Developing Your Team
Technology gives us the ability to measure Sales Rep Performance across many dimensions. Unfortunately this improvement in measuring performance has not translated into significant changes in sales manager behaviors and the ability to “coach” and develop of sales representatives.
Based on research, it’s clear that most sales managers are failing to coach effectively. A majority of sales representatives report that managers do not provide support to help them improve performance or have specific development plans beyond sales quotas. Unfortunately, many managers transfer all accountability to their sales reps when objectives are missed. The problem is that managers don’t understand how to effectively coach reps to drive improved performance. How could they? Most companies lack effective training for sales managers. Companies operate under the model that promoting successful sales reps is enough for success as a manager and fail to define outcomes, or create focused objectives that include people development while continuing to drive for results (transactional and transformational).
Managers typically review a sales report and state the obvious to their rep; "you’re not meeting your numbers.” This is often followed with "coaching" to sell more! Often the manager falls back to what they know and proceed to tell their rep how successful they were in sales, or what so and so is doing and you need to be more like them. The conversations miss the opportunity to find out the real issues and focused development areas needed for the rep. How many managers successfully define the outcomes (beyond sales), understand each team member’s strength, remove barriers that hinder performance and continue to work on developing their individuals? I often see less than 10% of a manager’s time spent in these areas - combined!
Ultimately managers end up transferring the blame to the sales rep who was “not able” to meet the expectations of the position (not that the expectations or outcomes were clearly defined). The end result…the sales rep is fired or leaves…potentially costing the company hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire someone else who can perform!
There are two areas that can provide insight into the effectiveness of your sales management team.
Quantity of coaching is an easy metric to track and should show that your sales managers are spending at least fifty-percent of their time in coaching, observing, and developing their team. If your managers are unable to devote this much energy to your team, you may want to review how they are spending their time and delegate non-coaching time to someone else. Quality of coaching is more difficult to measure, but can be done via direct feedback from the sales reps on a regular basis. The use of 360-feedback surveys can be used as well as skip-up interviews and quarterly development updates between the sales manager and his or her boss.
As a twenty-year veteran of corporate America working for high performance companies, I have learned through my own executive coaching training and client work that many opportunities are missed through the course of conversations. The skills needed by managers require presence, understanding, probing, listening and the ability to understand and help each team member’s unique strengths. These skills take time to develop and are vastly different than the ones needed when selling or driving results (revenue). The good news is these skills can be learned, and when effectively incorporated they can increase revenue, performance, engagement and skills of your sales managers and team.
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