What really holds us back
Please note: Peter’s new eBook, Coaching is a Lost Art is now available via PDF http://www.complexsale.com/ebook-lost-art.html and can also be found via Kindle and other reader platforms
It seems so simple – deal coaching doesn’t take a lot of time (when done well) and has an obvious return on time invested. Why isn’t it a core competency of the average sales organization? There are several reasons (which doesn’t mean they’re excusable):
Sales reps and managers are too busy. When I ask sales managers why they don’t coach opportunities more consistently they often talk about the “tyranny of the urgent” in their average day or week. It may represent the comfort of ‘busyness’: “At least I feel valuable and needed if I am always busy, even if my time is not allocated to the most important activities that can help us close more business.” Translated: They may be too busy to win!
They have a “forecast-flogging” mentality (i.e. the forecast discussion goes something like this, “When’s the deal going to close? For how much? What help do you need?”). These are not strategy questions, they’re questions that allow the sales manager to provide a semi-educated guess about the validity of their forecast submission this month.
Perhaps worse yet, when these managers actually conduct a strategy session they do so with little or no structure. They may also employ what I call “ambush” coaching – asking a surprise set of questions each time I coach opportunities with the sales teams.
Often the sales reps in an organization have a built in resistance to deal coaching either because they perceive minimal value or, worse yet, it actually hurts their productivity because it takes valuable time away from their clients and they perceive little value in the exercise when it’s not done well.
They don’t have the tools to coach effectively. Said another way, they lack the straightforward ability to efficiently review the status of a deal, i.e., whether they’re winning or losing, whose vote they need to win, and their strategy to close the deal. If deal coaching isn’t simple and repeatable, it typically doesn’t happen.
Sales managers don’t proactively build this coaching discipline into their schedule. Instead, they “hope” they can find time in their calendar “gaps” to conduct deal strategy sessions and the time is rarely found.
Or, perhaps your sales managers have never been taught how to coach deals effectively. You promoted them from a career as a successful sales rep and assume that since they were a great “player” they are likely to be a great “coach.” It doesn’t happen that way in sports, why do we think it will work any better in sales?
I’ve also found that even when deal coaching is done regularly, it doesn’t mean that the coaching will be effective and there are a variety of reasons:
Group forecast conferences – what a joy! We’ve all been there: a 90 minute forecast call that involves 10 sales people which means that each of the sales reps presents for approximately 9 minutes to update the manager on 10 deals in their pipeline. How much value do these bring to your team? More importantly, how useful was it to the other 9 reps who had to listen for 81 minutes with no relevance to their territory or deals?!
Coaching deals at the wrong time. As you might guess, most coaching I witness is done towards the end of the deal pursuit, mostly because it is the time when the deal is forecasted at a high probability and the business is counting on the revenue. It begs the question: when is the best time to coach deals? You guessed it: early – when you have time to adjust or to help discern whether the deal is worth pursuing in the first place (qualifying).
Deal strategy sessions that have no structure, with no consistency about the coaching questions that are used in each session and, perhaps most painfully, a session where we wander aimlessly into issues and topics that aren’t even applicable to the deal we’re working. We’ve all experienced this in our selling careers!
Premature prescription – the sales manager hears a few updates on the background of the deal and 3 minutes into the session the manager jumps to the uniformed answers – mostly unencumbered by the facts! Sound familiar? It happens every day in most sales organizations!
Stealing the deal – this is the “superman” sales managers who hears about trouble in an opportunity that is critical to make this month’s forecast and instead of coaching and equipping the sales person to win the deal they jump in with both feet and take over the pursuit because that’s what they feel best equipped and most comfortable doing. This strategy can work in the short term but it doesn’t help their people or their results in the long term!
Or, perhaps worst of all, sales managers in a deal coaching session are more focused on fixing the blame instead of fixing the problem or addressing the challenge. Being overly judgmental is not the answer and trying to find and place the guilt is usually counter-productive.
I’ll be interested in your experience and observations as well!