Sales Coaching Blog

This week we proudly announced the release of our upcoming book, “The Coaching Effect”, written by EcSell Institute's very own Bill Eckstrom, President and Founder, and Sarah Wirth, VP of Client Services. 

Both authors have spent over a decade researching the activities, behaviors, and performance of leaders. They’ve studied more than 100,000 coaching interactions in the workplace, primarily of sales teams, and have been able to determine how coaching affects team outcomes and growth. 

Every organization that has tried to implement a new training program, sales process or service initiative knows that change can be hard. At the outset of a new initiative, we all have the best of intentions that the new ideas we want to implement will take hold in our culture and improve our company for the better. But in fact, research proves that 50-70% of change initiatives fail because they aren’t implemented effectively.

At work we have bosses. They are also called managers, directors, executives, regionals, assistant VPs, VPs, and many more titles; however, whenever someone outside of work is hired to help us develop we refer to them as a “coach”. Why is it in athletics they are ALWAYS referred to as a coach?

Experience, research and common sense tell us a “coach” brings differentiated talents and skills, assistance, understanding, more overall development than a “boss” is able to deliver. So, if that is the case why do we even have bosses at work? Wouldn’t we all be better off with coaches?

Good news! According to this recent research article from ADT, more and more organizations are starting to realize that investing in their sales managers ability to coach, has a significant impact on sales results. Which begs the question, what type of ROI can we expect from sales coaching?

Millions of dollars and hours are spent each year by sales departments on training, with much of this directed toward teaching sales people a sales methodology and the skills to execute it. So much time and energy is spent here for one simple reason is - because it gets results. 

However, the best sales methodology and training in the world can lose much of its impact without an effective sales coaching methodology to reinforce it (Tweet this).  Unfortunately, a sales coaching methodology is a foreign concept to most organizations.

Want to hear a joke? What do Nike and top performing sales managers have in common?

They just do it.

Okay, okay. That was a terrible joke, I admit. But at the same time, the thought behind this is actually sound. Recently, I wrote up the findings from some EcSell Institute research on the ways that top performing sales managers work and coach that make them successful.

According to EcSell Institute research, one-on-one meetings with salespeople may be one of the most critical factors in helping them perform. In our Through the Eyes of the Rep survey, we see strong relationships between sales people that rate their one-to-one meetings with their managers as effective and sales people that rate their managers as excellent leaders, coaches and effective at motivating them to greater sales importance. 

These relationships indicate that one-to-one meetings are one of the most critical activities you can do with your sales people. (Tweet this) Read more about the effectiveness of these meetings in this best practice document. 

Sales Coach: (n.) Someone who develops processes, relationships and growth experiences to maximize individual and team performance

Sales Coaching: (v.) The act of teaching and helping sales people improve or enhance their skillsets

How effective are your managers in their role as a sales coach? If you are not fully confident about your answer to the question above, it’s time to start putting less emphasis on the action of sales coaching, and more emphasis on the role itself of a sales coach. Shifting this mindset can sometimes be a challenge for sales organizations because for the last three decades all the attention and resources have gone directly to the salesperson in an effort to help them sell more.

And so the articles in HBR, Forbes, Inc., and Fast Company continue...

Blogs in which consultants pontificate on the benefits of coaching in sales seems to have grown exponentially. Everywhere I turn there is something to hear or read on why sales coaching is so important. 

EcSell Institute research shows that more than 50% of sales managers knowingly execute less than 48% of the high performance coaching activities that will drive the most sales. The result of this statistic is obvious; sales revenue is left on the table due to the sales manager’s lack of willingness to execute. 

For perspective, how would a President, CSO, EVP Sales, etc. respond to the above stats if they were applied to sales people?  What if they learned half of their sales reps were doing only half of the activities that led to the best outcome? It would be unacceptable, heads would roll, yet in the sales leadership profession this double standard is unknowingly accepted because coaching performance is not measured. How much more would be sold if sales leaders fully committed and behaved like high performance coaches?