Sales Coaching
There’s no greater impact on sales performance than the implementation of effective sales coaching. Salestrong help sales leaders and sales managers to improve their coaching performance as part of every sales transformation programme that we run. Without it, any improvements in sales performance will be temporary.
When we perform analysis of sales coaching, the sales leaders all claim to be coaching their sales people and coaching them to a high standard. But when we measure this through sales coaching observations, we find two things:
1) most sales people are lucky to receive one coaching session per month – this is typically less than sales leaders claim and less than their employers want.
2) when we measure the competencies of the sales people, we see an over optimistic appraisal of the situation from the sales leaders.
What is Sales Coaching?
With clear differences of opinion on how much sales coaching is actually happening, it helps to get sales leaders to agree on what exactly sales coaching is. For this we defer to Max Lansberg in the ‘The Tao of Coaching’
“Coaching aims to enhance the performance and learning ability of others. It involves giving feedback, but it also includes other techniques such as motivation and effective questioning. And for a manager-coach it includes recognizing the coachee’s readiness to undertake a particular task, in terms of both their will and skill. Overall, the coach is aiming for the coachee to help her or himself. And it is a dynamic interaction – it does not rely on a one-way flow of telling or instruction.”
This last sentence is the clue as to why there is a volume gap perception for sales managers when it comes to sales coaching. Sales coaching ‘does not rely on a one-way flow of telling or instruction.’ And that is what is happening in many of the sales manager interactions with their teams. The sales managers are telling or instructing instead of sales coaching.
When we drill down into this, the standard feedback from the sales managers is that they ‘do not have the time to coach.’ This may or may not be true. But experience tells us that when someone says that they do not have time to do something, what they are actually saying is that they see no value in it. After we have agreed with them on what sales coaching actually is, we then set about helping them to see the value that sales coaching can bring to their sales teams.
The Benefits of Sales Coaching
Here’s some sales coaching statistics we use to win them over:
1.Sales Executive Council research with 2,000 salespeople showed salespeople who receive three hours or more of coaching a month, on average, achieve 107% of quota, compared with 82% who don’t.
2.According to the Corporate Executive Board, a leading research and advisory services company, effective sales coaching can potentially increase top-line revenue by up to 20%.
3.According to the Corporate Executive Board, companies that integrate sales training, sales coaching and real- world experience (i.e. experiential learning) have seen a four-fold increase in productivity. Furthermore, as a result of coaching, the ‘Return on Investment’ in sales goes up 27%.
4. According to Gallup where sales coaching improves customer loyalty by 56%.
One of the biggest impacts we look for from sales coaching is in the area of discretionary energy. Discretionary energy is the energy a sales person uses when going above and beyond the call of duty to complete a task or get the job done. Every sales person has discretionary energy and the question is are they using that for or against you?
Discretionary energy is particularly important with sales people because sales people typically have more of it than other types of employees. Sales people have a lot of autonomy and this is where the use of discretionary energy is key.
How to Improve Sales Coaching
Implementing a sales coaching methodology is key to scalable success across organisations. Then making sure that the methodology suits the world of the sales managers. Typically sales managers need something that can be used in both planned and unplanned sales coaching opportunities. Once the methodology has been introduced there should be a focus on associated sales coaching skills such as active listening, asking great questions, building trust and rapport, giving feedback and holding people accountable. For this complete sales coaching skill set, Salestrong have developed the ‘Coach’ sales coaching framework.
