Smart Alec?
Published July 2008
Around this time last year, we looked at what we in Living Sales® could learn from the world of sport regarding teamwork. But there are even more parallels in the area of coaching. For example.
Great players rarely make great coaches
To be a credible sports coach, it's important to have been a player. However, the number of really top class performers who go on to sustain a career as a coach is very limited. Top performers are usually intuitively skilled and can't communicate those skills. They find it very frustrating that others cannot just 'do-as-I-do'.
Our experience shows that it's much the same in sales. When top salespeople become sales managers they can't resist stepping in to take over from their sellers. Often their intervention is poorly timed and inappropriate - at the end of the sales cycle and in the form of a last minute concession to clinch the deal. This attracts future customer attention towards the manager and really irritates their sellers.
Imagine the Manchester United players manoeuvring the ball within range of the opposition's goal, only for Sir Alec Ferguson to run on to the pitch to take the final shot!
Results = Efficiency + Effectiveness
All great sports coaches have the ability to break down excellent performance into its component parts and observe them in action. And they look closely at two aspects: Efficiency and Effectiveness. Efficiency is the 'work rate' or activity of the players; effectiveness is the level of skill they display in those activities.
In sales, efficiency is about how often our people sell to customers and effectiveness is how well they perform in those interactions. The trap for sales managers is to focus heavily on increasing efficiency - measures such as the number of first meetings, frequency of contact etc. This is because these activities are very visible. Consequently, they're easy to monitor and drive up. But efficiency might not be the problem; can you imagine Sir Alec saying this?
"We need to increase the number of goals we score, so we're going to play more matches."
If the problem is sales effectiveness, driving up efficiency on its own risks sellers simply doing a bad job with even more customers.
The only way to judge effectiveness is for managers to accompany their sellers and observe their customer interactions. Not to take over the sale, but to use an objective observation framework to coach for improved effectiveness. This is exactly what we have been helping our clients' sales managers to do for many years - the Huthwaite Approach.
Without it, all the manager has is second hand reports and results, both of which are very blunt instruments for coaching. Of course, measuring effectiveness requires time and effort on the manager's part and we all have other demands. But, going back to Sir Alec Ferguson, how long would he have stayed in the job with this approach?
"After each match, I'm going to coach you based solely on the result and what the team captain tells me happened on the pitch. I'm too busy with budgets, reports and meetings to go to any of the games."
If you want some more thoughts on coaching and how to harness your natural skill at it, click on this link. If you want to know how our approach to coaching can deliver sales productivity improvement of up to 17%, even in a declining market, click here.
