By Steve Jensen
When he said “Time is the fire in which we burn,” poet Delmore Schwartz touched upon an undeniable truth. Our projects, careers and lives flash brightly but briefly. Time is our most important resource. It’s also the thing we are worst at managing and is in the least supply.
According to the TAS Group, 73% of managers spend less than 5% of their time coaching their sales teams. In a 50-hour week, that equates to just 2 ½ hours. Best practices dictate something closer to 30 minutes per rep per month. With a 10-person team, that’s just 5 hours. Making time for 5 hours of coaching can prove difficult, but those hours can make or break a deal, kill a project or make it a success.
Given this dearth of time, how is a sales leader to allocate such precious moments to coaching? The modern sales leader has a myriad of concerns, all of which take time. Budgeting, quota attainment, reporting, new rep onboarding, personnel issues and more all vie for the same hours and minutes. How do you prioritize? The answer is intuitive: focus on high value activities. The hard part is: how to do that.
Who to Coach
Some reps require more coaching than others. Some are independent and have success without much intervention. Some need help with specific skills or activities. How do you know who to coach so that you can maximize your effort where it is needed most? A good coaching tool (like Xvoyant, for example) will show you where your reps stand in relation to each other and map their adhesion to process and willingness to change and be coached. Knowing these things lets you know where your time will be best spent.
To make the most of your efforts, break your team up into two categories: those who are willing to be coached and to change because of that coaching and those who probably won’t listen and don’t want the help. The former are eager to better themselves, to “level up” while the later find coaching tedious and have no intention of improving themselves. You want to spend your time with reps who are willing to put in the effort and who are willing to follow processes. Helping a rep who falls into those categories will prove satisfying and will make a difference to the bottom line.
What to Coach
Without the proper tools, pinpointing areas of need for sales reps is extremely difficult. You don’t want to waste time coaching on points where the rep is proficient but you don’t want to miss the opportunity to help where help is welcomed. Spending a certain amount of time on one group of activities could set a rep up for record week, while concentrating on another might kill an otherwise productive period.
A good, well-designed coaching program lets you coach to skills while the time and effort of scheduling, documenting, and determining the goals and content of coaching sessions is reduced. The contents of your sales coaching technology stack can also help identify coaching areas that will have a direct impact on specific deals and on goal attainment in general. With good tools, it’s possible to get granular enough to know the exact effect of coaching on a skill or activity. Xvoyant, for example, takes that kind of granularity and, using machine learning, produces verified pipeline visibility. When combined with predictive analytics, you can know to a high degree of certainty what will happen in any given period of time with any given rep.
When to Coach
Is there a specific point in the sales cycle where individual reps need help? Would it be more effective to coach a rep on the number of starts or at the proposal stage or with the final written contract? These are all questions of timing. Many leaders wait until a rep asks for help before stepping up to the plate to coach. This can be damaging because it may seem like things are fine until the end of the quarter when it becomes apparent that there are problems and it is too late to fix them.
Again, a good tool can help decide when is the ideal time to get involved. A good, regular cadence is important to successful coaching, but the ability to offer help at a crucial moment is invaluable.
Returning to Delmore Schwartz, we see that how we learn to take advantage of our time is as important as recognizing its passing.
“Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.”
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Steve Jensen is the VP of Marketing at Xvoyant