Organizational culture is a shared set of expectations and values that guide a member’s behavior and impacts their attitudes and self-image.
When it comes to investigating the notion of a sales coaching culture, two questions surface immediately:
Should you devote the time and effort to create a sales coaching culture?
If the answer to the first question is yes, what is the key to getting that right?
Question 1 – Is devoting time and effort to creating a sales coaching culture worth it? The answer is yes, and the reasons are straightforward.
Whether or not you devote a purposeful effort, some set of expectations and values about sales coaching will emerge. The problem is without a defined effort, there will be divergent views of the value of coaching and a lack of a standard set of expectations as to what effective sales coaching entails. In short, effective sales coaching will be a hit and missed affair, and that’s not good enough in today’s competitive markets.
It is a fair bet that in most sales organizations, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to create and sustain an effective sales coaching effort without developing a coaching culture that supports that effort. And, that matters because, without an effective sales coaching effort, it is equally unlikely you will be able to develop and sustain a superior sales team.
Question 2 – How do you go about creating a sales coaching culture? The first step for creating a sales coaching culture is gaining the commitment of senior sales leadership. As starters, they need to be committed to answering the following three questions:
Are our front-line sales managers skilled in the art and science of coaching, if not, what are you going to do about that?
Are the front-line sales managers knowledgeable in the application of the skills taught in sales training, and if not, how do you correct that?
What are you not going to have the sales manager do so they will have the time to get serious about coaching?
Recognize the front-line sales manager as the pivotal job. Although the first step is gaining leadership commitment, the pivotal job for creating and sustaining a coaching culture rests with front-line sales managers. The sales managers need to:
View their role as primarily about developing their people.
Understand that providing feedback is about leveraging strengths as well as managing deficiencies.
Avoid being the super salesperson and selling rather than developing the selling skills of others.
Foster the establishment of a recognition and reward system. Sustaining any culture requires explicit recognition of the accomplishments that derive from that culture. The good news is most sales organizations have a history for recognizing achievement. The twist is to leverage that history to spotlight the importance of coaching. A couple of ideas that have a good track record:
Create an online library of best practices related to what to coach and how to coach. They not only recognize top performance but equally important they document excellence that can be tapped into by others.
Just as there are rewards for sales performance, create rewards related to coaching.
Summary. People who are knowledgeable and experienced in sales excellence know sales coaching is worthwhile; it can make a difference, and it needs to be a priority. Sales pros agree sales coaching is a necessity if you want a world-class sales team.
While most sales leaders agree about the importance of sales coaching, most also admit, “the job isn’t getting done.” Many great companies start sales coaching initiatives with tremendous energy and commitment. Far fewer exit the other end of the tunnel.
One part of the answer is recognizing the importance of creating a culture that explicitly values coaching.