Welcome to Day 8 of X-Factor: 10 Days of Epic Sales Knowledge. Today’s article comes from a true industry icon—Jim Dickie.
For over 20 years, Jim Dickie and CSO Insights have shared some of the most insightful research around the state of the sales world. Yesterday, his team’s study around Sales Enablement was recognized as the top sales and marketing whitepaper in 2017 by Top Sales World. If you haven’t read that study, you need to…its required reading. (Get the report here.)
Website: www.csoinsights.com
LinkedIn: /in/jimdickie/
Twitter: @jimdickie
The Five Keys to Great Sales Coaching
My most recent column in CRM Magazine shared the chart to the right that surfaced from an analysis I did on the impact of sales coaching on sales performance. The article generated a lot of responses asking for insights into exactly “how” you move up the sales coaching hierarchy, from having sales managers doing random coaching on their own, to formal and then dynamic coaching..
Peter Senge, systems scientist and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan Center of Management , had a huge impact on my views on sales manage coaching. I took the following away from the concepts he presented in The Fifth Discipline.
Coaching = Feedback
For feedback to be meaningful/effective it must meet five tests:
- Timely–You don’t wait until the end of the month or quarter to give salespeople feedback, you do it real-time when the advice and mentoring can make a difference in changing behavior and increasing sales effectiveness.
- Relevant–Coaching needs to be related to the opportunities a sales person is currently working on, where those deals are in the sales cycle, and the challenges that they are currently encountering in getting to “yes”.
- Consistent—You’re coaching to change/improve a specific rep behavior, so keep the focus on that. Too often managers jump from one behavior/skill to another, trying to improve everything at once but mostly making the rep feel, “I can’t do anything right.”
- Accurate–Coaching has to be based on metrics not hunches. Therefore, the data underlying those metrics has to be current and correct, otherwise sales reps and managers will lose faith in the validity of the process.
- Individualized–Each rep is going to have unique strengths and weaknesses. Sales managers need to be able to quickly assess the specific type of help each of their sales people needs right now and tailor their coaching accordingly.
When we see coaching optimization initiatives fail to deliver the desired results, it is most often because one or more of the tests above is missing. Coaching sessions become an exercise in catching your reps doing something wrong (falling short of expectations somehow), rather than catching your reps doing the specific behavior right/better. So step number one on the path towards optimized coaching is making these five tenants the foundation for your formal coaching methdology.
But as we see above, that is only half of the equation. While companies can clearly achieve an increase in sales performance by formalizing their coaching process, the end game is to take it a set further to dynamic process. Here you not only have a standardized way for doing coaching, you also have the systems in place to support that process. Technology augments the ability of sales managers to be effective coaches and mentors. It starts by tracking and analyzing the activities of each sales person on the team: who is doing what and how effectively are they doing it. It then surfaces the specific strengths and weaknesses for each sales professional, as well as pointing to tasks that that each sales person should focus on to optimize their own performance. When as the result of a coaching session with their manager a game plan for improvement is created, technology can serve virtual coach, tracking that those strategies and tactics are actually being accomplished by each sales team member.
Looking out to what we can expect in 2018, with what will be higher revenue targets for the vast majority of firms, we have to find innovative ways to increase the effectiveness of our sales organizations. Both at the sales person and sales manager level. Taking time now to be honest about how effective you are at coaching, and determine ways to improve this critical aspect of sales support, can go a long way towards ensuring you meet or exceed those goals.
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If you want to find out more about changing behavior in your sales teams with Xvoyant Coaching Technology,
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You can get caught up with past day’s articles by clicking on their titles below:
Day 1: Millennials In Sales: What You Need To Know For 2018
Day 2: Annoying Persistence vs. Professional Persistence
Day 3: The Most Important Attribute in Coaching Top Performing Salespeople
Day 4: Transformation in the Digital Era
Day 5: Designing a Social Sales Blueprint for Sales Leadership in 2018
Day 6: One Haunting Sales Statistic Every Sales Leader Should Know
Day 7: Hiring Kick Ass Salespeople
Day 7 Bonus: It is Time For More Women in Sales
Day 8 Bonus: 5 Lessons A 2-Year Old Can Teach You About Sales Coaching
Day 9: Why Impact Eats Value for Breakfast
Day 9 Bonus: Top 3 Coaching Mistakes Made by Good Sales Managers