How to tackle sales readiness for new product launches
How to get the buy-in from your leadership
Tips to get your own sales enablement budget
Which metrics and KPI’s sales enablement managers should track
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“I’ve been actually practicing the sales enablement role for many years. In fact, so many years that I believe I was here before the term sales enablement emerged,” mentions Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Leader, and Practitioner. She has worked in Sales Enablement for more than a decade, working with companies such as Symantec, Rapid7. She is also currently the President of Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.
Working with multiple technology firms she has established sales enablement teams from scratch. With this experience under her belt, Guardia has a lot of experience to share with new sales enablement leaders and management on where to start with sales enablement. More importantly, she also has some great advice on how to get the budget approved for your enablement initiatives.
“To be successful as a sales enabler, you need to think about how can you run this mini-business inside your company successfully,” says Guardia.
“We measure a lot of different things, but are we measuring the right things? More than often you’ll find that sales enablement people are measuring indicators with a bias to training. They are measuring a number of people who are trained, the number of hours consumed in training, and the smile sheets. Is that really telling you the success of the sales enabler, enablement team? Probably not,” says Guardia offering some great advice to new sales enablement leaders.
Furthermore, Guardia enumerates important KPI’s and metrics that sales enablement managers should start tracking. Continuing on from the last podcast, where Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, in this podcast, she takes this her advice a step further advising sales enablers on the nitty-gritty of their role.
Listen now, as Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, regardless of their size.
In this 16-minute interview Guardia outlines:
How to coach your frontline managers effectively
Ways to enable your sales leadership
Tips to deal with managers who are reluctant to coach
Best practices for sales enablement and coaching
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“If you just take your reps and you say,
’Hey congratulations! Tomorrow you are a manager, and we don’t provide any support or guidance about how best to do that, or stick with them throughout their journey to becoming the best manager they can be.’
t
hen that’s just wishful thinking, and it is not going to help the selling organization,” states Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Practitioner and Leader, who is also P
resident of the Boston Chapter
of the Sales Enablement Society.
According to Guardia, “Sales enablement is really about ensuring that the selling organization and the partner community is prepared to do their job. That preparation comes in the form of skills, knowledge, systems, tools, and processes that focus on sales efficiencies and overall improvement of their sales effectiveness. In some cases, people call it an improvement to sales productivity.”
To ensure everyone contributing to sales effectiveness in an organization are on the same page, it’s crucial to enable the enablers.
Many managers don’t know how to coach well. They may have been great sales reps, but just because they’ve been promoted into a management role doesn’t mean they’re equipped to perform it.
Whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a large enterprise you have one number to chase: revenue. While revenue is a good indicator of how your sales team has performed, it doesn’t really give you any idea how they’re performing right now, or whether you’re going to make your revenue number six months from now. Revenue doesn’t provide you with any insights into how your salespeople actually sell and gives you no way to control or change how they can create more revenue.
This leaves sales leaders open to massive risk. If you’re not sure how you’re making your number, it may take a lot more of your time to identify the right market trends, analyze your competition, understand falling sales behavior and adjust your sales coaching program. Being a sales leader is like being a jockey. While the racehorse is steaming full speed ahead, you need to be looking for potential threats and dangers in every direction.
Don’t get me wrong, revenue is still the most important indicator of success but it alone is not enough. In this digital age, the way people buy has changed, and we need to look at how we run sales differently in order to adapt. It’s no longer enough to rely solely on lagging indicators because your competitors and buyers will have moved on by the time you realize something’s not working.
Indicators that help you achieve predictable revenue will ensure that you always know what that figure will be each month, quarter, and year. To achieve predictable revenue you first need to understand how your salespeople actually sell, what works, and what doesn’t. To identify and track this it’s necessary to look at different indicators; efficiency and effectiveness indicators. Efficiency and effectiveness indicators can be tracked using sales readiness tools (like Mindtickle) and customer engagement tools (like Showpad and Seismic).
Indicators identify the path to predictable revenue
A leading indicator is one that can change before the final outcome is achieved, which means it can actually provide an indication of what the final outcome (ie. your revenue) will be. The metrics that are tracked are efficiency and effectiveness indicators. Traditionally companies have tracked mostly indicators of efficiency. But this is no longer sufficient because market dynamics are changing and it’s no longer enough to be efficient. Modern sales organizations also need to be effective to succeed.
Effectiveness is about ensuring your sales reps “get it”. They not only have the requisite knowledge of their products or services but their skills are developed enough to have meaningful customer interactions, consistently. They do this by measuring the individual activities that contribute to achieving your end goal.
Sales effectiveness indicators will help you achieve predictable revenue. These, in turn, drive your efficiency indicators and create the foundation that supports the achievement of your lagging indicators.
Productivity = efficiency x effectiveness
Measuring efficiency is relatively easy as so much work has been put towards this objective. It’s always the first line of defense when trying to improve productivity (ie. determining how to enable your reps to do more). There are several metrics that can be used to measure this, for example:
Number of calls/meetings held
Number of opportunities added to pipeline / CRM
Number of proposals/quotes submitted
% of leads converted to opportunities
% Opportunities converted to close
Average deal size per rep
Time from the pipeline to quota
% forecast achieved
Depending on your business objectives you might choose to measure the ones that are most relevant to you. But there’s only so much more your reps can do. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where optimizing efficiency actually produces fewer returns or even results in a decline in productivity.
That’s why measuring and managing sales effectiveness is crucial in improving your rep’s ability to meet their numbers. Some examples of effectiveness metrics are:
Product knowledge
Elevator pitch
Negotiation and challenger scores
Social selling skills
Competitive knowledge
Objection handling
Number of coaching sessions
Number of training certifications completed
These indicators have historically been challenging to measure, but Mindtickle’s sales readiness software now facilitates this. It enables these crucial indicators to be tracked and measured in a way that is transparent and objective. And more importantly, it has become easy to correlate the effectiveness of sales revenue.
So if you can track how effective and efficient your sales team is, you can achieve predictable revenue. If things are going off track, you’ll be alerted in advance, before it shows up on your top-line revenue. This gives you the opportunity to rectify it and avert disaster. So while your senior management is focused on the revenue number, sales leaders need to look to their efficiency and effective indicators to ensure they meet it.
Millennials are set to represent 75% of the global population by 2025. While they might be the youngest people in your business, they are by no means the most junior. Millennial managers and CEOs are now commonplace, the latter particularly in startups and technology. It’s well established that Gen X and Baby Boomer’s value career development and job satisfaction.
Similarly, millennials have distinct behaviors and work preferences, which is why they need specific training and coaching to help them perform better on the field.
To develop a coaching program that addresses the unique preferences of millennials, it’s important to understand how their behavior differs from other generations. This then impacts how to coach them, and even their propensity to be coached.
We’ve identified seven imperatives to take into account when structuring a coaching program for your millennial salespeople.
Let’s dive deeper into each of these and outline how they impact your sales coaching program.
Tie coaching to technology
By far the most distinguishing feature of millennials is the ease with which they understand and prefer to use technology. They’ll reject clunky antiquated systems in favor of convenient and intuitive technology. For millennials, being connected at all times is essential, in fact, 83% sleep with their smartphone by their bed.
While many millennials are comfortable socializing in person, they’re adept at using online mediums to enhance relationships and broaden their reach. So don’t be surprised if your millennial sales rep prefers to email customers rather than calling them.
How does this impact coaching?
Leveraging sales readiness technology is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s essential. Your millennial reps will demand that it be easy to use, accessible and helpful to perform their job. Without each of these factors, your reps may simply choose not to use your tools, and some may even find new ones to use. Keeping your millennial reps well-connected can pay dividends, in fact, our customers have found that 36% of their millennial reps choose to engage with information voluntarily outside of work hours.
Millennials preference to leverage technology may impact their ability to communicate with customers in other ways. This means they may require some back-to-basics coaching on how to develop relationships in person, from maintaining eye contact to opening a conversation. If some of your buyer personas are not millennials then this could also include coaching them on how to address generational preferences in customer conversations, and in particular when it’s appropriate to use technology and when it’s not. For example, baby boomer customers may prefer speaking to someone in person over email communication.
Keep content brief
Millennials are often depicted as having short attention spans when really they prefer consuming bite-sized information in short intervals. So when it comes to training, rather than sitting for hours in a classroom, your reps are more likely to consume bite-sized information. This addresses both a preference for crisp communication and accessing information on their mobile device.
Millennials are also expert multi-taskers, they’re often listening to podcasts while answering emails. Their proficiency in managing multiple tasks makes them experts at consuming information in different ways than previous generations.
How does this impact coaching?
Keep coaching sessions short but regular. Rather than conducting one-on-one coaching marathons just once in awhile, coach your reps regularly but in shorter intervals.
Engage them and not just manage them
Collaboration is one of the best ways to engage a millennial salesperson. They value learning from others and working as part of a team. They like to learn and solve problems by hearing success stories and working in teams. Millennials believe in sharing their wisdom and experiences as well, which provides a great opportunity for other teammates to learn from them.
Another way to engage them is by using gamification to encourage some healthy competition. In fact, 79% of learners believe their learning is more productive when introduced in a gamified environment. As self-starters, don’t be surprised if your millennial salespeople demand access to data so that they can gauge their own performance and plug their own knowledge gaps.
How does this impact coaching?
Leverage success stories and other tools to help reps learn from their peers. Practically understanding how others have approached a problem and then practicing it in a role play may even be more effective than being verbally trained by their manager.
Make coaching a team effort by providing online collaboration tools that allow your “A players” and seasoned reps to share their experiences. This can be facilitated through a sales enablement platform so it doesn’t matter where your experts and reps are based. After all, millennials are comfortable conversing with people online, regardless of their location.
Gamify the experience wherever possible so that reps can compete against each other, and even themselves.
Be transparent with your data. By giving your reps access to their data you enable them to identify their own gaps and allow them to suggest areas they would like to be coached on. When reps buy into their own coaching plan they’ll put their heart and should into it refining their own knowledge and skills.
Ensure coaching is driven by their values
Millennials have grown up in an era where political correctness and social awareness is high. This permeates into their personal values, seeking out opportunities that add real value and have a social impact. They expect a lot from their life and their employers and like to see their work reflected in the bigger picture. They have opinions and aren’t afraid of expressing them, but are also open to hearing other perspectives and taking onboard feedback.
How does this impact coaching?
When coaching millennial sales reps be sure to explain the value in what you’re doing. They need to see where they are going and how it will make an impact on their performance and the broader business.
Take a values-driven approach by asking your reps what they value. This will help them incorporate this view into their feedback and long-term coaching plan.
Consider their expectations at all times
Millennials aren’t used to waiting for anything. They’ve always been able to access everything at the touch of a button, so don’t expect them to wait patiently for career progression either.
As self-starters, they’ll happily take responsibility for their own development if they know what to expect and how to achieve it.. In fact, research has found that people between 25 and 34 are more likely to express gratitude for “being satisfied with an existing job” then they are about “spending quality time with family and friends.” So harness their desire to enjoy their work and perform it well.
How does this impact coaching?
Rather than coaching a specific issue in isolation, use a structured approach to providing millennials with a clear roadmap for their development. This not only helps you structure a coaching program but also gives your reps transparency about what they need to achieve in order to progress.
Give them agility and freedom
Millennials have been quick to embrace, and in many instances have driven, the death of the standard workday. But just because your reps may not begin and end their working day in normal office hours doesn’t mean they don’t work just as hard. In fact, our customer data shows that 27% of millennial users access and engage with the Mindtickle platform between the hours of 8 pm and midnight, and 4% even access it on Sundays.
Other research indicates that millennials stress and worry about their work more than other age groups. But thankfully they are also driven to find ways to overcome these issues. The flexibility to work when it suits them can be challenging to manage, but it shouldn’t impact your ability to coach your millennial sales reps when they need it, whatever the time.
How does this impact coaching?
Leverage online coaching tools that are accessible whenever and wherever. This gives your reps the flexibility to manage their time as they please, and still receive feedback from you without having to be physically present for a one-on-one coaching session.
If you would like to have some oversight into your reps activities, sales readiness software like Mindtickle allows you to see when and how your reps are accessing coaching tools and content. This can even be used as an additional coaching point when this data is overlaid with sales information.
Leverage their willingness to receive feedback and recognition
The millennial generation was raised in an era where praise and reward are valued, so naturally, they value recognition in the workplace. But along with the need to be recognized is the understanding that feedback is part of the process. This makes them more open to giving and receiving feedback, and willing to apply it so that they can achieve further rewards. How does this impact coaching?
As coaching often provides immediate feedback it may be more readily embraced by your millennial reps. When the feedback gives them visibility into their own progress and is linked to things they value, your millennial reps are more likely to take on board coaching and use it to succeed quicker.
To make your feedback easier to digest, it’s important to ensure that it’s directly relevant to your reps performance. It’s also helpful to deliver it in bite-sized pieces, so that specific issues can be readily addressed.
By reviewing and tailoring your approach to coach, you’ll not only help your millennial reps become better salespeople but also ensure that you retain them.
It’s also worth noting, that just because many of these techniques are directed towards the behaviors and values of your millennial reps, it doesn’t mean that your entire multi-generational workforce won’t benefit from them. It may take some time for some of your staff to get used to technology, but these modern coaching methods improve engagement, foster collaboration and enable remote workers to have the same level of development as their head office counterparts. While some may long for the good old classroom days g and in-person feedback, most will appreciate the benefits and flexibility that technology provides them.
ey skills that a sales rep in the FMCG space should possess:
Different long and short-term initiatives that Dabur has implemented to achieve sales excellence;
How to leverage technology to overcome the challenges that field sales teams face; and
Key metrics to assess a sales rep’s growth and measure the outcome of your sales enablement program
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“Dabur is a large and diverse organization, so it became essential to have a standard onboarding system in place. To address this diversity we use an online tool. It has helped us introduce visibility into who the new hires are and whether they are trained on basic sales techniques that they need to know as part of the sales team at Dabur,” explains Chirag Singh, Sales Capability Development Manager at Dabur.
Dabur is a pioneer in the FMCG space, the world’s biggest ayurvedic and natural healthcare company, it has been in existence for 135 years. In this episode of the Sales Excellence Podcast, Singh explains how sales excellence is perceived in an FMCG business and how sales enablement initiatives are executed in a large organization like Dabur.
“
Like any other business, there are a lot of internal and external factors that affect sales performance. We decided to edify our reps’ process knowledge leading to increased process adherence, using an online platform has helped us achieve that. Process knowledge has gone up big time, leading to process awareness and adherence,
” claims Singh while talking about factors that impact sales excellence at Dabur.
Listen now to learn how a large and diverse organization like Dabur manages its sales organization and leverages technology to achieve sales excellence.
Coaching is often proffered but not performed. Being able to execute it right is one of the biggest challenges faced by sales organizations. Managers put it in the too hard basket leaving them, and their sales reps, behind the eight ball. Companies that understand the impact that coaching has on their sales managers invest more and see greater top-line revenue. In fact, they prioritize coaching with frontline managers spending up to
70% of their time coaching
and mentoring their reps. Some businesses even attributed an
increase
o
f
2
5
% in their win rates to their focus on coaching.
But don’t just take our word for it. Here are six quotes from successful sales coaches on the power of coaching.
“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” ~ Timothy Gallwey, Author
Coaching is not about telling someone what they should be doing, it is about helping them develop so that they get there on their own. Even the most self-aware rep might find it challenging to see how far they can go, that is where a good coach steps in.
“Big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details” ~ John Wooden, former basketball player and coach
While coaching will lead to transformative change in your reps, the devil is in the detail. Helping reps make small behavioral changes can actually have a huge impact on their performance in the short, as well as long-term.
“The most important thing in coaching is communication. It’s not what you say as much as what they absorb.” ~ Red Auerbach, former basketball coach
While giving feedback is one part of coaching, the coaching process as a whole has an important role to play. If your reps are coached in a structured manner where they have visibility of their progression path, the coaching is likely to have a greater impact and drive behavioral change than if they’re just given ad hoc feedback. This is also where coaching tools that enable role play and watching peers can help reps gather insights into their own behavior that they can use to improve their performance.
“What do you coach? You coach the gap. Build a bridge that takes your people from where they are today to where they want or need to be” ~ Keith Rosen, Author and CEO Profit Builders
Gap identification is the foundation of effective coaching. Having a structured process in place to identify gaps is crucial for coaching to commence. Once a comprehensive plan is designed to fill the gaps, reaching your target objectives will be relatively easy.
“When you’re coaching your sales reps, make sure your feedback is timely, consistent, objective, accurate, individualised and relevant.” ~ Barry Trailer, Research Principal CSO Insights
In order to be effective, coaching needs to be contextual. This helps reps understand how to put it into practice and be their best in their customer conversations. Unless you’re sitting next to your reps it’s impossible to provide feedback that meets each of these objectives all the time, but it can be achieved by leveraging sales enablement technology that enables structuring coaching.
“Everyone needs a coach” ~ Bill Gates, Founder and CEO Microsoft
Even when you’re at the top of your field, there is still scope to be better with effective coaching. Here’s what Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, have to say about corporate coaching
.
Don’t you think it’s time to take coaching seriously in your sales organization?
Sales training organizations have long struggled with how to achieve long-term behavioral change, and how to prove it. The research brief from Sirius Decisions explains how combining coaching with enhanced measurement can actually deliver the visibility and accountability you need.
Sales coaching is often left up to managers to execute as part of on-the-job training. This has resulted in sub-optimal results, particularly where managers are not equipped with the knowledge and tools to coach or where reps are left to develop bad habits. To help reps bridge the gap between on-the-job realities and the skills and processes they’re taught in formal training, coaching must be offered in two ways:
Traditional: This is often a one-on-one interaction between reps and their manager that helps to influence behavior through observation and feedback. In order to be successful this requires training, justification and situational application; and
Unassisted: As managers can’t be there all the time, it’s necessary to align training with the rest of your support structure so that reps can choose the right route to solving their issue on their own. This may include a blend of process or tools playbook or content marketing and competency models.
With training and coaching in place, the next step is to determine an appropriate and accurate way to measure the success of the activity. The Research Brief identifies several ways to achieve this, both from an objective service perspective and also by collecting specific feedback from both reps and managers.
By measuring the impact of training initiatives, coaching can then reinforce the activities more effectively and produce actual behavioral change that has a real impact on sales performance.
A copy of the Research Brief is now available for download Mindtickle.com.
The digital era has arrived and research has found it to be the route to the customer, not the balance sheet. That means the biggest asset a business can have is a foolproof process to engage and convert prospects into customers. But the route to the customer has also undergone considerable changes.
Customers now research your business and competitors at the click of a mouse, reading reviews and seeking out advice without ever leaving their desk. In fact, over 60% of a buyer’s journey is over before they even speak to a sales rep, and it’s estimated that by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship with businesses without talking to anyone. The phenomenon is so common now it’s even got a name, “webrooming.”
Businesses that don’t find new ways to engage and convert prospects will be left behind or disappear completely. In fact, according to Pierre Nanterm, CEO of Accenture digital is the main reason over half the companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since 2000.
For sales organizations, the challenge is set.
Sales reps who once relied on the hard sell can no longer bamboozle prospective customers with details about their product features, because the customer may know more than they do. And customers don’t want to hear your pitch anymore, they’ve already read it on your website. What they want is proof that your product or service can solve their problems, data that shows what a difference it can make and facts that prove it’s the best option for them.
While sales managers still need to deliver the same things, from recruitment through to training, coaching and performance management, how they do their job also needs to change with the times. Many managers still spend much of their time focused on their team’s lagging and efficiency indicators. A multitude of reports and meetings are dedicated to order reviews and pipeline management, but how often do sales managers review their sales rep’s effectiveness?
Who is beating their quota? What are they doing well that the other reps aren’t? What knowledge and skill gaps do their individual reps have? Are their reps following the correct process?
This type of behavioural analysis is the first step for managers to be able to codify their best sales practices and identify what individual reps need to achieve results. Traditionally one on one sales coaching has been left in the hands of sales managers, with no real tools or structure to help them make the most of their efforts. In the digital age of sales codifying behaviour is key to achieving predictable sales results. And as a sales manager, if you can predict your sales results you will be successful.
So if codifying behaviour through coaching is the key to success then the problem of selling in the digital age is solved, right? Not exactly.
Sales coaching is still very much the domain of the sales manager and not every manager is cut from the same cloth. Each sales manager has their ow distinctive style. Some mentor their charges to success while others get down and personal to help coach individual reps. Some are confident to the point that they inflict their own style on their reps, whilst others focus more on what’s happening around the business rather than on their team.
This creates a unique sales enablement problem. In order to equip sales reps with the information, tools, and skills they need to succeed in the digital age their managers first need to be enabled to coach them effectively. And as sales managers have their own style, they need to be enabled in a way that gives them the flexibility to add their own personal touch. This can be solved for by using a sales coaching framework that provides both structure and flexibility.
Working closely with our customers we’ve found that there are three main areas where coaching is most effective:
The amount of coaching that is required in each category will depend on your business, your product or service and the experience of your reps. For example, if you’re selling FMCG to mom and pop retail stores then execution discipline is likely to be more important than knowledge. Whereas sales skills are likely to be key if you’re selling a complex enterprise software platform.
In order to be effective your business first needs to identify how important each of these areas is and what weighting each should have in your coaching framework. This then forms the basis for a structured coaching framework that incorporates processes and tools that help sales managers identify what their reps need and how to coach them. The framework moves the focus of sales coaching from addressing a single incident in one meeting, to the overall success of your reps and their cumulative sales outcomes.
Following a sales coaching framework also helps identify the needs of individual reps. While a couple of good reps may have been able to lift an entire team in the past, this isn’t the case anymore. Traditionally sales managers have tended to focus in on the “tails” or their very best and very worst reps, while the majority are left to fend for themselves. Research has found that focusing sales
coaching efforts on the middle 60%
can improve performance by a greater amount than addressing the top and bottom 10%. But there are more people sitting in the middle 60%, which means the top sales coaches need to be enabled to coach everyone effectively.
A sales coaching framework also has the additional benefit of providing a structure that can be leveraged by the broader sales and leadership team. As sales enablement and capability teams become more involved in helping reps sell, they are also taking on some of the responsibility for coaching them. That doesn’t mean that sales managers will eventually have no role in coaching. To the contrary, their role will be able to be elevated to focus in on the more challenging and higher impact opportunities that will make their sales reps not just good but great.
Why decision coaching is important to your customers
What are the must-have components of a top-notch sales training program
How to coach your sales reps so that it sticks
The link between mindfulness and sales performance
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“The new problem customers are facing is that they have too many choices. And making decisions are difficult because they’re so distracted, everybody wants their attention instantly. Customers now really need somebody’s help to coach them through the decision process.”
And that’s where the modern salesperson can step in according to Jeffrey Lipsius, Author, and President of Selling To The Point. With over 30 years experience in training salespeople, Lipsius has seen how the sales game has changed in the digital age.
“The salesperson has to be the learner, not the teacher. So the salesperson has to be very customer aware. Because if you are customer aware then you’re going to be able to respond in a way that’s going to help the customer make better decisions. All this talk about salespeople getting customer buying resistance, handling objections and being difficult in prospecting, that all goes away if the customer believes that the salesperson is there to help them make a better decision.”
That’s why Lipsius believes that decision coaching is a very important tool for a salesperson add to their tool chest. “A salesperson really only has to pay attention to 3 factors in the customer’s decision process,” says Lipsius. Listen now
to find out Lipsius’ three C’s to the customer decision process.
Superheroes aren’t born, they’re made. Clarke Kent walked in the light of the yellow sun. Diana Prince was granted her Amazonian strength by the Greek Gods, and Peter Parker was bitten by an irradiated spider. But all of them had to learn how to channel their powers and hone their skills before they could fly or scale walls.
When it comes to sales one of the most potent superpowers a sales manager can have is the ability to coach effectively. But why do we still think sales managers should be able to coach without any training or practice? Just like any skill coaching is something that requires training and development. But before we get into the details on how to achieve that, let’s take a look at why sales coaching is so important to your organization.
Effective sales coaching changes topline revenue
CSO Insights
found that there is a direct relationship between the quality of coaching and the amount of reps who made quota.
That’s because coaching isn’t about auditing what your reps are (or aren’t) doing or a quick fix. It’s about helping them improve how they sell in both the short and long-term, making them better sales reps for life. This could be in terms of specific sales skills, from prospecting to closing, or how effective their negotiating techniques are to get more prospects over the line.
By improving the skills of your reps, coaching can also increase their engagement with their role and your business. This means you’re more likely to retain high performing people who perform even better thanks to coaching. As your reps improve how they sell, coaching can move onto more complex issues, giving your reps (and your managers) new sales challenges.
So how do you learn to leap tall buildings in a single bound?
Just like Superman, sales coaches need to learn how to walk before they jump. There are three indicators that sales managers should be aware of:
Lagging indicators: These show them whether their reps are meeting their numbers and include a lot of the traditional metrics like pipeline activity, wins, and losses. These metrics are commonly measured with most CRMs already doing this effectively.
Efficiency indicators: These provide an understanding of why sales reps are meeting or missing their numbers. This can include win rates, sales cycles, and their pipeline size. These are very critical for the success of your business. For example, in a CPG business, your efficiency indicators will consider how well your reps are getting their product placement. Whereas in Technology getting the discovery process right will be an important area to focus your efficiency indicators.
Effectiveness indicators: These metrics look at whether your reps actually “get it” and the behaviors that they are demonstrating that drive your lagging indicators. Managers need to proactively identify capability gaps and fix them. A streamlined process for managers to build capabilities in their team and make them more effective salespeople could be the difference between an average and best-in-class team.
Businesses who not only understand their efficiency and effectiveness indicators but are able to maximize their reps achievement of them will achieve success. In the past sales managers focussed all their efforts on lagging and efficiency indicators to enable their team. But businesses have changed, the way we make our products has changed and the speed at which the industry dynamics alter is radically different. To drive revenue in the new world order managers need to look at the effectiveness of each element of their indicators and identify their importance for sales success. By focussing in on effectiveness, managers can coach their reps better, drive revenue and increase sales productivity.
Find new ways to identify capability indicators
Just like sales managers get regular reporting on lagging indicators, they also need access to information on their teams’ efficiency and effectiveness indicators and their gaps.
One way to do this is to spend time identifying the key capabilities that lead to the success of your top 20%. Then enable your sales managers with information about what team members have gaps in these capabilities.
For reps who are losing deals against their competition, managers can benefit from information like:
Are they accessing competitor information before a customer meeting?
Is their messaging tailored for each customer?
What behaviors are they demonstrating that is helping them move down the buying process and close more deals?
A sales enablement platform like Mindtickle can help identify some of these behaviors along with personal observation.
So what are we waiting for?
Before you start telling your sales managers to get out and coach, you have to help them learn to leap that tall building in a single bound. This is an important step that many businesses struggle with. In fact,
the Harvard Business Review
found that only 12% of international business leaders believed they had invested sufficiently in the development of their frontline managers. That means that 88% of sales managers are trying to coach their team blind.
But this isn’t just about teaching sales managers to coach, it’s about empowering them so they can coach. Sales managers in many organizations are weighed down by a plethora of tasks that don’t necessarily help them contribute to revenue or develop their team.
McKinsey found
that frontline managers spend between 30 and 60% of their time doing administrative tasks or sitting in meetings. A further 10 to 50% of their time is spent doing non-managerial tasks like traveling, special projects or actually selling themselves. This means that only 10 to 40% of their time is spent actually managing, and only a portion of this is spent coaching.
One of the quickest ways to give sales managers more time to coach is to take away the administrative tasks that are not adding any value or revenue. Whether it’s automating sales reporting or leveraging technology to reduce travel time, there are many ways to enable sales managers to perform these tasks more efficiently or remove them completely.
It’s essential to ensure that your managers are making the most of the extra time available to them. The first step is to make sure they have
the basics in place
.
Also, HBR found that 40%
of international business leaders believed that their frontline managers didn’t have sufficient leadership development, tools or training. Companies with the best sales training programs look at their existing learning programs and identify what gaps there are in sales leadership training so they can start working on the basics.
Joanne Wells of Halogen Software
suggests looking at what your sales leaders know about your business and its goals. By understanding your broader business objectives leaders are better placed to hone in on what’s most important for their sales reps to learn.
Learning is cultural
Holding knee-jerk training sessions that exist in isolation rarely achieve the desired results. So if learning and coaching are to be integral parts of your organization then they must become part of your culture. This means from the top down learning is valued, supported and encouraged.
The first step
is building the basics for your managers by clarifying responsibilities in job descriptions, performance appraisals, and broader communications, so it’s clear that this is an organization-wide initiative.
Then you can create an environment where there is a regular cadence for learning and coaching. An easy place to start is by looking at your best managers and identifying what they’re doing well. There’s no need to recreate the wheel, replicate what works.
Everyone has to start somewhere, and today there are so many tools available that can be used to help your organization build its culture of learning. Think about this way, if managers are given a structured and effective way to coach their reps regularly they’re more likely to use it, right? But if you have to take everyone out of the field for a week, there’s little incentive for anyone to get involved. That’s why super sales training has to fit into the way your sales team works, rather than the other way around.
The key to making the most of a sales manager’s time is to recognize that the managers don’t have to do it all. If learning and coaching are a part of your organization’s culture, then subject matter experts in Product Marketing or Sales Enablement can take on the role of coaching reps in some areas. After all sales
coaching is a team effort
. Sales Enablement and Product Marketing can take on key roles as subject matter experts, coaching reps on knowledge and messaging, like how to pitch that new product feature for example. This frees sales managers up further to focus on where they can add the most value like improving sales skills in a deal by deal coaching and on the finer aspects of process and execution.
This effectively elevates the role of the sales manager so they can focus on the more complex deals and performance issues, optimizing their time and skills. The more managers coach, the more they learn what works and what doesn’t, developing and strengthening their superpowers.
Millennials are set to represent 75% of the global population by 2025. While they might be the youngest people in your business, they are by no means the most junior. Millennial managers and CEOs are now commonplace, the latter particularly in startups and technology. It’s well established that Gen X and Baby Boomer’s value career development and job satisfaction.
Superheroes aren’t born, they’re made. Clarke Kent walked in the light of the yellow sun. Diana Prince was granted her Amazonian strength by the Greek Gods, and Peter Parker was bitten by an irradiated spider. But all of them had to learn how to channel their powers and hone their skills before they could fly or scale walls.
