2005 was the year the Council first investigated how sales managers should coach their direct reports. At this point in time, we had never heard of credit default swaps and while everybody said they were worried about inflation, unemployment numbers were low and members were relatively sanguine about the prospects for continued growth. The pressure on the sales force was really centered on trying to accelerate the sales cycle. Buyers themselves were often looking to add capacity and were generally willing to cooperate with efforts designed to speed up decision-making.
Today, things couldn’t be more different from an economic perspective and the sales force is more worried about closing the sale than trying to accelerate the sales cycle per se. And so, we have returned to the topic of sales management this year and are investigating what new requirements are being placed on sales managers.
While we are still collecting data from our sellers in terms of the behaviors they observe from their manager, we do have some early observations. First, sales reps continue to score their managers low in terms of the coaching they provide. Fully 66% of sales reps indicate that their manager does worse at coaching as opposed to the other behaviors that a sales manager will need to demonstrate, such as planning, assessing risks, championing new initiatives or even delivering bad news to senior management.
But it’s not all bad news in terms of coaching. In general, the rep who doesn’t receive any coaching is rare – the need to coach certainly seems to have been heard. Similarly, managers are generally rated reasonably high with regards to sharing knowledge and being reasonably well-prepared for development discussions.
The difficulty is all around coaching to some very specific behaviors known to drive individual sales performance, such as:
- Showing people how to appropriately pressure the customer to make a decision
- Helping reps identify next steps with a customer
- Helping somebody identify how to overcome customer indifference
(The need to demonstrate these behaviors is a relatively new thing. These are the behaviors that we found to be responsible for driving success in this new economy with our research around the Challenger rep™ last year.)
All of this amounts to a different way of running a sales organization and managing your reps: less emphasis on following the process and a lot more emphasis on working closely with people to change the nature of the customer conversation. The game, in other words, might still be the same but the rules for sales managers just changed…
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on March 21, 2010
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Well done Timur.
We have since the economic crunch focused a considerable effort in developing organisational awareness of the Challenger profile – thanks to SEC.
Despite this our managers were unable and therefore unwilling to develop the 3 behaviours. We have since run a 5 day boot camp to close this gap.
During the boot camp it was all cards on the table as manager skill shortages were exposed. We are now in the process of embedding the new behaviours with greater momentum.
Cheers
Jim
on March 28, 2010
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Timur,
I understand your point and think it applies also to my company. For me, the most important question is the following : how front line managers are made accountable for the quality of their coaching ? Who check this and coach them to coach ? I observe that the level 2 managers spend a minimum time working on this with their direct reports.
Do you have some thoughts on this ?
Cheers,
Patrice
on September 7, 2010
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[...] to our most recent data, 66% of sales reps indicate that their manager does worse at coaching than other manager behaviors [...]
on September 9, 2010
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It depends on what level you are coaching your people.
Assuming that most sales rep coaching is at a basic performance improvement level, then the key challenge is to get the sales rep to understand and accept the performance gap, acknowledge the need for improvement, and explore their own ideas as to how this can be done.
On a wider level, understanding the individuals wider existence, and tapping into their bigger goals and aspirations can help to drive commitment and action.
Changing the way people view the world can take a little longer!!!
on September 9, 2010
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Interesting point, and assumes that most coaching is done through the line.
Typically the value of the coaching comes from the interventions helping the coachee set themselves specfic goals around performance improvement, then monitoring progress against such goals (whether hard or soft measures). If you can get the coachee to take real ownership of the goals, rather than it being something that is done to them, you will increase the likelihood of success. Out of line coaching can be a useful approach as it can give the coachee freedom to explore without feeling under pressure.
on September 9, 2010
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Hi Tim,
Thank you for your comments. And we would certainly agree that you do need a moment of internalization for any coaching to be successful. If somebody doesn’t see the need, then they will ignore any intervention however well designed. And having somebody who isn’t the line manager does indeed seem to work well in certain instances. Specifically, a third party seems to work especially well when both parties are tenured and have been working together for longer periods of time. In that case, the relationship will have likely found an equilibrium and any coaching efforts might indeed benefit from an outside perspective.
Timur