We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Coaching

Posted on October 15th, 2009 by Dave Stein

ESR knows that when buyers of sales training need to skinny back on the vendor’s proposal to save some money, coaching/learning reinforcement often gets cut first.

I pointed this out yesterday during my keynote speech at SMT’s conference in Orlando and got universal agreement from a roomful of enthusiastic practitioners, trainers and consultants.

Everyone in the room, without exception, acknowledged that coaching is at or near the top of the list of critical success factors for any sales performance improvement initiative or intervention.

So why does it get eliminated?

  • Vendors know it’s important, but margins on coaching aren’t as rich as filling seats with salesreps, so they willingly strike it from their proposals.
  • Vendors don’t have effective coaching programs or they can’t differentiate themselves from the competition with their coaching solutions, so they focus on other skill areas.
  • Companies don’t want to invest in coaching programs because they don’t understand the impact on sustaining behavioral change.
  • Senior executives know that their first-line sales managers don’t have the traits required to be effective coaches, so spending money training them is wasted.
  • Practitioners and many trainers don’t understand that you must coach salesreps to a process.  If you don’t have a process, there is no standard to coach to, therefore it’s wasted time, effort, and money.
  • The list goes on…

I sat through a short workshop that Imparta delivered on coaching.  They have very strong content and a proven process.  The performance results reported by their clients bears this out. Other sales trainers have strong coaching programs, but certainly not all.

If you’re a trainer, understand the importance of coaching and build that capability into your solutions. The objective is to get your clients to the point where they are self-sufficient.

If you buy sales training from third parties or develop training programs in-house, make certain your overall approach includes a coaching methodology, including training, coaching the coaches—your first-line sales managers—and a measurement system.

Photo credit: © dragon_fang – Fotolia.com

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2 Responses to “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Coaching”

  1. Jeff Ogden, on October 15th, 2009 at 2:27 pm Said:

    Why is it in sports, coaches are essential, but in sales they are superfluous?

    I’m involved in Little League Baseball and coaches are the key to success.

    Maybe the problem is that management smarts are rare. They’re too cheap and short-sighted to see the big picture.

  2. Richard Lane, on October 20th, 2009 at 7:38 am Said:

    Dave,
    Thanks for raising the awareness of this issue. My proposed solutions always includes sales coaching as a core component of the solution. Without coaching you can deliver great standalone training but in my view (as with your conference it seems) it is very difficult to deliver long-term change – which is what we are all aspiring to achieve.

    Perhaps, as sales improvers, we need to do a better job of helping decision makers understand the difference between quick fix medicine and long-term change for the better.

    Regards,
    Richard.

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