Increased Sales Performance
High-performing sales organisations are typically willing to invest in training to ensure salespeople have the skills needed for success. Both research and experience support the belief that training can improve salespeople’s performance. Training for their managers, however, is usually a lower priority, especially when it is focused on coaching and performance management skills. Even though there is a general recognition that managers need to support and reinforce sales training, the assumption seems to be that a) they are already sufficiently skilled to do so, or b) the impact of coaching skills on training is not critical enough to warrant additional investment.
For Increased Sales Performance—Invest in Manager Training
To date, very little research has been done to challenge these assumptions, with the result that there has not been much solid data to show what impact sales managers have on sales training effectiveness, or what particular skills are required to ensure optimal results. In our current study, we explore these questions, with some surprising findings.
First, the study shows that the impact of sales training is much more dramatic when supported by sales managers who know how to coach to and support the new skills. Specifically, we found that sales training is 24% more effective when accompanied by training for sales managers.
Our research goes on to show that sales managers need more than just generic coaching skills. To be fully effective, they need the ability to coach to the specific sales skills and processes their salespeople learn. Sales managers who have both general coaching skills and skills for coaching to the specific new knowledge of their salespeople can have more than twice the impact on performance as managers with generic coaching skills only.
This study shows that an organisation can create greater and more sustained performance improvement by moving toward a process that involves the whole organisation and away from training salespeople alone.
Moving from training to a development system
It is an experience common to every traditional sales training effort. Salespeople leave a training seminar armed with a new selling perspective and skills that they are ready to use, but return to the same, unchanged sales environment where the new skills are not supported. Their managers don’t know how to support salespeople in applying the new skills, nor how to assess how well the skills are being used.
Sales executives are caught in a conundrum. In a recent survey, we asked a select group of sales executives what action is most important to improving sales performance; 88% indicated “making sales managers more effective,” a finding consistent with a survey conducted by the Sales Executive Council. In addition, we asked what manager skill is most critical; 91% answered “coaching and providing feedback to salespeople.” However, when asked how well prepared their organisation is to address these skill needs; over 50% indicated that they are not well prepared. The primary difficulty, according to sales executives, is lack of good evidence that the effort justifies the investment.
In our discussions with sales executives, two critical questions keep emerging:
- How much of an improvement in performance can we obtain by including manager coaching as part of our development system for salespeople?
- What are the skills most critical for managers to have, and is it enough to just give them generic coaching skills, or is more required?
To answer these questions we initiated two research projects—one focused on quantifying the impact of manager coaching skills on sales performance improvement, and the second to identify the specific skills with the greatest impact.
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