How can you balance coaching and managing your SDRs effectively?

1 Assess your SDRs' needs

Before you start coaching your SDRs, you need to understand their strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and motivations. You can use various tools and methods to assess your SDRs' needs, such as surveys, feedback forms, performance reviews, call recordings, role plays, and one-on-one meetings. Based on your assessment, you can identify the areas where your SDRs need more coaching, such as prospecting, qualifying, objection handling, or closing.

2 Set clear and SMART goals

Once you know what your SDRs need to work on, you can set clear and SMART goals for them. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These are the criteria that make your goals effective and trackable. For example, instead of saying "improve your conversion rate", you can say "increase your conversion rate from 10% to 15% by the end of the quarter". By setting SMART goals, you can align your coaching with your management expectations and measure your SDRs' progress.

3 Choose the right coaching methods

When it comes to coaching your SDRs, there are various methods you can use depending on their learning styles, preferences, and availability. Group coaching allows for collaboration and peer learning among your SDRs, but limits individual attention. Individual coaching provides tailored guidance and feedback, but can be more time-consuming. On-the-job coaching provides immediate real-time feedback, but can be intrusive or stressful. When selecting a method, consider your goals, resources, and availability. You may also want to combine different methods to get the best results.

5 Empower your SDRs to self-coach

The ultimate goal of coaching is to empower your SDRs to self-coach, which means they can identify their own areas of improvement, set their own goals, and monitor their own progress. To do this, you should ask open-ended questions that encourage critical and creative thinking. Additionally, provide resources and tools that enable your SDRs to learn and grow on their own. Lastly, celebrate successes and failures as learning opportunities and sources of feedback. Balancing coaching and managing your SDRs is challenging but rewarding; following these tips will create a coaching culture that supports their development and performance, while also aligning with your management goals and metrics.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?