One phrase that I often hear from sales leaders is: ‘I don’t have time to coach’.
The first thing I always wonder is: Does this sales leader understand the value of sales coaching?'
And I don’t mean the value of coaching on the sales rep. I’m talking about the value of coaching for the sales leader.
Having a coaching style of leadership is incredibly impactful on the sales leader. Let's discuss the four direct positive impacts:
1. It saves the sales leader time (by implementing a connector style of leadership)
2. It helps the sales leader to make better decisions (by staying close to voice of customer)
3. It gives visibility for forecasting and strategizing
4. It furthers the sales leader's career progression (creating more opportunity)
Coaches simply just do not have the time to do everything themselves. So, if they can empower their team to work to their full potential through sales performance coaching and leadership training, everyone wins.
#1 Sales coaching saves the leader time
Sales leaders who coach have more time to invest in other areas
When we coach our people, we understand them. We find out about their beliefs, values, and strengths in their personalities and skills. You can use that wisdom to help team members connect with each other in the most productive ways.
Discover who in your team is most suited to aspects of a job, and then delegate accordingly so the team can help each other. Slotting the best person into each role increases and improves overall output, without adding more people.
When you can connect others to working in their strengths and skills, you as a leader can move to a role of support, freeing up your time.
When the leaders have more time, they can be impactful in other ways. To find out more about the connector style of leadership, you can read a report by Gartner: Managers Can’t Be Great Coaches All By Themselves
How to be a connector manager:
Coach by having a deep understanding of what your rep needs, and then identifying and using other colleagues with the relevant expertise in those areas. Don’t tell your rep what to do. Instead, ask the right questions, provide tailored feedback, and help employees make a connection to a colleague who can help them.
Focus on quality, not quantity or frequency of your coaching. Really understand your employees’ aspirations and the skills needed to develop and work out ways together you can monitor their progress towards agreed goals.
#2 Sales coaching keeps you close to voice of customer
It’s all too easy as you progress up an organization to become distanced and even alienated from the market and your ICP. Fewer client interactions and more influencing opinions from above can affect your grip on voice of customer.
Luckily, no one knows your ideal clients better than the people who spend all day talking to them. They understand their questions, concerns, and thought processes. They have their finger on the pulse of new use cases, market trends or perceptions as well as any threats emerging.
When you make use of sales call recording or audio transcriptions in your coaching sessions, you can review your sales rep’s meetings to help them develop. But as you are listening and coaching your sales executives, you are also listening to the customer yourself, their needs, and values.
The customer changes, and if you're going to positively influence the product and service, how you market and how you evolve your sales process, you need to keep connected. Coaching is a great opportunity for you to do that, an incredibly effective use of time.
#3 The impact of coaching on forecasting and strategizing
Until you start looking into the granular detail of what your sales team are doing, you cannot accurately predict your sales pipeline.
How do you know how likely a sale is, when a rep tells you one thing but their conversion rate tells you another?
As you approach the end of quarter, how do you know which opportunities are worth spending time on, with limited people and time resources?
Luckily, you don’t have to sit down and listen back to every single sales call.
Using Conversation Intelligence (CI) to automate call recording, scoring and learning, you can gather insights quickly and effectively. Know how and where your team should be spending their time, both in the short and long term.
#4 Sales coaching offers freedom and career progression
The best thing about coaching is the confidence and ownership it develops in our sales team - yourself included. If you’re not coaching your sales reps through their challenges, then you’re problem-solving for them. If you’re solving issues and handing out direction, you’re creating an environment where your team becomes overly reliant on you. It’s then harder to remove yourself from the daily sales operation.
This does not equal success for you, them or the organization as a whole.
Instead, when we lead through coaching, that confidence and ownership that builds in your team creates independent thinkers, a team that can now operate when you’re not in the room. That power in your team is incredibly valuable for you, it gives you freedom to explore different opportunities, opportunities that exist in other areas of your business, or maybe additional roles you can take on for other businesses which can really help your career flourish.
If we’ve got you thinking about your sales coaching efforts, check out our fundamentals guide or watch our video.
Shelley Lavery is the COO and Co-Founder of Jiminny, the leading conversation intelligence and sales coaching platform that helps companies maximize their revenue. With over a decade of experience in coaching B2B sales teams, Shelley was previously Group SVP of Sales at Reward Gateway now leading the conversation intelligence discussion with expertise and insight.
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