Good Managers Manage, GREAT Managers Coach

Recently researchers conducted a study that indicated after sales training, if there was no coaching or reinforcement activity, there was a drop-off of 87% of the knowledge acquired. That’s a waste of 87 cents on every dollar spent on formal development efforts. Knowledge is power… ONLY if it is applied!

So why is it so difficult to do well?

In my opinion, it all comes down to coaching, which is something most sales managers aren’t particularly adept at — especially if they were promoted to their position from a sales representative role. Representatives-turned-managers likely got into management because of their ability to sell, not necessarily their ability to coach, and this negatively impacts the way they work with struggling sales representatives. This is compounded in distribution channels where wholesalers are overly dependent on their channel partners to sell their offerings.  Weak loyalties exist in these channels unless the wholesale entity partners with distribution in providing exceptional sales training and coaching models.

Evidence repeatedly shows that turning around a sales team starts with turning around the sales manager. Sales managers are uniquely positioned to influence and empower sales reps to greater levels of success, but sales managers sometimes become so busy and distracted that they neglect their own professional development as they get caught up trying to survive the latest fire drill.

What we commonly see are sales managers and leaders who:

• Don’t have time to coach sales representatives
• Aren’t sure what sales coaches are supposed to do
• Don’t have access to the tools and resources that help them get the most of coaching
• Don’t establish consistent rhythm of coaching
• Can’t lead great coaching dialogues
• Don’t have time to build coaching lessons that fit within the brief sales meetings they hold one on one, in groups, on line, on the telephone or in person with sales representatives
• Ignore animosities that exist between financial and sales professionals
• Don’t have a sales coaching coach

Sales coaching is an ongoing process of developing sales representatives to be better at what they do. It’s a process that is really up to the individual representative to do the work. The sales manager’s job is to facilitate, to hold the individual accountable to the growth or improvements they’re looking for. Coaching is the number one activity that sales managers do to drive performance.  Effective coaching hits the bottom line.

Sales representatives receiving great coaching reach over 100% of goal, in contrast to sales representatives reporting poor coaching who achieve dramatically lower percentages of their goals in large part due to unrealistic forecasts. 

Harvard Business conclusion? The real payoff from good coaching lies among the middle 60% — your core performers. For this group, the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19% {defined “performance” as a representatives gap to goal (i.e., percentage of quota attained)}. In fact, even moderate improvement in coaching quality — simply from below to above average — can mean a six to eight percent increase in performance across 50% of your sales force. Often as not, that makes the difference between hitting or missing goals.

We offer Sales Pro Professional Coaching System. Be sure to set up time with me (Jim Ullery) to talk in more detail about this subject: https://www.timetrade.com/book/YBWCC to set an appointment to talk or reach out to my email Jim@c4oe.com

Sales Coaches

Who generally make the best sales coaches? Oddly popular notional are that the best sales people make the best sales coaches. NOT SO!

Here are five reasons why not:

1- The roles are very, very different. A professional salesperson is responsible for delivering tangible results. Sales managers are responsible for delivering tangible results... through other people. Managing a sales team is a role that engages in dissimilar activities than sales reps such as: coaching, ride-along evaluations, recruiting, hiring, performance appraisals, holding salespeople accountable, and termination. None of these are required for professional selling.

2- The capacities required for success are different - It's easy to assume that since a salesperson performed so well at selling, that leading a team of salespeople would be the natural next step. The capacities required for professional selling are not the same for sales leadership. One is patience. It takes patience to coach someone on a particular skill for months not always a strength for many superstar sales reps.

3- They struggle translating their instincts - A great player often cannot articulate why they are good, let alone transfer their skills to someone else. Great performers in any area almost always rely, in part, on natural instinct for their success. Instinct is very difficult to breakdown into measurable parts and communicate to others. Therefore, it becomes very hard to replicate their success through systematic training and coaching.

4- The urge to sell supersedes the will to coach - Your new sales manager will be tempted to take over sales calls instead of developing the skills of their players. The new sales manager, still focused on their own individual performance, will tend to step in over and over again to save deals and justify this dependency-causing behavior driven by quota demands. Plus, they would rather carry a poor performing sales rep than go through the tedious process of firing and replacing them.

5- You'll lose the revenue from your best sales rep - Instead of gaining a great sales manager,you'll lose the revenue from your now former great sales rep. This is an unintended consequence that many organizations often overlook. In addition, some companies believe that their new sales manager will replace their previous revenue stream by scaling the success of the sales team to new levels of performance, which is generally not the case.