By Steve Jensen
We all want to make a difference. We all want to be relevant. Sometimes, however, it can be difficult and sales coaching is one place where it is extremely hard. We recently did a training for one of our customers and during the session, one of the sales reps approached us. He was a star performer for the company, but he had some concerns about coaching. He told us, “If you are going to help me get a deal, that’s great. But if are going to put me in a room and talk to me about generic stuff, I don’t have the time or patience for that.” As a coach who wants to help everyone on your team, how do you ensure that you are relevant?
The ability to make your coaching relevant, even indispensable, comes down to four things:
Address Their Needs
Every rep has a list of things that you could do to help them win business. Whether its removing roadblocks, getting on calls or helping with a proposal, teasing out these needs is an important activity. If you can address individual needs, you will be relevant. It shows concern for the rep’s apprehensions and will improve engagement and coachability.
Know Their Challenges
Even top performing reps have areas where they could improve and perhaps the most impactful thing you could do is to help your stars level-up. Their challenges are different than low performers, who might have problems with the number of starts or with deal velocity. The point is, you have to know where to focus your efforts by identifying weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.
The best way to gain insight on individual challenges is by segmenting your reps and comparing them against the average and against their peer groups (i.e. Stars, High Core, Core, Low Core and Poor.) Using this kind of rep distribution, you can treat each group separately using strategies and tactics that are particularly useful for each group. Again, the challenges that Stars face are different from, say, Low Core reps. To find individual challenges, compare these areas:
Get granular on activities. If reps that are hitting goal are performing a given activity at a certain level, compare those numbers with your Poor performers and use that knowledge to coach them on weak points and set goals for improvement. If a High Core rep aspires to make the President’s Club, compare their activities to your Stars and model your coaching and goals around that gap.
Understand Their Pipeline
Visibility into a rep’s pipeline is a key factor in being able to coach effectively. You need to go beyond close dates and probabilities to the individual sales stages and individual deal level to pinpoint where your help can be most impactful. Are there deals that are close and just need a push to bring home? Are their proposals that need follow-up? Are there deals stuck in contract mark up that could be sped up? All these are examples of knowing your rep’s pipeline and determining where you can help with roadblocks, underwriting, or other closing challenges, etc.
Focus Your Efforts
As I’ve written before, a sales leader’s biggest challenge is finding the time to coach effectively. The secret isn’t longer days—it’s being discerning about who you coach. You should only spend time with reps who value and respond to your coaching. Base your coaching on the return you expect from each rep, remembering that outcomes are dependent on adherence to process.
Collaborate
Becoming and staying relevant as a sales leader and coach requires a collaborative effort between you and your reps. You can’t succeed without their buy-in and support and in order to earn that, you have to prove the value of regular, focused coaching. The best way to do that is to show the rep the financial impact of incremental changes (i.e. by doing x you can expect y in return.) This involves them in the process and they become invested in their success. They will be willing and enthusiastic about working with you because they can see the direct benefit. This process also fosters engagement and leads to quicker onboarding and better rep retention
Conclusion
To put it simply, relevance is the key to good, effective coaching. So, to be as relevant as possible, remember:
Finally, remember, your relevance as a sales coach directly affects the bottom line. You will find that you will have significant impact in revenue per rep as well as overall quota attainment. And, as a bonus, you’ll have less turnover. Think of it as “leveling-up” your coaching game. It will transform your coaching. And your team will appreciate it, because you won’t just be talking to them about “generic stuff”—you’ll be “relevant.”
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Steve Jensen is the VP of Marketing at Xvoyant