The Coaching Effect Blog

Most of us can point to leadership moments from movies and TV shows that have inspired us. One of my personal favorites is from Hoosiers. In this movie, Gene Hackman’s character, a basketball coach named Norman Dale, benches a kid during a game for not being a team player.  When another player fouls out, Coach Dale is left with only four kids available.  As the kid that was benched gets up to return to the game, Coach Dale lets him know he should stay put and tells the ref, “my team is on the floor.”

One of our favorite parts of the Sales Coaching Summit (now rebranded as The Coaching Effect Summit) is announcing and celebrating our coaching award winners. In sales, there’s lots of recognition of the performance of individual sales people – from internal awards to incentive trips – but little focus is placed on celebrating excellence in sales leadership. Our goal is to change that, so each year we honor companies and people who truly excel, or should I say EcSell, in the coaching and development of sales performers. This year, we celebrated two very deserving winners:

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.

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.

According to EcSell Institute research, one-to-one meetings with your reps 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 reps that rate their one-to-one meetings with their managers as effective and reps that rate their managers as excellent leaders, coaches and effective at motivating them to greater sales importance. 

At our most recent Sales Coaching Summit, we announced our 2018 Sales Coaching Award winners. Two award recipients were recognized for not only leading their teams to excellent sales results, but doing so through the implementation of coaching best practices that allow their sales team members to grow and flourish. The highest individual honor was bestowed upon 2018 Coach of the Year, Curt Reekers of Orthopedic Solutions Inc.

Sometimes my boss really annoys me.

Don’t worry about him reading this – we have a really great relationship, so I’ve said this to his face a few times. Specifically, he annoys me when I’m working on a new project and I think I’ve come up with the right idea, only to have him ask me a bunch of questions that poke holes in my thinking. Just when I think I’ve arrived at a conclusion, his challenging questions put me back at square one – that’s annoying!

My 10-year-old son is a tennis player. He absolutely loves the sport and works really hard at it. Recently, we were talking about the different coaches he has at his tennis club and I asked him which coaches were his favorites. When he gave me two names, I asked him why and his response was fascinating. He said, “I like them best because they push me. The other coaches are really nice, but they sometimes let kids mess around during practice.”

This answer made me smile because it showed me that even a 10 year old knows the difference between nice coaches and those that really drive performance. Just like a young tennis player, we have found that sales reps often prefer a coach that makes them work and improve. At EcSell Institute, we describe these “pushier” managers as having a higher Catalytic Factor (or C-Factor), that is, the ability to push their reps into a higher performance zone.

More and more of our Through the Eyes of the Rep survey data shows that many sales reps are not interested in moving into sales management. Whether it’s because the reps like the autonomy of an individual performer role, or feel they can make more money as a sales producer, or aren’t interested in coaching others; becoming a sales manager simply isn’t a desirable path for all reps. Therefore, sales managers are presented with the challenge of how-to grow and develop sales reps' careers without leaving their current role.

The only way to plan for career development inside the same sales role is to understand the individual talents, needs and interests of the sales rep. To this end, we encourage each sales manager to conduct an annual career discussion to better understand these individual concerns.