Coaching salespeople

Coaching salespeople isn’t easy, but it’s a sales manager’s best tool.
The more competitive a sport, the more coaching the champion needs. Sales management is one of the most competitive areas of a company, and yet, contrary to popular belief, few sales organizations have implemented an effective sales coaching system. This is all the more paradoxical given that the majority of companies want to increase their sales, but they don’t put in the resources to do so. Oh, yes, they spend fortunes on advertising or promotional campaigns, but they don’t put budgets into improving the efficiency and organization of their salespeople, whether they’re on the road, on the phone or in a website chat room.

Sales coaches’ most common mistakes

– When you talk to a vice-president of sales, everything is generally going well: they have the best people, sales are progressing, the team leaders are coaching perfectly. When you ask a few questions or go and see what’s going on in the field, you realize that managers are doing results monitoring interviews, which is supervision, not coaching. Monitoring results tells you where the salesperson is in terms of sales, but not how to increase them. The team leader therefore increases the pressure, but doesn’t give the salesperson any means of improving; all he does is push his salespeople towards disgust and resignation.
– But how can you coach a salesperson in an office if you can’t see how he’s selling? It’s as stupid as coaching a field hockey player by analyzing his results and not watching what he does on the ice!
– The manager is overworked and has no time for coaching, as he has to produce reports and analyses for his management. He ends up spending his time analyzing what’s going wrong rather than working on improving it.
– The sales manager thinks he’s doing perfect coaching, goes out on the road, coaches his sales reps, corrects their mistakes at the customer’s, to such an extent that he ends up becoming the preferred contact for these customers at the expense of the sales rep, who loses credibility. This sales manager quickly becomes overwhelmed, as he accumulates two tasks, his own and those of his sales reps, by becoming the privileged contact for their own customers. The situation is ridiculous, but it happens quite often, and it’s not always the managers’ fault: if they haven’t been told how to do it, they’ll have to reinvent the wheel.

Training errors

– CRM (customer relationship management) is currently in vogue as a basic tool for salespeople. But some VPs of sales or marketing are buying complex, irrelevant tools that cost a fortune, not to mention the license fees, so much so that they no longer have training budgets. Why spend money on a big machine if salespeople don’t know how to use it? Worse still, when the CRM is bought by a marketing director who doesn’t know sales very well, the system in question is often not relevant to their industry, it’s found to be too cumbersome, ill-suited, too complicated, it’s put aside and replaced by an Excel… Worst of all, it’s true!
– In another case, the human resources department likes to work with a psychologist specializing in coaching or skills development. He’s a very good coach indeed, but he knows nothing about sales, and concocts a training program that’s not very well received by salespeople, who see how it doesn’t meet their needs. Sometimes, the company can afford to set up an in-house development team that will work for several months on a large coaching program that is mandatory for all sales managers. When you see it, you realize that it’s perfect, too perfect, so long in application that it’s unworkable if you want to coach all employees.

How to coach salespeople

The role of a coach is to get salespeople to surpass themselves in order to increase the company’s results. The most important quality of a coaching program is that it can be applied and implemented by all sales managers. It must therefore be designed around a number of key points.
– coaches’ sales skills, otherwise they won’t be able to coach effectively.
– the number of salespeople to be coached according to frequency. Clearly, 15 salespeople on the road to be coached by one person, or 20 salespeople on the phone, is too many, and there will be no real coaching. There are a number of key figures that need to be respected.
– The duration of coaching which, multiplied by the frequency, must not exceed 70% of the coach’s time
– The time of the sales manager needs to be analyzed. If he spends more than 15% of his time doing administration, then he loses his added value; an assistant would do the same thing for less money.
– Coaching tools must be neither too short nor too heavy. If they are so complicated (as is sometimes the case) that the coach is not familiar with them, how can he coach his salespeople?
– A system of coach-to-coach must be set up to constantly improve the system
– Finally, the coaching method must respect logical stages to bring about the best development for both coach and coachee, as both have to learn from each coaching session. These stages are based on preparation, salesperson awareness, knowledge development, immediate application, feedback and results observation.
In conclusion, let’s not forget that coaching is not an end in itself, it’s a means of improving results through the development of employees’ knowledge and motivation, so it’s a perpetual wheel, coaching is not a destination, it’s a journey.

Jean-Pierre Mercier

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