Coaching in Sales Management (Part 1)

First, let me share one thing about coaching. I can say that 90% of people around me who talk about coaching do not know what professional coaching is. With all their good intentions, they mix coaching with advising, mentoring, counseling, leading, guiding, etc.

I am not going to make a definition of coaching here. You can check it on the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) website. I want to focus more on integrating coaching into daily sales management practice. 

Coaching for a sales manager is a thought-provoking dialogue where the manager assists the person in finding their answers. In this process, the manager believes in the person’s potential and suspends their judgments and presumptions. It requires time and effort. It might be a painful process for the manager when working under pressure to deliver results on time.

That is where the problem begins. When sales managers see their roles as delivering results, they will have difficulty coaching their teams. Most sales managers come from the field; therefore, they know what to do and how to succeed. With one slight difference…they know it for themselves. They know it for their personality, experience, learning capabilities, values, beliefs, and for external factors of their time.

They do not know it for others. The problem is…they think they know.  

That is why when they try to help, they do it by pointing out the problem areas and simply telling sellers what they should do. As shared in an article about performance feedback and coaching in the Harvard Business Review, when thousands of managers were asked to coach someone, they “simply provided the other person with advice or a solution. We regularly heard comments like ‘First you do this’ or ‘Why don’t you do this?’’

The question is: is this helpful or not? It might seem to be beneficial in the short run. However, it creates a high dependency of the salespeople on the manager. You likely hear those managers saying, « I always have to be there and check everything to make sure that they make their numbers at the end of the quarter. »

This is a trap. The more you do it, the more you need to do it. 

But how to break this cycle and integrate coaching into daily business management?

Stay tuned…I will write about it in Part 2, next week.