Deal Reviews Are NOT Sales Coaching

Deal Reviews Are NOT Sales Coaching: by Jamie Kleinerman
“The only thing worse than coaching someone and having them leave is NOT coaching them and having them stay.”
This powerful statement about the importance of sales coaching was made by one of our members during a panel discussion at last month’s CEB Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas.
Many organizations pursue coaching as the key lever to impact sales force performance. That said, changes in today’s buying environment have found managers treating coaching as opportunistic at best, and not the norm.
That’s why we were very excited to host this panel discussion focused on re-energizing coaching for today’s selling environment. Our session featured panelists from The Charmer Sunbelt Group and Staples, Inc., two organizations that have been on the coaching journey for some time now, and have seen a number of benefits as a result of their emphasis on coaching.
Our panelists offered lots of helpful advice and lessons learned they’ve gathered along the way, on everything from recognizing the need for improved coaching to building managers’ coaching skills, some of which I wanted to share with you here.
“There is a difference between deal inspection and sales coaching. One is about behaviors, the other is about beliefs.”
A main theme throughout the discussion was the danger of managers’ viewing coaching as one-time events, often rooted in deal reviews and business results. As both sets of panelists shared, it’s easy for coaching to devolve from its original purpose and deteriorate into a mere exercise or check-the-box activity.
Data from our Coaching Pulse survey shows that managers often tend to prioritize deal-level coaching at the expense of skill-level coaching, which is why it’s essential to differentiate between the two and to make sure managers understand these key differences.
(SEC Members, for more on deal-level and skill-level coaching, see our Deal-Based Challenger Coaching Guide and our Skill-Based Challenger Coaching Guide.)
What’s more, numbers-driven sales managers can also confuse regular deal reviews with deal-level coaching. As our panelists advised, you must re-focus your managers not on the numbers but rather, on the story behind the numbers. That is how managers can gauge where the disparity in performance is coming from.
As one panelist commented, “We do not want managers coaching to metrics that are in the CRM (i.e., activity or success metric numbers). We had to redesign what deal coaching looks like – it’s not deal inspection, but a conversation to drive the right activities and behaviors that we know bring a deal to a close.”
“Spend more time than you think showing your managers what good coaching looks like.”
It’s extremely important to put some structure around coaching – don’t let it be a free for all. As our panelists advised, define what good coaching looks like, formalize your coaching process, put metrics in place, and hold managers accountable to them.
For managers to provide high-quality coaching, they must first understand what high-quality coaching is…and is NOT. Our panelists commented that coaching can often be confused with training, managing, and leading. That’s why it is crucial to give managers as many examples of good coaching as possible.
(SEC Members, see the SEC’s definition of coaching as well as the PAUSE coaching framework developed by our sister program SEC Solutions.)
As one panelist noted, “Coaching is not comfortable and it is not popular. You’re essentially showing someone how to do something better. It’s important that managers recognize that.”
On a similar note, a theme throughout the discussion was the need to provide managers with plenty of opportunities to receive feedback on their coaching.
In fact, our panelists shared that as part of their formal coaching process they’ve added in a specific stage/component for Second-Line Sales Managers (SLSMs) to give coaching feedback to Front-Line Sales Managers.
Overall, one of the main takeaways for members that attended this panel discussion was that for coaching to be high-quality and truly impactful, organizations must spend a lot more time and energy on it than most typically do. As the Charmer Sunbelt and Staples stories show, there are many benefits that can be gained from putting such rigor around coaching.
SEC Members, for more information on Staples’ and Charmer Sunbelt’s coaching journeys, access this replay of our recent webinar with them. You can also watch this video of Staples discussing the impact their coaching certification program has had on their organization. And, for more on coaching, be sure to check out our newly updated Anatomy of World-Class Sales Coaching Practices.