By Bryan Jeppsen
4 min read
As winter has come on strong, and temperatures drop to freezing levels, I really appreciate the radiant heating system in my home. Radiant heat circulates hot water in the floors throughout the house. The result is heat through the floors giving a solid base of warmth everywhere with no cold spots. Whenever family and friends stay at our home, they often comment on how surprising it is to go barefoot into the kitchen and walk on those porcelain tiles that are warm where their expectation is they would be a bit chilly. That sense of expectation is key to companies having a strong sales coaching culture.
Now, stay with me and that will start to make sense.
The concept of the company culture is everywhere right now. A company’s culture defines what the company stands for. More and more, employees (in this case, sales reps) have an expectation of a strong culture that they consider to be a primary factor when selecting a place of employment.
Today’s sales reps are no different. They expect that the company will have a plan in place for their future development. They want a regular, frequent stream of feedback to help them intentionally improve and exceed their goals. Today’s sales reps want a culture of coaching.
Unfortunately, reality doesn’t currently meet their expectations. Studies have shown that while 83% of managers say that they are great coaches, only 16% of reps say that they are receiving coaching and only 3% say that the coaching is useful. That gap is entirely due to poor company coaching culture.
Expectations
For a sales team, coaching culture defines what team members expect from their leaders when they have 1:1 meetings. The expectation covers three areas:
How important are these expectations? The same study shows that 16% of your sales force is looking for another job and 33% will change employers in 2020. Meeting their coaching expectations is essential.
Executive Buy-In
The first step to building a sales coaching culture is to get the senior management of the organization to understand and be 100% committed to three things:
Fail to get senior management on board relative to these three concepts and your entire sales organization will never truly flourish. “The best way around is straight through.”
What exactly does that mean relative to sales coaching? It’s simple. If you’re going to create a culture in which sales coaching is truly important, then sales managers must have the courage to provide both good and constructive feedback as quickly and regularly as possible.
A Coaching Mindset
This starts with a mindset and commitment not only on the part of senior sales leaders, but also on the part of sales managers, and they must agree to these non-negotiables. In these 6 Non-Negotiables of a Sales Coaching Culture, sales managers must:
A Real-Life Story
We installed a coaching and feedback process with one of our clients over a several-year period. This organization had somewhere around 400 salespeople and 60 sales managers. When we started, it was clear that they had no consistent sales process, training methodology, coaching system or anything else. Interestingly enough, they also hadn’t hit their sales targets for 4 years in a row.
It took about 12 months to integrate the coaching process for their sales managers, the main part of which was developing ongoing messaging and support of driving a sales coaching culture down through the managers. “Coaching the Coaches” was an ongoing component of this installation.
While sales coaching skills training is an important part of developing sales managers into coaches, the real work is on the shoulders of senior leaders inside of the company. That which is reinforced gets done (inspect what you expect), so building a culture in which sales coaching is reinforced can’t be an event…it’s an ongoing commitment.
Conclusion
Like the welcome feel of warm tiles on bare feet make friends and family enjoy their visits at my home, modern salespeople move to and stay at companies where effective sales coaching helps them achieve their goals and career aspirations. When reps encounter a company with a great coaching culture, they thrive.
A coaching culture lowers attrition, increases engagement and in the long run, has a positive effect on production, win rate, and quota achievement. Industry-leading companies either already have a coaching culture or they are implementing one. The bottom-line results, both in terms of employee performance and satisfaction and increased revenue is a real competitive advantage.
Bryan Jeppsen is the Producer of the Sales Leadership Podcast
www.xvoyant.com