Becoming Relevant as a Sales Coach

by Steve Jensen

10 min read

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “relevance” as “the state of being closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand.”

The catalyst for compound growth isn’t more tools, training or people. World-class coaching enables leaders to be relevant to salespeople, helping them change activities, develop new skills, and improve performance.

Relevance. “If I can’t help my reps do more or do it faster, what value am I?”

Coaching is about being relevant. Reps aren’t interested in generic information—they want you to be relevant to their needs, to their current deals and to their careers. With all the business intelligence data that is available today, it is tempting to look at a sales dashboard, review the results with your reps and call it coaching.

But data doesn’t improve performance—people do. The challenge is to move beyond the data to stay relevant as a coach so that your efforts are accepted and appreciated.

Stop Binary Thinking

Many coaches tend to separate their team into two categories—those they coach and those they don’t. Historically this has been driven by an “either/or” mentality where the sales leader only coaches poor performers and the rest of the team doesn’t get coached. In some cases, the dividing point is those who hit quota vs. those who don’t. In some it is those who are on their way out vs. those who are headed in and up.

In a new study from The Sales Management Association (Measuring Sales Management’s Coaching Impact), the results showed that “coaching time is allocated in ways that favor reactive performance issues—poor performers and those asking for help.”

The Issue with “Do or Don’t”

This type of binary thinking has several fatal flaws. It ignores potential revenue gains from high-performing salespeople, which has been shown in our aggregated coaching study to have the potential for the biggest gains. It also assumes that there is only one necessary coaching curriculum and that all sales reps’ needs are alike. The needs of salespeople differ at every level, from onboarding to fine-tuning to ever greater challenges. Those needs must all be addressed separately.

The Sales Management Association’s study concluded that there is a need for “a widespread use of coaching as a proactive management intervention with pre-defined objectives and a focus on elevating performance across all salespeople.”

Segment-Driven Coaching

Segment-driven coaching is a better answer, both in overall performance and in revenue per rep. There are various ways to segment your team, based on performance bands or experience, for example. In Xvoyant’s experience, dividing your team into five performance bands is the most efficient and responsive method of segmentation.

The groups are:

  1. Stars
  2. High Core
  3. Core
  4. Low Core
  5. Poor

The percentage of reps who fall into each group is up to you. You should use natural breakpoints wherever possible. For instance, you would separate Core from Low Core at quota level. Stars may be at 120% of quota and Poor could be at 50%.

Once you have your groups set up, you can begin to coach each group to their individual needs. For Poor/Low Core, what skill/activity/resource would best help them achieve their goal? For Core/High Core/Star, what is their next summit to reach? How do you coach them to parlay their success to reach ever-higher summits?

The best way to gain insight on individual challenges is by segmenting your reps and comparing them against the average and against their peer groups. Using this kind of rep distribution, you can treat each group separately using strategies and tactics that are particularly useful for each group.

Get granular on activities. If reps that are hitting goal are performing a given activity at a certain level, compare those numbers with your Poor performers and use that knowledge to coach them on weak points and set goals for improvement. If a High Core rep aspires to make the President’s Club, compare their activities to your Stars and model your coaching and goals around that gap.

Retention

Retention is another concern that is addressed by a segmented coaching approach. 26% of salespeople changed jobs last year, and at an estimated 1.5x salary per rep, that adds up to a large amount.  According to CEB, quality of coaching is the number one determining factor in intent to stay. That means that by coaching your top performers you are saving salary and onboarding costs as well as increasing revenue per rep. This often allows you to meet your sales goals without increasing headcount.

Champion Predictability

There is no better motivator than accepting and achieving a sales goal and knowing it will net a specific result. Modern sales teams, in large part, are run using pipeline reports, both as a measurement of current activity and a predictor of future revenue. But they aren’t accurate because they don’t take into account the sales rep’s activities, competencies or adherence to process.

Building the Model

Start with modeling the performance and activities of your star performers. That way you can give a clear picture of the activities and competencies necessary to achieve that level of success. It not only informs a lower-performing rep of the changes he or she will have to make, but it incentivizes them by clearly demonstrating the results that can be achieved.

To be a great, relevant coach, you must also understand and connect to the salesperson’s idea of excellence. To the rep, there may be some individual goals they want to achieve or they may have goals based on moving up from one segment to the next in the short term with becoming a Star as a long-term goal. Ask the rep, “What segment do you want to reach?” Then, for example, you can have a conversation where you can show exactly what is necessary to move from one segment to another—number of starts required, necessary deal size and the required velocity of deals.

  • Poor— You may be relevant by focusing on Activities.
  • Core—You may be relevant by focusing on skills and competencies.
  • Stars—You become relevant by chasing the next mountain.

Connect to the Future

It’s important to connect to the future state that you want to reach, not the current state. Coaching shouldn’t be about reviewing the past as much as planning for the future. “Where do you want to go?” “How high do you want to reach?” Those are the types of questions you should ask.

Then, model the process necessary to get there. “How many more deals do you need to start?” “What size of deals should you be chasing?” “How quickly do you need to get them done?” Looking at just those four things, you should be able to choose tactics that will help you win and level up.

You can use the formula below (match when text is complete) to model the competencies of compound growth. For example, using the formula, if you improved each of those variables by just 10%, you get a 48% increase.

What If?

When you know how those drivers need to change, you can get more granular, narrowing the effort required down to specific activities and competency improvements. This also lets you be very predictive, knowing exactly what the changes will mean to the rep in revenue, which is a huge motivator to improve.

Once you have identified key activities, you can set goals around performance with a very specific focus and suddenly pipelines take on new meaning. You will be able to predict, based on adherence to process, outcomes with a high degree of accuracy. The takeaway here is that you should coach to activities, not outcomes.

Personal Relevance

Coaching, at its core, is a person-to-person activity. Team trainings, kickoffs, and pipeline reviews can’t begin to have the impact of a half-hour, one-on-one meeting every month to discuss intentional improvement and the effect it will have on a rep’s future.

To reach its potential, coaching must be personally relevant. It has to matter to a rep and they have to be able to see, in no uncertain terms, exactly what it will do for them if they follow through on goals.

Create Moments That Matter

When you have modeled what success looks like, your next step is to have a “Now What?” conversation. You need to explain to the rep that they are at a fork-in-the-road moment, where they can either change and reap the rewards or not change and achieve the same results they always have and be disappointed.

This takes the emotion out of coaching conversations because the results of various actions are completely predictable. Do X get Y. All the goals you set will be relevant—both to you and to the rep. Make sure you are not just having conversations. Have conversations about what your rep is going to do next.

Your conversation can’t be about winning a particular 15K deal. It has to be about changing their activities or building a skill—things that the rep is 100% in charge of. Then you know if they trying to change or they aren’t. Focus your limited resources (time and effort) on who you can coach.

Think of all of this as “leveling-up” or significantly impacting revenue per rep as well as overall quota attainment. Focus on the commitments each person must make to create relevant coaching goals.

Measure Coachability

In addition to measuring process, measuring coachability is another tool for being relevant. You can’t be relevant for reps that aren’t coachable—you’ll be wasting your time. If a rep is coachable, you know that he or she will respond to a model for success. These reps are where you should focus your time and where you will find you can be relevant.

Observable Moments

Being able to see your reps in action or conversely, them watching you executing sales processes is a powerful tool. You can help diagnose problems, spot competency gaps and give them real-time feedback. They can watch how you handle various scenarios, overcome objections, use sales tools correctly and engage with potential customers.

Observable moments are generally overlooked when planning schedules and allotting coaching time, yet they are one of the most powerful tools a sales leader has to engage their salespeople. Seeing a rep in action gives the opportunity for instant feedback and reinforcement. It promotes knowledge share and provides opportunities to model what awesome looks like.

Creating those kinds of moments takes time, but in the long run, it will help you build a competent, enthusiastic team that will value your time and look forward to those occasions. Their engagement will be higher and their loyalty will increase.

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Steve Jensen is VP of Marketing at Xvoyant

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