Building a Sales Coaching Culture

Posted by James Fennessy

World-class sales forces have a coaching culture as the driving force of their sales management practice. There are several questions that we ask of managers all the time. First, if we were to look at the performance of the people who report directly to you, and if we were to graph their sales performance, what would the shape of that curve be? Inevitably, even if they are not aware of the mathematical principle, they will say that it is a bell curve. (“I have a few top performers, I have a few lousy ones, and the vast majority are in the middle.”) And then we ask them, “What is the job of a sales manager?” In most average companies the manager will say, “It is to deliver numbers.” But if we then ask them, “What’s the job of the salesperson?” They will say, “It is to deliver numbers.” So we usually say, “Wow, that’s kind of striking.” Remember the old adage, why keep a dog and bark? If we step back from the answers and consider them carefully, we realise that the manager is getting the same performance curve that he would have gotten randomly, if he did nothing. And the manager has the same job as the salesperson. Why is he in management? Whereas, in worldclass corporations, the job of management is to coach and prepare the people that work for them.

It has been said that the most important asset in a company goes to the parking lot every night and drives off. If people are the most important asset, then it stands to reason that developing them to their highest potential is a capital investment. Nothing is more important. Great companies recognise this basic truth and invest their time in developing a culture of sales coaching. Coaching cultures have thought through four questions: (1) who do we coach, (2) when do we coach, (3) how do we coach and (4) to what do we coach.

In too many companies, coaching falls under the same head as calling your mother or working out every day - it is all this stuff that we wish we would do, and we kind of know that it is good for us, but we haven’t gotten it down to the practical, tactical measured things we do on a day to day basis to make it a fundamental part of the fabric of our culture.

Creating a coaching culture means allocating time; it means allocating metrics; it means allocating attention. But if we just step back and think of the previous four characteristics, they all reflect what it means to have a coaching culture. By focusing on effectiveness measures that counterweight efficiency measures, we have a direct way to know what to coach our salespeople on. We pay attention to the early stages of the sales pipeline because we can coach people there. All we can do at the end of the pipeline is negotiate price and terms. We can coach at the front end of the pipeline. By coaching our salespeople where to create value, we are moving the large part of our corporation, as many salespeople as possible, into the consultative space. They all play in. So the culture is reflective of what we measure and what we focus on as a job. There is nothing wrong with focusing on the numbers. But it is the means to the numbers that make a difference. In a world-class corporation, the job of a manager is to coach people to achieve the numbers.

The prerequisite for a good sales coaching culture requires a system of empirical, objective and quantified measures to drive sales performance.