Sales leaders should hold their sales managers accountable for providing consistent coaching to reps because it has a significant impact on sales productivity and performance. Sixty-five percent of high-impact sales organizations (75% or more of reps achieving quota) report that sales managers spend 20% or more of their time coaching. Today, CEOs and investors prioritize scalable and repeatable revenue. To achieve this, sales leaders must ensure that at least 90% of reps achieve quota, instead of relying on a few superstar sellers to close the majority of business.

Additionally, sellers are increasingly demanding more coaching. Forrester data shows that 62% of sellers agree that “the feedback and coaching I receive helps improve my performance.” And ultimately, sales leaders and managers are responsible for coaching and developing their sellers. As a result, coaching should be a crucial tool for sales leaders and managers to increase sales productivity.

The Three Keys To Effective Coaching For Sales Leaders

Too often, sales leaders and managers are tasked with coaching sellers without being taught how to coach effectively. Effective coaching should improve knowledge, skills, and process execution through communicating expectations, facilitating self-assessment, and offering direction and feedback. Sales leaders must design coaching programs with three key components in mind:

  • Coaching culture. Sales leaders must create a setting where sellers feel safe learning and where they aren’t afraid to ask questions and learn from failure. Deliver consistently, rather than with one-off, ad hoc motions to close specific deals. Managers and sellers should be assessed on their willingness to coach and be coached. Lastly, coaching outcomes should be measured to see how reps and managers are progressing.
  • Insights. No two reps are the same, and some perform better than others. But why? Insights are not only key to learning more about customers. They are also key to learning about your sellers. Sales leaders must use insights to unearth each sellers’ skill/knowledge gap. Furthermore, insights can expose what high-performing sellers do so that sales leaders can teach lower-performing reps those skills. But sales orgs must have the processes and tools in place to capture these vital insights …
  • Processes and tools. Sales leaders finally have the tools to capture insights to make informed decisions about their sellers. And they need to use them. Conversation intelligence tools allow sales leaders to see where a seller’s ultimately won a deal or where it fell through. As a result, sales leaders and managers can personalize coaching for that rep to address their specific weaknesses. Additionally, they can identify successful sales actions and coach lower-performing reps to implement those at the right time.

Sales Leaders: Leverage Forrester To Ensure Successful Coaching And Increased Revenue

All sales leaders can leverage our research on coaching below to ensure that they reap the full spectrum of benefits from coaching programs: