In reviewing what others are saying about the importance sales management coaching we came across some work from Gallup.
One point Gallup made was particularly worth repeating: “Company leadership must move beyond merely telling managers to coach. They need to:
Redefine managers’ roles and expectations.
Provide the tools, resources, and development managers need to satisfy role expectations.
Support managers with world-class leadership.
Leadership needs to make manager development a continuous priority.”
No question – that thinking is a home run idea! With the rate and scale at which changes occur in today’s markets, you must be able to upgrade the skill sets of your sales team more often and more quickly. That means your coaching efforts of yesteryear are probably not good enough.
So what might a company do to change the game when it comes to developing sales managers who are great coaches?
Here’s one idea we thought might have a chance. Building on Gallup’s “continuous priority idea” – Why not develop the coaching skills of your sales team earlier in the game? Why not develop the coaching skills of your salespeople?
Suspending disbelief about the merit of the idea for a moment, how might you go about doing that? Here are five ideas:
Establish a new hire-mentoring program. The skill set for mentoring is a close cousin to those used for coaching. Assigning experienced salespeople as mentors for new salespeople has a double payoff. The new salesperson has access to a non-manager coach and the mentor is building coaching skills. Mentoring programs work best when experienced salespeople are selected on a volunteer basis and there is a training program related to the skills and responsibilities of the mentor.
Leverage best practice libraries. With more companies investing in Learning Management Systems (LMS), the creation of video-based best practice libraries have become more commonplace. A build on that idea is to assign the salesperson that contributes a best practice as a “coach” for any other salesperson who is interested in developing the skills required to master that best practice.
Integrate management coaching programs. If a company has a formal in-class sales coaching program for managers, each sales manager could bring along one salesperson to the program. Again there’s a dual payoff – the salesperson would learn about coaching and the sales manager could learn about coaching issues of interest to the salesperson. The idea would also enable the design of the program to incorporate more realistic exercises and role-plays.
Encourage the idea of peer-to-peer coaching. Peer-to-peer coaching is usually viewed as a semi-structured and informal approach to coaching and is generally focused on helping salespeople deal with day-to-day tactical issues. The feedback suggests that salespeople like the idea their company supports peer-to-peer coaching. An added payoff is that both parties suggest the process is beneficial. Because tactical issues are being addressed, it also means management coaching can be focused on more substantive skill development.
Provide access to online coaching programs. For those companies that have incorporated online training and have included modules on coaching for their sales managers, they can provide the salespeople access to the online coaching material. This can be particularly helpful if the company has initiated one of the other ideas described above for the salespeople to become engaged in coaching.
Since sales coaching is an important aspect of a sales manager’s job and many sales managers are selected from the ranks of salespeople, why not allow salespeople to jump-start the development of their sales coaching skills? Plus, the skills that make for great sales coaching have a wide range of other applications, so you may find your salespeople getting great unanticipated benefits too!