Sales organizations can increase revenue when they focus on improving how their salespeople interact with prospects and customers. Some companies struggle to effectively coach salespeople for improved sales call impact and improved call quality. Specifically, senior leaders find it difficult to define, capture and use the data obtained from sales coaching reports. In many instances coaching metrics are an afterthought or overlooked altogether.
As a result, there is no mechanism to:
- Identify the skills salespeople need to improve
- Track the skills coaches are spending time developing
- Measure the degree of skill improvement over time
- Measure the results of coaching
- Identify who is making an impact or not having an impact
- Measure the effect of training investments
This article provides senior leaders with an opportunity to examine the impact improved sales coaching and applied metrics can have on revenue and how coaching tools can help. In the end, you will leave with a clear, bottom-line understanding of why metrics should be used within your organization.
Is There a Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow?
The Sales Executive Council has demonstrated that a 20 percent increase in sales is possible by improving field force interactions with customers. This figure is derived from a market survey of leading companies and their sales employees. It doesn't happen by accident and it doesn't happen by coaching alone.
From our experience, an improvement in sales through improved customer interactions happens when the organization follows a clear, concise, tracking methodology that is integrated into coaching initiatives.
Coaching Has Earned the Right to Be Taken Seriously
Over the last decade, organizations have devoted time and resources in core-process control systems such as Siebel and SAP-powered CRMs. These monitoring and controls are a key priority and they provide millions of dollars in cost savings. Meanwhile, the science of coaching languished in the shadows.
With success stories of increased performance attributed to more effective coaching of employees — coaching has finally come of age. If we are to increase our sales through improved coaching, we have specific work to do. We need to:
- Separate and identify the elements of sales force coaching that make a tangible difference.
- Track and monitor each step of the coaching process to observe it in full detail, especially to see where we fall short.
Overall, we need to define the process and then transform that process into a science.
Ten Crucial Coaching Metrics
Let's get specific about the use of coaching metrics within your organization. Carefully answer the following questions, which will help you identify if a gap exists.
Metric 1: Are managers correctly using and implementing the organization's coaching
and/or sales model on every call?
Metric 2: What are the top three skills currently being coached in the field this month?
Metric 3: What are the three weakest skills currently exhibited by representatives
across teams, and nationally?
Metric 4: How is improvement tracked, measured, and communicated, and how regularly?
Metric 5: How is the consistency of coaching tracked across time?
Metric 6: How much time elapses between the field ride and the final documenting of
a coaching report?
Metric 7: What are the three strongest skills being exhibited by representatives across teams, and nationally?
Metric 8: How many representatives have had zero coaching input for the last two months?
Metric 9: How is the representative's self perception in their mastery of key skills compared to their manager's?
Metric 10: How does the customer view the representative against competition?
The Power of Metrics
The most commonly tracked metric is the number of days a manager spends in the field "coaching" against a recommended or mandatory percentage of working time. Focusing on that number alone is insufficient and will not go far towards achieving the sought after 20 percent sales uplift.
For a real change to take place you need to capture data relevant to the questions listed in this section. You need the ability to track this data simply and easily as it’s created (in the field) as well as the ability to retrieve this information in a summarized and logical format.
Common Excuses for Not Implementing Metrics
Barrier 1
“Ratings are too subjective; every manager has their own view.”
You can minimize subjectivity through continued peer reviews and base lining at regional meetings and clear interpretation of the ratings and their underlying components.
Barrier 2
“Our managers are too busy to do more work.”
Our feedback to date from successful managers in the field states that a process and tool makes their job easier.
Barrier 3
“I don’t want to argue with my representative over being a “2” or a “3” in a particular skill due to semantics.”
Every rating level for each of the assessed skills needs to be defined in a clear and understandable way so that behavioral progression from one level to the next is visible and demonstrable and free from ambiguity.
Barrier 4
“Skill ratings will conflict with performance reviews.”
Align coaching and performance review rating scales as much as possible. Provide your managers with clear training to communicate the goals of their coaching efforts.
Barrier 5
“We cannot decide on the coaching skills that we want to rate against.”
There are many ways of doing this, ranging from adapting existing in-house materials to enlisting the assistance of industrial psychologists to interviewing your top performers.
The Methodology is Important
An organization needs a methodology to obtain detailed and accurate data. The key elements and steps for implementing improved coaching and metrics are the following:
- 1. Benchmark current weaknesses in your sales process and skill execution.
- 2. Gain clarity and engagement with a detailed business case for change.
- 3. Identify the specific selling skills and activities that separate high performers from average performers.
- 4. Provide training to build the skills required to excel.
- 5. Empower line managers to be effective and objective coaches.
- 6. Ensure user-friendly, automated, data-capture and reporting tools are in place.
- 7. Take action based on monthly Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reports.
These steps are sequential. Clearly define and apply each step before moving on to the next. Problems will arise if the steps are rushed, modified or missed. Gaps or holes in the process will lead to sketchy outcomes, unreliable data and unpredictable sales uplift at best.
Fred Lord is a managing partner of Lord Strategic Partners (LSP), a premier global agency providing focused, results-driven business consulting services to leaders in the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device industries. Fred can be reached at fred@lordstrategicpartners.com.
Written for TrainingIndustry.com
