Written By: Holly LaBoda | Apr 21, 2022 12:00:00 AM
“I keep telling them they should do it this way, but it’s not sticking.”
This statement is what a sales leader lamented to me last week during our call. Most of us can appreciate where they were coming from, at least at times. It’s frustrating when you feel like you’ve set and reinforced expectations over and over. You’ve told them how, you’ve showed them how, you’ve reminded them again, and it isn’t working.
It’s time for a different approach.
Coaching is one of the many tools in a manager’s toolset, but one of the most powerful for transforming performance. It’s a way to connect and communicate with your employees that’s completely focused on them. Coaching means engaging with someone in an empowering way that helps them discover new possibilities and unlock their potential.
There is no shortage of research showing the multi-fold impact of effective sales coaching. According to CSO Insights, effective coaching increases win rates by 28 percent and quota attainment by 10 percent. That’s the bottom-line impact, but it doesn’t stop there. In today’s challenging talent market, coaching might also be the best thing you can do to get your employees to stay with you, and stay engaged.
It’s hard to argue the ROI of coaching. Yet, higher ROI on any development is always better, right?
Here are three ways to increase the payoff of your coaching efforts:
These three strategies can help you get the most of your 1:1 coaching effort. But if you want to level-up your coaching even further, create a coaching culture where it is the norm for everyone to provide feedback and guidance to each other and themselves. Sound like a pipedream? It’s not! We love a method called Feed Forward for this. It’s the opposite of feedback because it’s future-focused, uplifting and energizing. Bet you wouldn’t describe your last feedback session that way. Make development conversations positive and fun and they are likely to keep happening.
Finally, it’s no secret that a sales manager’s job is a tricky one. This role has highly visible results, a highly subjective process, and incredibly diverse demands on the leader’s time. Yet, only 1 in 5 sales managers has had any kind of formal development. If you want to dramatically increase the likelihood of success for your sales team (and therefore your organization), invest in your sales managers.
Holly LaBoda helps logistics companies of all shapes and sizes get, keep, and grow larger customers. As a Partner and Co-Founder of Luminaries Consulting, she loves working with clients to help them achieve their goals. A pragmatic business success partner, she takes a holistic view of an organization’s, or individual’s, current state and future goals and helps them design practical ways to bridge the gap. She wants to see all her clients get real results, fast.
Tags: Strategy
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