Today it’s difficult to sustain a competitive advantage by product alone. You need a superior sales team, and maintaining a superior sales team requires frontline sales leaders who coach and who are good at it.
But for sales leaders to be good at coaching, feedback must run both ways. Not only must sales leaders be able to provide feedback on a wide variety of skill sets and challenges, they must also be open to receiving feedback from their sales team as to when sales coaching is needed and how they can improve their coaching.
To accomplish this, both the sales leader and the members of the sales team must communicate openly and directly. From the salesperson’s perspective, the feedback can take two very different forms:
Salespeople cannot hesitate to present a sales problem they are having in one of their accounts.The cost is too high if they don’t address it. A sale could be lost because a less than effective sales strategy was pursued, or a smaller sale than what was possible was captured because the opportunity was under-scoped.
In regard to this type of feedback, successful sales leaders work with their sales teams to develop a communication channel for surfacing the problems and addressing the best ways to solve them. They don’t get in the way of sales success, and they don’t take credit for it. They regularly seek feedback from their sales team making sure there are not obstacles for sharing challenges and difficulties. In the end, they understand that if their sales team isn’t successful, they have something to do with it.
Receiving feedback can be uncomfortable for sales leaders, but that’s no reason not to be open to it. We all have blind spots, yet when we know what they are, we can adjust and address them. To make this happen, the sales leader must not only be open to the feedback, they must establish a culture that says it’s okay to bring it up. If they don’t, their salespeople will remain silent.
A way to take a step toward establishing this open culture is for the sales leader to periodically simply ask members of their sales team about how they can improve the efficiency or effectiveness of their coaching. A jump-start set of questions that could be used are:
Am I focusing my coaching efforts on the areas that you view as most beneficial?
What have I done as part of our coaching effort that you found particularly effective?
What are we not doing in our coaching effort that you think we should be doing?
Are we doing some things in our coaching effort that you think are simply taking up time that we could devote to something more worthwhile?
Should I be leveraging some other people or resources that could add to the effectiveness of our coaching effort?
Am I spending too little, too much, or just about the right amount of time on coaching?
Salespeople are unlikely to get better if they don’t receive feedback from their sales leaders, and sales leaders are unlikely to get better at getting it right if the feedback only goes one way.