Four Things Coaching is Not

Most sales managers think they are coaching more than they actually are. And most salespeople feel less coached than their managers think they should. Meanwhile, most sales organizations struggle to gain traction on performance improvements.

There’s clearly a disconnect between the impact we as a profession think coaching should provide and what it is currently providing. In my opinion, one of the reasons for this disconnect is a basic misunderstanding about what coaching is and, especially, what it is NOT.

So here are four things we commonly mistake for it, but that is not coaching.

1. Coaching is Not Managing
   Picture this. You’re a salesperson having a weekly “coaching” call with your manager. You sit down in their office, and they pull up your data (assuming they have access to good data). They point out that although you’ve made your sales numbers so far this fiscal year, you are behind on activity numbers. They tell you that is going to mean that your sales numbers will go down in the near future. They encourage you to “get out there and get those activities up!”
   
   They might feel like they have coached you.
   
   You feel like you have been managed.
   
   Who’s right? You are.
   
   Managing is the process of ensuring that individuals on the sales team align with the company’s goals for them, and produce the results they are paid to produce. It involves telling people what to do, and holding them accountable to do it. It may include encouragement (“get out there and do it! You can do it!”), but it is fundamentally focused on meeting company goals.
   
   Coaching, on the contrary, focuses on the individual and helping them identify and achieve their own goals. It should of course contribute to helping salespeople meet company goals, but rather than telling them what to do, it helps them discover their own motivation and approaches to getting where they want to be.
   
   Now imagine you walk into your manager’s office and sit down, and they ask you how you feel about your performance. You say that you’re happy you’re meeting your numbers, and you hope you’ll continue to do well. They ask you if you have any concerns about whether you’ll be able to continue to do so. You say that in the past, you’ve had a bit of a feast or famine experience. They ask if you know why.
   
   By the end of the conversation, you’ve uncovered that you get so busy servicing the tail end of your pipeline that you forget to continually fill the front end of it. With your manager, you create a framework for your day that carves out time for you to focus on the front of your pipeline first thing to make sure you always get to it. Your numbers go up and stay up.
   
   That’s coaching. It may have the same end result as managing, sometimes, but it creates intrinsic motivation and involves the salesperson in developing the solution. Read more about the difference and when to manage versus when to coach here.
2. Coaching is Not Training
   New scenario. You have a team meeting for your manager to go over some new sales process steps. In order to help you understand and implement the new steps, the manager facilitates a series of role playing scenarios.
   
   At the end of the session, you feel competent and ready to implement the new skills.
   
   But you have not been coached. You have been trained.
   
   Coaching focuses on your individual needs and development, and helps you develop your intrinsic motivation to grow.
   
   On a sports team, training is something you do to strengthen skills that are necessary for performance. Coaching is what happens when the coach asks you what you hope to accomplish in the sport and then helps you develop a training program that will help you meet your personal goals and address your specific areas for growth.
   
   On a sales team, this can look like this:
   
   After a sales training, you sit with your manager, and they ask you whether you feel the new skills are working for you. You tell them they seem to be effective at getting to the second meeting, but the second meeting often doesn’t go anywhere.
   
   They ask you to describe what’s happening. You tell them, and they ask whether you feel like you actually believe what you’re saying during that second meeting. You think about it and realize that you don’t really believe it, and that’s impacting the way you talk about it.
   
   The manager asks you to reflect on why you don’t believe it. Through the course of the conversation, you discover that you have been carrying a limiting belief about whether you are competent to provide guidance to a customer. Once you discover that, you create a plan together to address the limiting belief so that you can feel more confident in that second meeting.
   
   Sales training can feed into coaching, and sometimes, coaching can point you at necessary training, but they are not the same thing.
3. Coaching is Not Mentoring
   A mentor can be a coach, and a coach can be a mentor, but they are not the same thing. A mentor is someone who has been where you are and has achieved something you want. A more senior salesperson can be a mentor to a more junior salesperson without coaching them, and a coach can coach without having been in the same place as the person they are coaching.
   A mentor can be a coach, and a coach can be a mentor, but they are not the same thing.

   George Brontén
   For example: You someday hope to become a sales executive. You look up to the director of your sales department. You don’t report to them, but you see them regularly, and they take time out of their day regularly to encourage you, share stories about how they got where they are, and offer recommendations to you based on their own experience. Perhaps they even tell you that you need a coach.
   
   That’s mentoring.
   
   The same person may coach you by asking you questions about your goals and aspirations, and helping you identify for yourself where you can improve and grow. A coach who is not a mentor may ask you those same questions, and you might, in the course of being coached, identify someone you look up to who might be a good mentor.
   
   In this way, mentoring and coaching can point to each other, and the same person can do both, but they are not the same thing.
4. Coaching is Not Role Modeling
   This is a big mistake we make in the sales industry, assuming that a good role model will also be a good coach. We promote our high performers into management positions and then tell them to coach, without teaching them how.
   
   But just because someone is good at something doesn’t mean they’ll be good at helping others be good at it.
   
   Imagine you’re the salesperson in your manager’s office. The manager was promoted because they’re an amazing salesperson. You want to be just like them. You ask them how they made so much money as a salesperson and they tell you what they do to make so many sales. They continue to perform well on an individual basis, and you watch them to see how you can repeat their success.
   
   That’s a role model. It can be helpful to you, but role modeling doesn’t address you as an individual, help you uncover your personal motivations, or pinpoint your biggest areas for growth. 
   
   The role model can be a coach if they have skills and desire, and a coach can be a role model, but the two things are different. 

Understanding Where the Pieces Fit In

In a healthy sales ecosystem, coaching, managing, training, mentoring, and role modeling all have a place. Salespeople need role models to show them how successful it’s possible to be. They need mentors to take a personal interest in them and pave the way. They need training to gain skills and learn new processes. They need managing so they know what’s expected of them and how to meet company goals. 

But most of all, they need coaching to help them as individuals identify what they need and establish intrinsic motivation to accomplish what you want them to accomplish (and what they want to accomplish).

When you have all of these pieces implemented effectively and working together within your organization, you can’t help but win.