Should You Coach That Salesperson, Or Fire Them?

The sales profession is not for the faint of heart. There comes a time in nearly every salesperson’s life when they wonder if they’re really cut out for this work. And there comes a time in nearly every sales leader’s life when they wonder if someone on their team is really cut out for the work.

This salesperson is chronically underperforming, doesn’t seem to improve with practice, and even though you like them and they’re a great team player… they’re just not pulling their weight. So the question arises: Should I coach them, or fire them?

Should I Coach or Should I Fire Is the Wrong Question

Here in Sweden, we love our winter Olympics. People in other parts of the world may laugh at the eccentricity of curling, but to us, it’s serious business. And even more than curling, we love cross-country skiing. This year, we took home some gold. A lot of it.

We also put forward many competitors who didn’t take home gold. My daughter has a friend who competes in the women’s mogul skiing, who didn’t make it to the finals.

Every one of these athletes, the gold medal winners, the competitors who didn’t make it to the finals, and many in between: Every one of them has a coach or a team of coaches. Can you imagine if they only received coaching when they were failing?

If the Swedish cross-country teams only coached an athlete when they were failing, we definitely would not have brought home gold medals. Even Alysa Liu, the figure skating gold medalist from the US, who famously did things her own way: She had a team of coaches, and she was definitely not failing.

So why is it that in sales, arguably the most important aspect of a company’s growth… we only coach when we’re failing?

Why We Only Coach When Someone Is Failing

There are many reasons why sales managers don’t coach. For instance:

• They feel they don’t have time
• They don’t know what to coach about
• They don’t know the difference between coaching and managing
• They think salespeople should “just know what to do”

These are all valid concerns, but the reality is that good coaching is the critical multiplier that sets gold-winning teams above amateurs. So maybe it’s time we start taking it seriously.

How to Bake It In

In any performance-based activity, coaching cannot be a last resort intervention in order to be effective. It needs to be baked into the culture, the system, the organization’s Way of Selling.

Some of this work can now be outsourced to conversational intelligence software like Gong. Nitty gritty details like “how much are you talking and how much are you listening” during calls are a good way for these tools to support salespeople.

No human is born knowing how to coach effectively.

But effective coaching also requires a skilled, human coach who can provide a full range of coaching types based on cadence and need. To whom salespeople feel accountable. And who can push back on salespeople in a way that AI has not yet perfected.

In order to have this, your organization must invest in training and coaching the coaches. No human is born knowing how to coach effectively, and sales managers are very often former salespeople who have been promoted beyond their skillset, into a job that is entirely different from the one they excelled at.

We can complain and complain about the cost of turnover, the low performance of our individual salespeople, or the struggles of managers to get their teams to do what they’re supposed to do, but until we actually invest in the coaching systems that fix these problems, we’ll just keep having them.

How are you ensuring that your salespeople are getting the coaching they need? If you’re a frontline salesperson, are you getting the coaching you need to perform at your best?