The role of the Sales Manager and Sales Leader is becoming increasingly difficult year after year.
Our three key stakeholders (customers, CEOs, salespeople) have ever-growing expectations, the pace of change is relentless, and sometimes the economy/environment kicks us in the tail to ensure we don’t get too comfortable sleeping well (like today’s turbulent times).
Our average tenure as sales manager is shockingly brief.
According to Manny Medina, Max Althschuler, and Mark Kosoglow in Sales Engagement (2019, John Wiley and Sons), the average tenure for a Vice President of Sales has been steadily declining from 26 months (in 2010) to 19 months (in 2017).
What makes this role so challenging?
As sales leaders, our main objective is to influence the future behavior of our sales teams in a positive way to achieve our sales targets.
Getting Started with Sales Management
We start by setting high (but reasonable) expectations, give guidance on how to achieve those expectations (sales playbooks, sales processes, strategies and tools), and then (hopefully) provide effective sales training (outsourced or in-house) to enable the team to achieve those expectations.
These foundational elements are just the start of our sales management program.
Once the foundational sales playbook elements are in place, we need to actively manage the sales team with a formal sales management cadence that enables us to:
Coach the team
Motivate the team
Inspect the team
Unfortunately, most sales managers feel the pull of too many stakeholders against the constant pressure of quarterly sale performance, which causes their coaching programs to suffer.
According to CSO Insights (the research arm of the Miller-Heiman Group), sales managers spend twice as much time on administration and forecasting as they do on coaching their people (less than 15% of their time).
Research from leadership development firm BlessingWhite suggests that only 23% of people being coached thought that the coaching had a “significant impact on their performance or job satisfaction.” Amazingly, 10% even suggested that the coaching they were getting was having a “negative effect.”
However, statistics also tell us that coaching matters and is directly related to sales performance.
Sales managers that were rated as highly effective coaches outperformed sales managers who were rated as ineffective coaches by 19% in revenue production according to research by the Sales Executive Council (2005).
We need to coach and be good at it if we want to build effective, sustainable, and productive sales organizations.
Unfortunately, most of us focus only on opportunity coaching when facing the relentless cadence of quarterly sales targets. Basically, we conduct deal reviews with our salespeople to ensure that their priority opportunities for the quarter will close on time. When issues or barriers arise, we then tell them what to do to fix them and close the deal. We “feed” the sales rep the answer and create an ongoing dependency on our answers while concurrently diminishing their sales IQ.
Of course, in the example above, we always have the best of intentions. We want to help the sales rep close the deal (and likely need them to close the deal to hit our quarterly commitment). We think we are being helpful, but we’re only chasing a short-term gain instead of intentionally trying to create a learning and professional development environment that enables our sales teams to grow.
In her bestselling book, Liz Wiseman actually names the forward-thinking leaders, “Multipliers” (2010, HarperCollins), those who are “Genius makers and bring out the intelligence in others… By extracting people’s full capability, Multipliers get twice the capability than Diminishers do.”
To tap into the power of exponential sales growth, we need to leverage coaching as the essential strategy.
How to Improve Your Coaching Program
The average sales manager leads a team of eight. If you can elevate the performance of the entire team, you get exponential growth. If you hire one more sales rep, you get incremental growth (maybe in 6 months if they make it through probation).
Here are three strategies to improve your coaching program as part of your sales management cadence today.
1. Schedule Coaching Events
A) 1-on-1 meetings and time in the field with your salespeople are opportune times for sales coaching.
→ Download Now: ITF 1-on-1 Meeting Agenda [Free Tool]
B) When coaching in the field, ensure you reserve time to review the client call/ presentation after the activity. According to Michael Bunga Stanier in his excellent work the Coaching Habit (2016, Box of Crayons Press), “People don’t learn when you tell them something. They don’t even really learn when they do something. They start learning, start creating new neural pathways only when they have a chance to recall and reflect on what just happened.”
We suggest reviewing a customer call or event by asking the sales rep to identify three things she liked and three things she would do differently next time. Then we (as the sales leader) share our opinion on the same. This allows the salesperson to first self-diagnose thereby creating the learning moment.
C) Once the coaching event is over, ask your salesperson whether it was helpful. If they say it wasn’t, discuss why. If your salesperson is not growth-oriented and does not want any form of coaching, then perhaps they’re not the right person for your sales team.
2. Stop Giving Advice and Start Asking Better Questions
A) You may think you know the answer to the issues and challenges that your salesperson is facing. If you give them the answer today, you can guarantee that they will be back for a similar answer next week.
This creates a dependency cycle where they come to you for all of the answers in the future. This cycle multiplied by the number of salespeople on your team means you will have even less time to address the key stakeholders that influence your success as a sales manager.
Nobody likes being told what to do. The kind of people you want on your sales team are intelligent, driven and humble. They want to develop and learn. You need to give them space to allow for this.
B) Try this as a process for your next coaching moment:
Assess their situation
Create great questions to help them come to the same assessment
Align on your go-forward plan together
Ask them to send you an email summarizing the go forward plan or the key points of what you discussed (after the coaching event)
It is tremendously difficult to stop yourself from giving the answer when this issue seems so obvious to you. You want to be helpful, show value, and feel like you made a significant contribution as a sales manager. You think the best way to do that is to tell them the answer, but it’s not
As a sales leader, it is your duty to make people who work for you better. Too many sales managers believe it is the salesperson’s duty to enable us to hit our numbers.
Remember, when you tell them the answer, they don’t always internalize it or commit to it.
“The biggest single problem with communication is the illusion it has taken place”
-Bernard Shaw
When they ask you what you think they should do, pause then ask them, “What do YOU think we should do?” You may need to do this multiple times to actually break their dependence on your direction.
3. The 6 Types of Sales Coaching
Understand the six types of sales coaching (below) and be intentional when working with any member of your sales team on these:
We can either coach a situation or we can coach the person. The former fixes an immediate problem and the other creates someone who will fix these problems without us in the future. Both are necessary. We need to be intentional and focused to coach for better sales outcomes in addition to better learning/development cultures that “Multiply” the capabilities of our salespeople.
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