Sixty to seventy percent of your time is devoted to coaching.

40% new hires and weaker performers.
40% average performers.
20% strong performers.

Coach every sales person at least once every two weeks.

Observe every sales person with customers – in person, on video or on a recording – at least once every two weeks.

The coach talks about 30% of the time.

Coaching – How not to do it

Peter, a sales executive appointed three months ago, is visiting one of his larger customers – Allied Electronics (AE). Rob, his sales manager, has joined the meeting for coaching purposes.

AE are a demanding customer. But Peter feels he has established a good rapport. The AE manager, Charlene, seems to respect him.

During the visit, Charlene raises a new opportunity and asks whether Peter’s company could accommodate it by a small but rather technical change to their operational procedures.

Peter is unsure whether his operations department could make the change. Unwilling to make promises that he could not keep, he promises to respond the next day.

Charlene accepted this and was in the process of setting a time for the next day when Rob stepped in and said “Of course we can do it”.

Leaving the building, Rob says to Peter: “Just as well I came on that call. You need to learn about our capabilities.”

How do you think Peter is feeling right now?

Did Peter deserve the criticism?
Was Rob’s action in taking over the meeting justified?
Could Rob have handled things better?
What do you think Charlene is thinking?

What are the key lessons here?

DO NOT make your people look bad in front of the customer.

It is not good for them.
It is not good for the customer – they are never impressed by such behaviour and may lose faith in the sales person. You are then only a few short steps away from losing the customer!
Charlene would not be too impressed.

In extreme situations you may need to step in. But try to do it diplomatically.

In this case Peter had things under control. Charlene was happy to wait a day. Rob stepped in out of ego.

Rob should have waited until they were in the car and then told Peter it could be done. He could have congratulated Peter on not overcommitting but keeping the customer engaged.

He could then have asked Peter what lessons he had learned. One lesson is to become more familiar with the company’s capabilities – but this was quite a technical issue and Peter could be forgiven for not knowing. Rob knew because he is much more experienced. His role was to tell Peter after the meeting. Instead – he humiliated Peter.

The same thing happens on video calls every day. The manager unmutes “just to add something” – and never stops.

Coaching – How it can work

A multinational company introduced a coaching programme for front line managers.

During a visit from Head Office there was a team dinner where one of the sales executives sat beside the Regional SVP of Sales.

She asked the SVP why local country sales managers had changed their behaviours so much.

Four months ago, her sales manager, Karsten, was only interested in meeting sales targets. He would not accept any excuses.

He was also quite remote.

She said she did not really respect her sales manager at that point and felt he was not doing a very good job.

Over the last two months however, Karsten had done a complete U turn in his management style.

He gave her a set time to meet and allowed her to go into detail on the problems she was facing.

He asked her opinion on how to resolve issues and she felt he was taking a real interest.

He accompanied her on visits and instead of taking the lead on every sales call, as he had done before, allowed her to sell to the customer.

The SVP replied that this must be a result of the coaching programme. He had received similar feedback from other countries.

Illustration – Coaching with AI: the same data, two managers

Two managers in the same company were given the same conversation intelligence tool.

Dev set up a weekly report ranking his team on six call metrics. He emailed it every Monday with comments such as “Talk ratio too high again – fix this”. Within a month two of his people had stopped recording calls “because the customer objected”. The others had learned to game the numbers. Results did not move.

Aisha showed her team the tool and what she could and could not see. She asked each person to bring one call a fortnight – one they were proud of or one that had gone wrong – and to choose the five minutes to listen to together.

The AI had flagged that Tomás rarely agreed a next step. She did not tell him. She played the last three minutes of his call and asked “What happens now with this customer?” He paused. “I don’t actually know.” He set his own action.

Six months later Aisha’s team had the best conversion from first meeting to proposal in the region.

What is the key lesson here?

The tool was the same. The behaviour of the manager was not. AI found the issue. Coaching fixed it.