Enablement teams and managers alike know how effective sales coaching can be at boosting quota attainment, improving manager and seller relationships, and building the key skills reps need to succeed. In fact, eight out of 10 teams that have effective coaching practices hit greater than 75% of sales quotas. Still, a significant number of barriers exist that stand in the way of effective coaching. They include technology, lack of formal coaching processes, and management training (i.e., “coaching the coach”). Most notably, simply finding time to consistently coach is challenging, as managers must balance it with a multitude of other critical daily tasks.
As a result, quota attainment suffers, and managers are left wondering how to pivot and change seller behavior after the quarter ends and it’s too late. Overcoming these barriers and coaching sellers on leading indicators can be done when coaching is built into the culture of a sales organization. Here are five tips to set that in motion.
Tip 1: Get Leadership Buy-in
Make sure leadership, including sales and enablement leaders all the way up to the executive level, buys into the importance of coaching. Coaching typically falls squarely on the shoulders of frontline managers, but they can’t do it alone. While they’ll ultimately be the ones delivering the coaching, it’s important that leadership continually reinforces that coaching is a priority. This means giving frontline managers the tools and time to do it on a regular basis. Reinforcing coaching as a priority may also mean including it as part of the compensation structure.
Tip 2: Formalize your approach to coaching
Coaching is often done ad hoc. Managers are meeting with their reps, but the coaching is not documented or formalized, resulting in no real way to quantify the outcomes of these sessions. But creating a framework that formalizes how to coach and when it should occur sets clear expectations and serves as a concrete guide for a coaching cadence. Clear expectations on coaching help your frontline managers understand exactly how often they need to be coaching and the framework to follow in their sessions in order to get the most out of them. The GROW model is one of the most popular methodologies for coaching, which focuses on the goals, obstacles and actions you’ll take to achieve success. Creating an outline with key stakeholders of the expectations of coaching at your organization is key to launching a successful coaching program.
Tip 3: Coach the coach with regular management training
Many frontline managers have reached their positions because they were high-performing sales reps. Often, they have no management experience and little (if any) formal management training. They may not even know how to articulate why they became high performers, let alone coach others to do so. Others have a ton of management experience but may have different approaches to coaching their sellers from previous companies. Therefore, “coaching the coach” becomes an essential element in a formalized approach to sales coaching. Training managers to coach effectively should start upon hiring or promotion (onboarding), and it shouldn’t stop there. Training to coach effectively and ensure managers are following a framework should be done regularly, perhaps annually or twice yearly at your sales kickoffs, for example.
Tip 4: Personalize coaching according to each rep’s needs
Skill coaching shouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach, as knowledge and skill sets vary from rep to rep. For example, focusing coaching on objection-handling for all reps on a team might be a waste if a number of the reps already excel in this area. This is where enablement and training data come in handy. Using this data, managers can pinpoint where knowledge and skills gaps exist for individual reps and therefore personalize their coaching to remediate these gaps.
Tip 5: Reinforce coaching with ongoing learning and practice
Coaching sessions become even more powerful when they are reinforced with tasks relevant to what was covered. These tasks could include quizzes on the skills covered, a set of calls to highlight top performers in this area or video pitch exercises for the rep to practice. Ongoing practice measures the outcomes and benefits of coaching sessions. Practice in the form of a video role play can show improvement over time, from the first role play to the fifth. Essentially, it closes the loop on coaching sessions and provides concrete evidence that, through reinforcement with tasks and practice, skills are improving.
If you are still struggling with how to launch a successful coaching culture in your organization, consider leveraging an ecosystem of outside expertise. Just like companies rely on third-party providers for strategic services (such as management consulting or technology services) or content (such as digital or marketing agencies), so, too, can they turn to outside expertise to bring an entire team up to speed on core competencies and foundational skill sets, while providing day-to-day observation and feedback in the short term.
Given the critical role that coaching plays in a successful sales organization, following these five sales-coaching tips will help transform rep behavior and set your company on the path toward consistently meeting its sales goals.
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