them when you need to.
4. Use your calendar to your advantage
Do you schedule regular one-on-one’s with your team? Even if you manage a remote team, you can book in regular calls with each of your team members. This means your coaching sessions will be planned and become part of your daily or weekly routine. By having the time scheduled you also demonstrate to your team how important coaching is to you. A good tip is to set up coaching sessions first thing in the morning before you and your reps become distracted with other things.
Customer visits are another important task that you can schedule in each week. This not only ensures you get out and meet customers regularly but also gives you the opportunity to observe your sales reps in action so that you can give them immediate coaching and feedback.
5. Say no
Just because someone asks you to do something doesn’t mean that you have to do it. While saying “no” doesn’t come naturally to many people, it’s important to say it sometimes, particularly when you’re asked to do something that doesn’t add value or isn’t important. Otherwis, you may risk becoming overwhelmed by a growing to-do list that isn’t helping your team sell more.
6. Set achievable goals
Write to-do lists and actually set small goals to work through it. Perhaps allocate one crucial task that’s a priority each week. This means you can slowly chip away at your to-do list and actually get some of the most important tasks done slowly but surely.
If it helps you can use tools that list tasks, prioritize them for you or allocate them to days or weeks. Tools like Asana or Trello let you keep track of things that you want to do and allocate them into the future.
By following some or all of these tips you can take control over your to-do list and calendar and create time to coach your team. As coaching becomes an integral part of your schedule, you will also start to see a difference in the performance of your team.
Being a sales manager today is less about managing and more about developing, inspiring and growing the skills of your team. This is not easy and can leave a lot of sales managers chasing their tails trying to work out how to improve the performance of their team.
Some focus in on performance appraisals, which means that they’re only checking in on their reps’ performance once or twice a year. That isn’t often enough to build cadence or really help improve how they sell. Others use intimidation tactics or micro-manage which can leave their team feeling discouraged and uninspired.
While training is a useful way to teach new skills, it takes more than a training session or two to make sure it sticks. One of the most effective ways to reinforce, amplify and increase adoption of training is through coaching – in fact, CSO Insights found that implementing a formal or dynamic coaching process can help more salespeople achieve quota by up to 10%. The same research found that informal or ad hoc coaching didn’t achieve the same results.
No great sports person gets to be a world champion without a good coach by the side day-in-day-out, so why do you expect your salespeople to tough it out on their own? The answer may lie in the fact that coaching is hard, and it’s human nature to avoid doing the things that are really difficult. But coaching doesn’t just benefit your reps, it also benefits you which is an added incentive to put in place a formal coaching regime.
Coaching improves your skills
Being able to coach well is a skill that’s in high demand. By increasing your skill base you become more attractive to other employers both within and outside your company. This has the potential to open up new and exciting opportunities to develop yourself or possibly take on a more senior role. If you’ve got your eye on another role in the not so distant future, consider whether learning to coach effectively may help you get there.
Coaching also improves your skills as a manager. Coaching regularly gives you the cadence and insight to identify issues that may be impacting the performance of your team members. Rather than waiting for the annual performance review, you can nip them in the bud and then move onto the next issue. It can also help you put together a succession plan, thanks to the wealth of information that you learn about the strengths of each of your team members.
A flow on effect of developing your team is that they are likely to feel more valued and inspired. Feedback helps people know where and how to improve themselves, giving them a feeling of control over their own destiny and increases their trust in you.
This, in turn, has the potential to improve your retention rates. As you’re aware, recruiting new people is a costly and lengthy process, by improving retention you can improve the efficiency of running your team.
Last but not least, coaching will improve the results for your team, as the research from CSO Insights has found, and improve their productivity. While this won’t happen overnight, as it builds over time your team may meet or even exceed their performance objectives – a benefit that will directly be reflected in your own performance objectives.
So what does coaching really require?
There are several things that you can do that will help you be a good coach.
The most important is to focus on what your people need. This doesn’t mean just looking at what they need to develop but also understanding what they want to develop in themselves. One of the biggest ways to motivate someone to learn and adopt new skills is to do something that they want to do. The key is to set goals so that you can review their progress objectively together.
To build trust it’s important to be mindful, patient and truly listens. There’s no point trying to coach with one eye on your emails and the other on your watch. Show your team members how important their development is to you by giving them your full attention and allowing them to talk and work through an issue with your guidance.
Creating a safe environment is also important to build trust. No one will open up to a coach unless they feel secure, supported and know what they say is confidential. This includes following through on development opportunities or requests. Don’t leave it up them to ask you again – support them and give them the space to develop.
Another element of building trust is to keep your judgment at the door. If your people are worried about being critiqued, they’re less likely to open up and be willing to change. Let them vent their frustrations and work in different ways to find a solution that works for them. While not everyone can perfect everything, a good coach can identify the diamond in the rough and find a way to polish it.
One of the most valuable things a good coach can give is their strategic oversight. It’s difficult for an individual to step back and see how all the different moving parts work together, but a coach can help the individual pull everything together in a cohesive way. This gives them new insights that they can potentially use across different elements of their role. While coaching is about the individual, it’s really a partnership between you and your team member. Together you can both learn new skills and develop yourselves. If you approach coaching with this perspective in mind, it gives you more incentive to coach more often and to get better at it as well.
It’s a common misconception that management and leadership are the same things but they’re not. Managing involves dealing with or controlling things – for a sales manager this could be anything from fighting fires to telling reps what they should be doing.
Whereas leadership is about leading people and guiding them to achieve. Both require different skill sets and have vastly different results when it comes to teams. According to author Tom Peters:
“Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”
While sales managers need both management and leadership skills, many tend to manage more than they lead. After all, it’s easy to monitor and react to statistics, processes, and deadlines. But it’s much more challenging to inspire and develop a team to achieve by developing and executing a clear strategy. When a sales team is over-managed and under-led it can lead to several problems that may impact your sales results, team turnover and the overall culture of your sales organization.
Managing is not motivating
One of the biggest issues with managing people rather than leading them is that it can be demotivating. Very few people are inspired to succeed when they’re told that they’re not meeting quota. By focusing in on the numbers or process constantly, sales managers risk alienating and demotivating the majority of their team and make them feel unappreciated.
According to CSO Insights
20% of salespeople turnover each year
– that’s a significant investment walking out the door. They also found that sales managers only spend about 20% of their time actually helping sales reps sell, something that’s unlikely to be a coincidence. Reps that feel supported are more likely to feel motivated and willing to stay. In fact,
87% of millennials and 69% of other employees
say that development opportunities are important to them in a role. That’s one area where leadership is particularly important.
Directing traffic serves a purpose but it’s far more exciting to take your team on a journey to get them to where they need to be. Rather than focusing in on what someone is doing, strong leadership can help guide salespeople on how they can improve and set a clear path to help them achieve it. This is particularly important in this day and age where buyers are well-informed and savvy. They require salespeople who are well-informed and adaptable, and reps need strong leadership to learn these skills.
Leadership is liberating
Sales teams that are truly led are liberated and unconstrained. They’re given wings to do their job well, rather than being bogged down in red tape and control. This doesn’t mean that leadership equates to anarchy, far from it. But a good leader knows how to influence behavior. They will help their team find a way through the necessary elements of their role so that they can focus on what’s really important – selling better and closing deals.
The numbers are of course important, but a good leader knows which numbers to focus on and how to use them to influence their team. That final step is what makes the difference between a manager and a leader. Numbers and processes are good, but ultimately they are just a tool to inform decisions. If you want a salesperson to perform their best, then you need to look at all the aspects of their role. The numbers can inform this, but they will rarely tell the whole story.
Bain & Co has conducted detailed research
over several years about what makes a leader. Their research has identified leadership attributes that focus in on the human aspects of performance and grouped them into four key areas:
Leadership is less about monitoring and more about creating an environment where people can thrive. This involves building trust, encouraging people to learn and inspiring them to achieve. It’s about building a sales culture that reaps dividends long into the future.
How to shift the balance from managing to leading
There are several things that you can do to focus on leading over managing. One of the most important is to set a strategy and be clear about its goals. It should set the stage for what they need to achieve and how they will go about doing this. This can then be constantly reiterated through communications, coaching sessions, rewards and KPIs. This gives them clarity and also creates a cadence for them to look forward, develop and strive for their goals.
By linking your team’s development, through training and coaching, they not only see that you’re investing in them but that there is a purpose to what they’re being asked to do. It is here where you can rely on management tools – track leading indicators to identify where to focus your energy. Use all the data available to identify the key areas of focus and inform coaching and training programs. While your reps don’t need to know the detail of the analysis, they should be able to see how the areas of focus link to the overall strategy.
Another important aspect of a sales manager’s role is to make it easier for their team to sell. Many sales roles inevitably come with a lot of non-selling tasks and there’s always room for improvement. This often provides a good opportunity for leaders to seek out feedback and suggestions from their team. By giving their team a forum to have their say, the can feel some ownership over the issues and feel like they are proactively involved in trying to address them.
The role of a sales manager certainly isn’t easy, but it can be far more effective by making a conscious effort to balance the need to manage with the importance of leading.
As a sales manager, one of your many challenges is continuously developing 
As a manager, there is so much to do and never enough time. Research has found that sales managers spend just 32% of their time managing their team and only part of that is spent coaching.
Being a sales manager today is less about managing and more about developing, inspiring and growing the skills of your team. This is not easy and can leave a lot of 
