By Steve Jensen
Do you coach your entire team? Or, like most coaches, do you concentrate your efforts on one or two groups of reps? Or maybe you coach only poor performers and when it comes to reps hitting quota, you just get out of their way. So, how do you know where to allocate your time? Because as we all know, a sales manager’s time is scarce at best.
Harvard Business Review wrote an eye-opening article about which group(s) of reps to coach, where they said, “…our research shows that coaching is almost worthless when it targets the wrong reps. And our work suggests that management targets the wrong reps all the time.” (Harvard Business Review, The Dirty Secret of Effective Sales Coaching.) And getting it right can make all the difference. The article goes on to say “…the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19%.” That can make the difference when it comes to hitting quota or not, to engagement and to their intent to stay with an organization.
Coaching, then, is a non-negotiable activity for sales leaders. As Keith Rosen says in his book Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, “Top leaders know that in order for their people to live their fullest potential every day, they need someone in their corner supporting them throughout the process.”
Segmenting Your Team
So, who do you coach? Do you coach the stars who are looking for a challenge? What about the under-performers? What about those who are hitting quota but aren’t really excelling? The only way to answer the question of who to coach is to segment your team. Salespeople’s needs aren’t heterogeneous.
You can’t take a binary approach to sales coaching. Many organizations have mandated equal coaching for everyone, thinking it would lift everyone equally, but that’s not the case. I am a proponent of “unequal” coaching and by that, I mean that you should segment your reps into groups and deliver tailored coaching to each group. Your groups will have different strengths, different opportunities and different needs.
Just as customers need to be segmented for Marketing and Sales, your sales force should be segmented into groups to aid in coaching triage. What are the different ways you can divide your reps? Here are some ideas for breaking down your reps into groups:
- Experienced vs. new (onboarding)
- Stars, High Core, Core, Low Core and Poor
- Hitting quota vs. missing quota
Adding a coachability score to the mix is another way to determine who needs coaching. Reps who are receptive to your message are much better candidates for coaching than those who are resistant. You can still coach everyone, but you will know who should get more time because you know where you can make the bigger difference.
Here are some examples of how you might differentiate your coaching based on segments:
- Motivating Underperformers
- Moving the Middle
- Turning Stars into Superstars
- Motivating Younger Reps
- Teaching New Reps
- Challenging Experienced Reps
Knowing who to coach is one of the most important considerations in allocating your time as a sales manager. You simply don’t have time to waste with the wrong person at the wrong moment (or the wrong message, but that is a different blog post). Segment your teams into performance bands or by experience, but separate them and coach to their specific needs. It will transform your coaching culture and make you more effective as a sales leader. In the end, you’ll have a more positive effect on your team’s careers. As Keith Rosen said, “Top leaders know that in order for their people to live their fullest potential every day, they need someone in their corner supporting them throughout the process.” (Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions).
Dollarizing Your Efforts
Having a tool that can show you the impact of different coaching decisions is a must-have for sales leaders. To my knowledge, Xvoyant is the only tool available right now that shows you your reps’ current distribution on a curve and then lets you experiment with moving different groups—showing you the impact on revenue. Armed with that knowledge, you can pinpoint exactly where your coaching will make the most difference.
And, there are huge top line benefits. According to Oracle, in their whitepaper The Future of Sales Management, “On a strategic basis, they [organizations] need to be able to identify top performers and their best practices and determine how to make more of their “B Players” into top performers. Because average performers often make up the lion’s share of the sales team, the ability to improve their performance—even by increasing their close rates by a few percentage points—can have a significant impact on the top line.” Harvard Business Review builds on that assertion, adding that “an organization cannot be successful on the backs of the extremely talented alone. You need solid players just as you need stars, and they will need a manager’s help to build skills and deal with the changing realities of their marketplace.”
Coaching isn’t always on every organization’s radar. You may need to convince your colleagues that coaching is valuable and you will need to be able to demonstrate that value.
If you are interested in seeing what coaching individual segments can do for you and your company, Xvoyant provides a tool where you can enter your company’s information and then try different scenarios and see the impact. There are no strings attached. You can see the calculator at www.xvoyant.com/how-much-is-coaching-worth-to-you so that you can weigh the complexities and difficulty of coaching various groups against the potential increase in revenue per rep, which is a much more useful stat than simple quota attainment.
One of the things that becomes obvious quickly is that moving different segments is worth different amounts. In the past, the thinking was that star performers didn’t respond to coaching, but the exact opposite has been proven to be true. The breakdown is different for each organization, but if we say that 15% of your sales force is in the Stars category, if they improve even slightly, the effect on revenue generation is larger than a more significant movement in the lower segments.
Different bands yield different results and each requires a specific coaching approach. Here is a breakdown of a typical enterprise-level sales organization:
Typical Sales Team Distribution Curve
Let’s examine poor performers, for example. Salespeople in this band are either coachable or they’re not. If they’re not, they probably aren’t worth any of your time. But if they are coachable, it’s worth your time to coach them and then be patient. Their adherence to process will eventually bring success. If you could move all of your Poor performers to Low Core, it would be worth a significant amount and their coaching needs will most likely be similar.What if you could move all of your High Core performers to Stars status? What would that be worth to you? As a group, they are most likely hungry to move up and their coaching needs will be similar as well.
By breaking down your team into these type of performance bands, you move beyond the simple under/over quota measurement and the limited insight it provides. Segmenting your team, tracking process, and measuring coachability will give you the information you need to know who to coach. The rest is up to you.
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Steve Jensen is the VP of Marketing at Xvoyant