BY Kathy Crosett
Your sales managers may need to use a sales coaching solution to meet the needs in their department. That’s one of the key issues that the Sales Readiness Group and SellingPower analysts sought to answer in their just-released 2017 High-Impact Sales Management survey. Ensuring that your sales managers meet the other criteria outlined in this survey can bring your organization into the high-impact sales zone.
Time Spent Coaching
On average, at least 65% of top sales managers spend a lot of time coaching – about 20% of their total work effort. In an average sales organization, only about half, 51%, of managers allocate a day a week to coaching. At the bottom of the list, in lower-performing sales groups, only 40% of managers spend a day a week talking their reps through problems, role-playing during mock sales calls, or going out with reps on prospect or client visits.
In an astonishing finding, the survey noted that 73% of sales managers have not received coaching training. Not surprising, the managers in high-performing organizations were more likely to have participated in training compared to lower-performing organizations.
Investment in Training
The path to becoming a manager for most reps is to excel at sales. The skills that these individuals develop in that process – prospecting, qualifying, negotiating, and closing – are not always the skills need to excel as managers. As sales managers, the skills of recruiting and hiring, setting and monitoring goals, and motivating reps become more important. Higher performing organizations have figured out that most managers don’t learn these skills in a vacuum. Nearly 33% of these organizations invest $2,000 a year training their sales managers. The comparable number of lower-performing organizations that spend heavily on sales manager training is 7%.
High-Impact Sales Managers
If you want to improve sales outcomes across the board in your organization, start investing in training programs for your managers. Then, insist that they use what they’ve learned by allocating one day a week to effectively coach their reps.