Think about the best managers and mentors in your career. What traits did they have that made them so impactful to you?
I used to run an exercise asking people to think about the top three sales managers who were transformational in their careers. Everyone would raise their hand to show they had someone in mind, but when I would ask who felt like they were one of those transformational leaders for their direct reports, significantly fewer people raised their hands.
We’re not blaming the people who say, “No, they haven’t been transformational leaders”; sales managers have a lot to do on top of overseeing their teams, from forecasting to reviewing deals to attending a truly staggering number of meetings. However, when data shows that 60 percent of sales reps will leave an organization if their manager is a lackluster coach, learning how to be a transformational leader should be a priority for managers. Just like closing deals, how to be a good mentor is learnable and should be a long-lasting effort.
In a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, sales leaders rank themselves in the 79th percentile, while reps rank their leaders in the 38th percentile, suggesting that most leaders are vastly overestimating their coaching abilities. While being a poor coach risks higher turnover and lower retention rates, becoming a good coach has the proven benefit of driving higher revenue—which is what every organization, at its core, is designed to need.
Building a Culture of Learning
So what works? The single most important quality of a good coach is how much their organization invests in building a coaching culture. Coaching should be an ongoing, ever-evolving process that’s encouraged throughout the organization.
One-time, situation-based training might close the current deal a rep is working on but favors short-term results. That type of training fails to build the foundational skills that will benefit reps throughout the rest of their careers and ultimately close more deals.
The biggest difference between coaching and non-coaching cultures is embracing a learning mindset: building training into your processes, from the moment a new rep onboards throughout each step of their journey with your organization.
There are a few ways to build this kind of learning culture:
- Coaching frequency: A study from Mindtickle found that continuous and ongoing training correlates to greater rep success in the field. The average number of formal coaching sessions completed by managers of top-performing reps is 11 per rep per month.
- Be proactive, not reactive: Instead of treating coaching like a checkbox, the best managers know that reinforcement is the key to ensuring training sticks and top managers are 3.5 times more likely to assign a training exercise as a follow-up to a coaching session.
- Coach on the go: As reps begin to travel more, remote and mobile coaching also has increased. In 2022, up to 60 percent of coaching took place on a mobile app.
- Don’t just coach in a Zoom call or anecdotally: Record what you’re saying, underlying the importance for the rep. This makes it official and makes reps much more conscious the next time they’re on a call and more alert to what’s happening.
How the Landscape Is Changing with AI
One of the top coaching obstacles, as found by Mindtickle, is the number of reps managers are responsible for coaching. Some 32 percent of managers report having challenges with the number of reps they manage, which is difficult when compounded by a manager’s other duties.
Increased efficiency is one of the crowning jewels of AI, and why it’s dominated the work and productivity news section for the past year. Sales enablement also is changing with the times, as more enablement and revenue productivity tools work to integrate AI into their platforms. AI can help managers balance their time between each rep and their tasks more effectively.
For example, managers used to have to listen to an entire sales call to gather insights and points for coaching. With AI embedded into a conversation intelligence tool, the AI will analyze everything in a call recording for managers and, on top of that, share timestamps for the points of note in the conversation for deeper analysis.
To take it one step further, a generative AI tool trained on historical data also can tell managers what the rep could have done better and what the top risks coming from the conversation are for the next call. Within seconds, managers can create action items for the rep and build a training plan for the future.
Anyone can become a transformational leader, especially with the knowledge and tools we have today to help us along the way. The only thing required is the will and effort to achieve it. Upleveling your managerial skills will make a real difference for the reps you manage, not to mention the revenue numbers that come with greater employee satisfaction.