Will we ever start coaching our sales people?

Let me be the 2,366,714th person to point this out: sales coaching is really important. Unfortunately, it is something we continuously talk about doing, but never get around to actually implementing. We’re busy, right? There are meetings to be had, calls to make, forecasts to produce.

What’s the RoI on coaching, anyway? 

Not bad, it turns out. Research shows it is the leading driver of increased sales performance, improving results by up to 19%. It is something high achieving organizations continuously prioritize and execute. Now, if we all agree this is a good thing to undertake, why is it not being implemented anywhere and everywhere? We seem happy to continually invest billions in sales training every year, despite depressing figures showing that, unless reinforced, 87% of training content is forgotten within 1 month (!). Why is the best practice of coaching consistently absent? 

The skills gap

Allow me to state something obvious: in order to run a coaching program, you will need sales coaches. However, being a great coach is not the same as being a good manager or a star sales rep. It is a different skill set and not everyone is suited for this role. Unless you bring in help externally, you will need to invest in your managers and help them acquire the skills needed to coach effectively. 

Second, it takes time – yes, that non-renewable resource we only seem to be getting less of - to implement and maintain a coaching program.

Causation and correlation 

Third, it can be difficult to measure the direct impact of coaching. With new systems, you can quite easily point to savings in time and money. If you generate 10 proposals per day and new software helps reduce the time from 1 hour per proposal to 30 minutes, the math is easy. However, coaching does not lend itself to obvious evidence of causation – it’s hard to argue that a specific result would not have been achieved without regular coaching sessions in place. Perhaps you can show there is a correlation between consistent coaching and improved performance, but it is qualitative by nature. Coaching is about playing the long game in an environment fixated on making the number short term. The results will come, but they will come over time.

Trends, data and behaviors

Even more tedious – a great coach still needs good data to be effective. Finding what you need, fast, is of great importance if you are going to help the people in your organization achieve greater things. If the data is inaccurate and can’t be trusted, how will you fulfill the established axiom of knowing who to coach about what and when? An exported Excel from a CRM with unclear meeting notes, guesstimated closing dates and basic activity KPI’s won’t be of much help. You’ll spend more time trying to decipher what it all means, rather than identifying areas of improvement.

Good data extends beyond hard metrics that are easily measured. In order to coach on behaviors, rather than manage by numbers, you need to look at the trends – which in turn means analyzing data over time. Once the trend in behavior has been identified, we can start deconstructing and look at additional data points. 

For example, trend analytics may help you uncover that person A consistently struggles with prospecting – they simply do not generate enough opportunities in order to make quota. From here, you can start digging into the data to understand where coaching is required; how many companies are being contacted each week and month? How many contact attempts are made before they give up and move on? What sort of questions do they ask when they finally get a hold of the prospect? Are they reaching out to the same person over and over, via the same medium (hello, email!), or are they reaching out to multiple people within the organization?

I could go on and on, but the point is this: good data, fast. Uncover the behavior first, then dig in to the habits to identify the change that would bring about the greatest improvement.

The complex coach

Finally, coaching becomes even more complex in B2B sales. It’s not just about efficiency and KPI’s. It becomes an exercise of helping sales people qualify new prospects, adhere to the execution of a sales process in the field, navigating the landscape of multiple stakeholders and internal politics while somehow managing to add value at every corner. It’s about helping a sales person play to their strengths, while recognizing their weaknesses.

With Q4 around the corner and 2016 upon us, let us please put coaching back on the agenda. It may not have the appeal of immediacy, but achieving consistent results is about playing the long game. Research shows that the results will come.

To better understand how the team at Membrain approach coaching in complex B2B sales, click below.