We’ve all heard the saying “you can never have too much of a good thing.” The positive link between good sales coaching and sales performance is well documented, so it stands to reason that more coaching time spent with your reps, regardless of the method, should be a good thing, right?
It turns out, however, that when it comes to influencing win rates and revenue, not all coaching approaches are created equal.
CSO Insights’ 2015 Sales Management Optimization Study reported that front-line sales managers are spending 21.8% of a typical work week on coaching, averaging just over one hour per week with each member of their team.
They further asked how companies were handling the actual coaching process, and found that firms were generally adopting one of three approaches. The first method, cited by 42% of respondents, left it to the discretion of individual managers to determine how they wanted to coach their teams. The second group, representing 33% of respondents, was comprised of companies that had an informal process which managers were encouraged, but not required to use. The final 24% of respondents indicated they had implemented a more formal approach to coaching that managers were both trained in and expected to use.
As detailed in a recent blog post by CSO Insight’s Kim Cameron, seeing those breakdowns prompted a deeper dive into the data to understand what differences, if any, each approach generated when it came to business results. Since two-thirds of coaching time is dedicated to opportunity-specific coaching versus general skills development, CSO compared the win rates of forecasted deals for each of the three coaching approaches. The chart below summarizes the findings.
Results showed only a marginal difference between the discretionary and informal coaching groups, but there was a significant increase in win rates for companies that adopted and enforced a more formal coaching process. While this coaching approach likely required more investment from the company and sales leadership, the resulting increase in revenue from closing more deals could easily offset those costs.
Given these indicators, many sales executives are turning to CRM-integrated technology to support these mandates and deliver the data required for more focused coaching. In Qstream’s case, our Predictive Insights Engine analyzes hundreds and thousands of data points from your team’s responses to scenario-based challenges deliver real-time dashboards that let managers quickly and easily see how their sales teams are performing. (For organizations standardized on Salesforce.com, managers can now also access real-time insights directly from within their CRM, including their existing Salesforce dashboards.)
Qstream then uses this data to pinpoint the most relevant and highly individualized coaching opportunities to let managers take action immediately, including integrated communication tools that make it easy to reach specific reps or the entire group directly from their Qstream manager dashboard.
Even seasoned managers can try to coach too many skills at once, or coach the wrong skills altogether. Now your sales managers not only know who needs coaching, but when to coach, and what specific skills need to be addressed.
There’s no question that an effective, engaged sales coach can make a positive impact on their team, but as this data shows, not all coaching methods are created equal when it comes to generating business results. Is your company considering a more formal coaching methodology? How will you implement it, and more importantly, how will you measure its impact? We’d love to hear from you!
