Is Sales Coaching Your ‘Big Rock’?

Today’s Sales Managers often complain that their life has never been busier. The many task demands fill their day at the expense of arguably their most important focus, people development.

The question therefore is, “Are you giving your people development responsibility the focus it deserves?” Is coaching your sales team the ‘big rock’ you place in your work bowl first?

The recurring picture we see is that busy sales managers focus on too many tasks that don’t add value or drive real change. The focus on people and their ongoing development through coaching sadly becomes the casualty, and yet it is their people, their sales teams that are ultimately tasked with delivering sales targets.

So how can the “busy fool” reorganise the priorities of sales management and still file the sales report on time for the Sales Director?

Here are 5 ideas you may like to consider:

1.  Re-define your role as a Sales Manager & communicate it

• Take ‘time out’ in your role and review your top priorities
• Map your responsibilities and quantify the time you currently spend on each
• Then reset the allocation giving priority to people development whilst still meeting your other commitments
• Share and communicate openly your revised priorities with confidence, not just with your sales teams but also with your manager and the wider organization so that everyone is clear on your game plan

 2.  Measure it and hold yourself accountable

• With Coaching now prioritised, make sure you set SMART goals and clear measures so you are accountable
• Build these objectives and measures into your annual performance review and report them openly
• Encourage other sales managers in your organisation who also have people responsibilities to follow your lead and help build a ‘coaching culture’

3.  Prioritise and protect people time

• Schedule time in field with all of your people (including your high performers)
• As a guide, plan to spend a minimum of 1 coaching day per person per month
• Set dates and lock them in 3 months in advance
• Communicate these days not just with your sales team, but within your
• sales organisation
• Then take your other meetings in the spare times around your coaching days
• Protect these dates with discipline and resist the temptation to make changes

 4.  Delegate other tasks and challenge the status quo to create more coaching time

• Identify tasks that you are able to appropriately delegate to other members of your team and empower them to take responsibility and ownership. This frees up more time for you to re-invest back into coaching
• Delegation also serves as a great ‘development’ opportunity for individuals within your team and further ‘coaching’ opportunities
• Identify any non-value, time wasting, non-sales generating tasks and challenge the ‘status quo’. Either re-assess how you can improve efficiency with that task or simply get rid of it!

 5.   Communicate your success stories and results achieved

• With coaching now a priority in your role, share your success stories and in particular demonstrate the impact it had on the overall capability and results from the sales team
• Develop a simple coaching measurement tool where you can highlight the time invested in coaching and the direct relationship this has had with sales targets being achieved

The vast majority of sales managers today I believe do subscribe to the view that people development through sales coaching should be a top priority and a core competency within their organisation. It makes logical sense. But the real question that needs to be asked is how many actually follow through with this in reality, and what is holding them back from doing so? In considering the ideas discussed in this article along with a real willingness to make coaching a top priority, what will you now commit to doing today?

As a Business Improvement Consultant to a variety of organisations across a multitude of industries, I have worked with clients on making coaching a real focus and developed programs and tools that drive real change, not just for the sales coach but also for their sales teams. With a change in mindset and measures in place, these organisations have since implemented rigorous coaching calendars where they hold all sales managers accountable to ‘time in field coaching’. This has resulted in dramatically improved capability of the sales team and in some cases seen sales uplift of more than 50%.

Chris is a Business Improvement Consultant for BIG Consulting with a strong history of successful Sales Leadership, Coaching & Development across all levels of the sales organization. We engage with clients on a variety of Business Improvement and Sales Force Effectiveness solutions including Senior Leadership Teams responsible for optimising the sales function, to Sales Managers looking to drive results through their teams, to front line Sales People responsible for accounts or territories… all designed to positively impact sales results.  You can learn more on our website and through Chris’s LinkedIn profile.