Finally! Science Reveals the Actual Impact of Sales Coaching

I have read and even reported that sales leaders who coach their salespeople see a boost in revenue of around 27%. It sounds like a realistic number but I have not seen any science to back it up. Until now. Check this out!

OMG has evaluated and assessed nearly 1.8 million salespeople and sales managers from 25,000 companies. The data in the table below is from a subset of that data where we looked at around 16,000 salespeople who reported to approximately 4,000 sales managers.

The title row shows the percentage of time the sales managers devoted to coaching their salespeople and the 6 rows below that show the average scores for the salespeople that report to those managers. Sales Percentile is the percentile that a salesperson scored in. Sales DNA is an overall score for 6 of the 21 Sales Core Competencies that OMG measures. Hunter, Consultative, Qualifier and Closer are 4 of the 7 Tactical selling competencies that OMG measures. If you're interested, you can see all 21 Sales Core Competencies and how salespeople score by industry and skill here.

Do you remember that 27% number? The first row reveals that sales managers who devote at least 50% of their time to coaching salespeople (last column on the right) have salespeople whose sales percentile score is 28% higher than those managers who devoted little to none of their time coaching. How is that for science to back up somebody's incredibly accurate wild guess?

There's another interesting find in this data

Average scores for hunting were not further improved after a manager is devoting at least 20% of their time to coaching. This suggests that sales managers who coach more don't spend their coaching time helping salespeople work on their prospecting skills.

Another interesting takeaway can be seen in the Consultative scores. This competency shows the smallest gain in average score. Given how difficult it is to effectively take the consultative approach, this suggests that despite coaching more often, those sales managers lack the consultative skills needed to coach their salespeople on the consultative approach.

If Consultative scores show the smallest gain, where can the biggest gains be found? Qualifying and Closing. Sales managers who devote at least 50% of their time to coaching have salespeople who score 13% better in Qualifying and 24% better in closing than the salespeople whose sales managers rarely coach.

This data was not filtered by coaching effectiveness so there was no assumption that the coaching was good coaching; only that there was coaching. What would happen if in addition to the time these managers devote to coaching, they were also becoming more effective at coaching?