Structure: The Missing Ingredient in How We Support Sales Coaching

We know that sales coaching is important. Leadership often calls it the “critical multiplier” and complains when sales managers aren’t doing enough of it. Companies hire outside coaches to help build our teams up. I’ve done all of these things myself. But where is the structure we need to ensure sales managers know how to do it, when to do it, with whom and why, and are equipped to do it effectively?

I recently attended a 3-day coaching training at Coach2Coach to find answers to some of these questions. Their new course aimed at managers was partly designed based on market feedback that there is a lot of generic coaching training available, but far less training to help managers balance the unique needs of coaching and accountability when you are also the manager.

Coaching without follow-up is like building a bridge and never crossing it.

The point: The kind of coaching managers do is different and more specific than the type of coaching external leadership coaches do, and it needs to be trained and supported differently.

Here are three ways that good coaching from a sales manager is different from generic leadership coaching:

1. Generic Coaching Has No Stake… Sales Manager Coaching Does
   When you hire an outside coach, the coach has no explicit stake in outcomes. Their only real stake is whether you feel satisfied by the coaching and are meeting goals that you and the coach agreed on.
   
   When the coach is also the manager, this is different. The manager has a direct stake in whether or not you meet targets set by someone else. The manager is held accountable for how well the team performs against goals, and your ability to hit your targets directly impacts that outcome. This means that managers have to be really good not just at coaching, but at coaching in a way that improves performance against company goals.
2. Sales Management Coaching Isn’t Life Coaching
   Great coaches care about the people they coach. They want to see them succeed, and they may work hard to help their people do well not only at their jobs, but in their lives as well. However, as a manager, your job is not to help your people achieve their dreams in life so much as it is to help them achieve their goals at work (although the alignment of both is optimal, of course). 
   
   This can create some tension between the desire to see people improve in a general sense and the manager’s need to help people succeed within the role assigned to them by the company. Said differently, I often see a tension between coaching and holding people accountable.
3. Sales Coaching Has Specific Flavors
   Many coaches niche down to specific areas of expertise, and within those areas, they may develop frameworks to help coachees accomplish specific goals. Sales coaching has this specificity too, and it covers a lot of ground.
   
   Sales coaches need to provide strategic coaching, goal coaching, skills coaching, deal coaching, pipeline coaching, account plan coaching, call prep coaching, and much more. Often, managing cadences for these different types of coaching is left up to the sales managers themselves, with very little structure to ensure all the different types of coaching are covered.

These differences in coaching type have real consequences for the skills and structure that sales managers need for their coaching, versus what pure leadership coaches need. Generalized coaching training simply isn’t enough to support them in balancing these differences.

Sales managers need to learn to coach in a way that also:

• Connects individual goals with company goals
• Balances individual needs with team needs
• Builds effective cadence around coaching types
• Ensures structured follow-ups

I’ve been saying for a long time that sales managers need more coaching training and structure. This workshop highlighted the importance of training and structure that is specific to the needs of sales managers, and not generic for anyone who wants to be a coach. It also highlighted the critical importance of goal setting and disciplined follow-up.

We built Membrain Elevate to help sales leaders build effective coaching structure within their organization. It’s easy to customize, and provides powerful tools to give sales managers greater insight, as well as help them align individual goals with company goals, and give each salesperson the coaching they need to get where they want to go–and where the company needs them to go.