Every time I run a Coaching workshop I hear this from the participants: “We don’t have time for Coaching!”. Typically, this is one of the first challenges mentioned by sales managers when I open a training for Professional Coaching Skills® by the Miller Heiman Group.
During the following two days we carve out and elaborate on the benefits of a high-performance sales team, what issues to provide coaching on and the actual content of an ideal coaching conversation. The program includes multiple role plays giving the sales managers a safe environment to practise. Participants get very excited and acknowledge that they see what effectively coaching their sales teams really means and how it is done practically.
At the end of the training we discuss best practices in formalizing Coaching in organizations. And, again I often face resistance to Coaching due to time constraints as every sales person and sales manager is busy closing deals. This is when I like to highlight one of the key findings of the ‘2016 Sales Best Practices Study’ by CSO InsightsTM – The Research Division of Miller Heiman Group. They found that in 88% of top performing companies sales managers spend adequate time coaching their team members each month. This compares to 32% of companies based on all respondents only.
Source: ‘2016 Sales Best Practices Study’ by CSO InsightsTM – The Research Division of Miller Heiman Group
The survey concluded that “World-Class Sales Performers translate the advantages of a formal coaching process directly into sales performance improvements such as increasing the win rate of forecasted deals by as much as 9%.”.
You can download the full report here:
https://www.millerheimangroup.com/insight-ready/2016-cso-insights-best-practices-study/