Coaching Coaches – By Ted Power
These best practices enable managers to be effective
Good coaching is table stakes for life sciences sales organizations. But if you’re not also coaching your coaches, you’re putting your numbers at risk.
Great sales teams start with great coaching; most life sciences sales organizations have figured that out by now. A complex product and a relationship selling model means sales must be continuously trained and kept up to speed.
More sales leadership teams are rallying around providing strong training and skills development for their front-line managers. But all too often they are missing a massive blind spot that could put their long-term success at risk — coaching the coaches themselves.
Building Skills
Typically, sales leaders begin as rock-star sales representatives — but the skills needed to bring in big deals are not always the skills needed to coach a team to success. Front-line, and even second-line, managers need support themselves and attention to assessing and building the skills to effectively coach and manage top-performing sales teams.
We’ve all heard the term “coaching the coaches,” but many organizations lack a clear picture of what that looks like, or what the risks are in ignoring it. Paying lip service to coaching your sales coaches can be detrimental to your organization in many ways.
Here are some potential consequences:
- Lack of skill development: If you are not investing enough time and resources in coaching your sales coaches — expanding their emotional intelligence and leadership skills — they will not be able to in turn motivate and effectively develop the skills of their team members. This can result in alack of improvement in the performance of your sales team and ultimately impact your revenue.
- Low engagement and retention: Employees value coaching and development opportunities and may become disengaged if they feel their managers are not invested in their growth. This is especially true on sales teams. A lack of understanding around employee development can lead to higher turnover rates, which can be costly and disruptive. This is especially true in life sciences, where expertise takes time to develop — and relationships and trust are so critical.
- Poor coaching culture: If managers can’t develop their own skills and confidence in coaching, less coaching will be given overall. When coaching is not given the priority it deserves, a culture can develop where development is viewed as low- or no-priority, and growth stagnates. This kind of negative cycle has a knock-on effect on sales confidence and skills for the entire team.
- Missed opportunities: Coaching can help second-line and senior sales leaders proactively identify and address performance gaps for both front-line managers and representatives — and provide more opportunities for growth and development. Without proper coaching, your entire sales team may miss out on important opportunities for improvement and growth, which can ultimately impact your bottom line.
As you can see, failing to coach your sales managers can cost you in terms of lost revenue, employee engagement, retention and missed opportunities.
7 Skills to Build Great Managers
Overall, effective coaching requires a combination of communication skills, leadership abilities and strategic thinking. What skills can you be coaching to help your managers be most effective?
Here are seven of the most important skills and best practices you can aim for when you coach your coaches:
- Develop a great coaching plan: Sales managers should develop a coaching plan that outlines the specific areas where their sales team needs improvement. The plan should include strategies for coaching and training, as well as specific goals and timelines for improvement.
- Provide forward-looking feedback and guidance: Sales managers should provide regular feedback and guidance to their sales team. This includes recognizing when team members are doing well, as well as identifying areas where they need improvement. Feedback should be constructive and focused on specific behaviors or outcomes.
- Build empathy and earn trust of team members: We talk a lot about using empathy in the selling cycle, but it is also important to use empathy in management. 2021 research from Ernst & Young shows that 90% of U.S. workers believe empathetic leadership leads to higher job satisfaction. Another eight in 10 believe it decreases employee turnover — something that is particularly key for this sometimes high-churn industry. Expressing more empathy is an important core skill for sales managers, and one that should bead dressed in coaching.
- Enable and empower team members to succeed: Sales managers will need to learn how to balance accountability with enablement. This means coaching reps to develop their skills and abilities — and teaching them to use tools, technology and resources to build in those areas. It also means setting clear and specific goals for their sales team and communicating these goals effectively — holding them accountable for shortfalls in a motivating and empowering way — a sometimes difficult balance..
- Support career ambitions: Sales managers should identify opportunities for growth and provide training, resources and support to help their team members improve. This also means working with team members to understand their individual career goals and help them identify and build the skills they will need to reach their goals — including expectations for behavior, performance and results.
- Use coaching for continuous change management: Coaching should be a continuum of interactions that happen throughout the year, rather than singular events. Sales managers should view coaching sessions as interconnected, ongoing touchpoints with their team members that drive continuous positive changes in attitudes, habits and behaviors.
- Use data, analytics and technology most effectively: Sales managers should use data and analytics to track performance and identify areas where their sales team can improve. They should use this information to inform their coaching and training strategies. They should also be trained on how they can best use available technology to scale their efforts and assist their coaching efforts.
Conclusion
Coaching your coaches can yield an incredible return on investment — not only in terms of meeting and exceeding revenue targets but also in providing improved coaching skills and manager competencies in the long term.
Ted Power is chief operating officer of iCoachFirst. Email Ted at tpower@icoachfirst.com.
