Coaching for Dollars

If your team is playing at 75% or less, only
a great coach can reach into them for that other 25%.
– Vince Lombardi, Green Bay Packers coach

Coaching – from sports to sales – is one of the most important sales-management activities. To help people capitalize on their strengths and overcome personal obstacles to enhance their expertise, a coach must focus on high ROI skills and beliefs, implement a strong selling system, understand the hand you’ve been dealt, and track metrics.

This article de-mystifies the process by providing ideas and tools that help create a coaching culture for generating a high ROI.

When to Coach

While the vast majority of sales people need some form of coaching, a sales person is sending a strong signal when he/she:

always asks for “special” low pricing
lacks motivation and drive
lacks confidence and has difficulty recovering from rejection
accepts stalls and put-offs
does not prospect consistently
can’t sell at high margins

Of course, these are just a few examples. Also, consider that increased product commoditization makes sales people a critical point of differentiation, so sales coaching becomes even more critical in sharpening your company’s competitive edge.

Creating a Coaching Culture

Focus on high ROI skills and beliefs

To identify where to focus coaching efforts to maximize performance, start with an assessment tool that provides objective information about personal selling beliefs. Without this type of information, you may have your eye on the wrong ball. Objective Management Group’s sales evaluation helped me as a sales manager identify beliefs that were sabotaging sales efforts, so I could focus my coaching on those areas.

One of my reps frequently said, “They don’t have the money in their budget.” Since a discomfort talking about money can negatively impact sales results by up to 24%, I decided that my coaching and training efforts needed to focus on these beliefs systems. Until my rep could talk comfortably and confidently about money and budgets, this objection would haunt him forever!

Quick Coach is a CD full of helpful coaching ideas. I tap it for coaching suggestions for a rep’s identified roadblock. The program offers positive affirmations, recommended books on coaching, and training and coaching resources.

Implement a strong selling system

A strong selling system for assessing sales coaching needs and measuring progress includes:

clear steps that can be inspected and monitored
common language for planning and debriefing a sales calls
framework for making joint sales calls

I helped a high-end IT consulting company reduce their sales cycle from 18 months to 15 months by documenting their selling process and optimizing it to ensure every interaction with the prospect was maximized. We created a common language for the entire sales organization that ensured more effective pre-call planning, call execution and post-call debriefing. Dave, the president, said, “Having a clearly defined process improved communications so we could interact synergistically.”

Understand the hand you’ve been dealt

One of the tools that can help a sales manager determine the best approach is the Hand-You’ve-Been-Dealt quadrant by John Condry of Cornerstones Management, a management consulting firm. Once you determine which quadrant your sales person is in, you can determine the best coaching strategy: Terminate or transfer, train and provide personal goal development, retain and provide growth opportunities, or maintain and monitor performance.

Jim, an office products company president who wore the sales manager hat, had two sales people who weren’t hitting revenue targets. Jack had been with the company for about nine months, had not hit any quick-start targets, and made excuses for non-performance. Jim put Jack into the first quadrant with poor attitude and low competence. He could talk to Jack about excuse-making and taking personal responsibility for results to move him to quadrant two, where there would be ROI in training efforts. Or, he could transfer him to another department, or terminate him.

On the other hand, Nancy was new to the company with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and very coachable. However, she lacked product knowledge and selling skills. Her good attitude and poor skills earned her a spot in a quadrant that required training to move her to the high-performer quadrant.

Track metrics

Analysis of the sales rep’s metrics and ratios in each step of the sales process is also a useful way to determine coaching needs: how many dials convert to conversations with the decision-maker; how many conversations to land an appointment; how many appointments before a proposal is presented; how many proposals result in revenue.

Two reps in a company had the following stats:

	Rep 1	Rep 2
Dial : Conversations	50%	10%
Conversations : Qualified Appointments	45%	55%
Qualified Appointments : Proposals	60%	40%
Proposals : Closes	10%	80%

Rep 1 seemed to have excellent stats in moving prospects through the sales process, but only 10% of his proposals resulted in sales. Was it the proposal or the qualification process? Eighty percent of Rep 2’s proposals resulted in business. She had more difficulty getting through the gatekeeper to the decision maker. These metrics, coupled with an objective management sales evaluation and Quick Coach, helped me identify coaching opportunities.

Making Good Organizations Great

Linda Richardson in her book, Sales Coaching, sums up the critical need for effective sales coaching. “Even if an organization has a compelling vision, even it is highly market-oriented, and even if it has sales systems, without developmental coaching as a way of life and feedback as a mainstay of communication, its management and sales people cannot continuously improve and get to the next level fast enough.”