How much does one-on-one sales manager coaching matter when it comes to sales force performance? A lot, according to new research from Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Management Association. In fact, companies that spend at least three hours per month managing each rep’s sales pipeline through coaching show 11 percent greater revenue growth than those that spend fewer than three hours per month, based on a survey of 62 business-to-business (B2B) companies, 39 percent with revenue greater than $1 billion and 37 percent with revenue greater than $250 million.
But not just any pipeline management coaching session will do. If you want them to have a positive impact on sales force performance, the coaching sessions must be true coaching sessions and not “data scrubbing” meetings. Below are three best practices for creating winning pipeline management coaching sessions that drive sales force performance.
1. Conduct early-stage opportunity reviews. Even though it’s tempting to only address the deals about to close, it’s important to spend time on deals early in the selling process as well. Why? It’s a chance to get bad deals out of the pipeline early so reps don’t waste their time. Sales managers can play a significant role in directing sellers away from undesirable deals, while coaching them on strategies to purse the opportunities that align with the company’s go-to-market strategy, if they start early in the process.
Too many sales managers wait until a deal is in the final stages of the pipeline to get involved. By this time, most of the important decisions, such as whether or not the deal is even worth pursuing, have already been made. However, by establishing early-stage opportunity reviews, sales managers can help sellers make critical decisions early in the process that will prevent unqualified deals from entering the pipeline in the first place.
2. Make a distinction between coaching and forecasting. Many sales managers believe they are spending a lot of time coaching when in reality they’re spending a lot of time creating forecasts. If your pipeline management coaching discussions revolve around close dates, probabilities, and deal sizes, then you are forecasting. Period. If, however, you spend your time discussing the overall health of your sellers’ pipelines and how they can shepherd more deals to successful closure, then you are coaching your sellers to manage the pipeline in a productive way.
The primary focus of a pipeline meeting should be to help reps develop a game plan to move deals forward, not just scrubbing CRM data and forecasting revenue. Overall, a good pipeline management coaching session is more forward than backward looking. Strive to influence live deals today rather than merely documenting their outcomes later. While accurate data is important, more time should be allotted to coaching reps through deals rather than cleaning up numbers.
3. Spend more time on fewer deals. The natural inclination of sales managers is often to discuss the entire pipeline during each coaching meeting, but it can be more effective to do a deep drive into a handful of specific, live opportunities to increase a seller’s likelihood of winning desirable deals.
Find out who the competition is, who the buyers are in the organization, what the rep’s approach is, and so on. With this information in hand, you can guide (and possibly change) the trajectory of a deal if it’s at risk of going awry, as well as address emerging problems before they derail a deal.
But a deep dive into individual deals should not be the end of the coaching session. The session should also include coaching at a more tactical level – planning the next sales call. The discussion should include planning the very next interaction that the salesperson will have with the prospect. When coaching includes tactical next steps, more opportunities glide through the pipeline and result in wins.
In order to squeeze in a little coaching, it is tempting to “coach in the moment” but, as research shows, investing at least three hours a month in intentional pipeline coaching with each rep can have a significant impact on sales force performance. After all, what company couldn’t use an 11 percent increase in revenue generation?
Jason Jordan is a founding partner of Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm, and co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code. Michelle Vazzana is a partner at Vantage Point Performance and Jordan’s co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code.
