For coaching to be effective, three things need to be true:
- There must be a skills gap to coach
- The coach must be willing and able to close that gap
- The ‘coachee’ must accept there is a gap and be willing to accept you as a coach
If any one of these is absent the coaching will fail.
In the context of sales coaching:
1. You must be able to accurately define what is missing and the person you are coaching must agree it is missing. Moreover, it must be relevant to achieving the objectives of the job at the time. Role plays are not always popular with salespeople but managed properly they are the only way, besides field accompaniment, to coach sales skills. Keep them to 10 minutes with a tight brief that focusses on the behaviours you want to observe. Video them and review them objectively alongside the salesperson. Start with the positives and avoid judgemental comments that might make them defensive. Try and get them to spot what is happening rather than what is right, wrong, good or bad.
2. For many successful salespeople the next natural step is sales management. Whenever a salesperson approached me to join the management development programme my first question was always “why are you successful?”. If they were unable to dissect their own performance they were unlikely to be able to hold a mirror up to their staff and help them to be better salespeople. The usual answers were “I work hard” and “customers seem to like me”. I would even get “I don’t want to know, in case I jinx myself”. Selling is a learned skill, not an art and not what you might observe on ‘The Apprentice’. You must be able to identify exactly what is happening in any interaction and your main objective must be to make your salespeople better – not to show off your own expertise or close deals for them.
3. I don’t believe in constructive criticism. All criticism is judgemental and damaging to the coaching process. You must analyse what happened objectively and where necessary agree with the salesperson how they could have achieved a different outcome. You need to catch people doing things right because knowing your strengths is often more important than knowing your weaknesses. Unfortunately, some people are just not wired to work this way and your attempts to coach them will probably fail. You will not be able to develop a salesperson if they don’t respect you as a coach or if they are not able or willing to improve.
Jola only sells through channel and we have a vested interest in our partners and their salespeople beating the competition. We know from experience that one of the biggest challenges facing our partners is recruiting and retaining good salespeople. All our account managers are experienced in the channel. They know they don’t need to sell to you but they will do everything they can to make your salespeople more successful.
