The role of the sales leader or sales manager has changed. Fully 50% of their role should be coaching now. Unfortunately according to data from Objective Management Group, 82% of sales managers are not effective sales coaches. Recently we did a full-scale analysis of a sales team that included several sales managers. They are representative of many of the sales teams we analyze. None of them were fully competent as a sales coach and the common problems we found with these managers were:
- Not effective handling joint sales calls
- Rescuing the salesperson when on joint sales calls
- Does not have nor follow a selling system
- Not effective at getting commitments
- Does not consistently coach and debrief calls
But the #1 biggest issue with all these sales managers and the vast majority of sales managers we run across is that they don’t spend enough time actually coaching their salespeople. They SHOULD be spending 50% of their time coaching their salespeople. They will get better more consistent results if they do that. Unfortunately, the average by this group of managers spent actually coaching their salespeople was 10% of their time. So what were they doing that could possibly be more important than coaching their salespeople to higher performance? Remember the primary role of the sales manager is to grow their people so that THEY can grow revenue. A sales manager cannot possibly grow their people if they only spend 10% of their time actually coaching them.