5 Things to Coach Junior Sales Leaders On
I’m a strong believer in the idea of growing leaders internally. Not only does it create career opportunities for the team members and allow companies to retain talent, but also enables the team to leverage the expertise of employees to make business decisions that require a deep understanding of the market, product, and business processes. However, as I highlighted in my article “Pros and Cons of Hiring a Leader for the Sales Team Externally”, the move to a leadership role can not be positioned as an award for high performance. It’s a completely different role that requires a different skillset, and readiness to address a completely different type of challenge. But as long as there are team members who demonstrate potential to become great leaders, giving them an opportunity could lead to the team achieving amazing results. Obviously, the newly promoted leaders need a lot of coaching and enablement. Every second week I conduct coaching sessions for junior leaders in sales. In this article, I provide an overview of the topics we cover during these sessions as well as the why behind each of them.
Tracking KPIs
It is well known that any improvement starts with measurement. Any recommendations that leaders would be able to provide to the reps would not be very helpful if there were no clear way to track the improvement. That said, being consistent in tracking KPIs is one of the first things leaders need to do. The first step here is to achieve alignment on the why between each KPIs. It’s actually more important than many tend to think since some reps may be pushing back on certain KPIs and the leaders need to be able to provide a clear explanation of how hitting the KPIs correlates with achieving the target. So regardless of which KPIs your team has, conduct a working session with your junior leaders during which you will go one by one through each KPI, discuss its connection to the end result, and how to position it well to the reps.
The next step is to share the necessary reports that would allow us to track KPIs in real time. If your CRM allows that, create dashboards that would show all the numbers per rep on a single screen. But even if that is not available, a simple Google Sheet would work. Make sure that the numbers are present for each employee and review together who’s at the top of their game and who needs additional help and support. Encourage leaders to discuss with top performers how they’re hitting their KPIs and how that affects their performance. All best practices need to be thoroughly documented so they can be used during conversations with other team members who are not performing that well. Another aspect to emphasize here — prepare your leaders not to expect 100% improvement from one week to another, but to push for a positive trend. For example, if a certain rep is currently at 40% of the expected number of phone calls per week, it is highly unlikely that he would jump to 100% in one week. But what is critical is that in the next week, he goes to 50%, then 60%, and so on. In the long run, the trend may be more important than a single overachievement spike.
Holding team members accountable for commitments
One of the most stressful parts of management for junior leaders is holding uncomfortable conversations with the team members. Anyone who wants to grow as a leader would inevitably engage in one every once in a while. A key guidance that can be provided to the junior leaders is that the more constructive and data-driven these conversations would be, the higher the probability that the situation will improve. Circling back to my example on the phone calls: let’s say a rep has demonstrated a low number of calls made for several weeks in a row. If a manager would keep sharing generic comments on that, it’s not very likely that the situation would improve. A common dialogue would look like this:
Manager: Your phone call metric is still low
Rep: Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I was swamped again with other activities
Manager: Please increase the volume of calls next week
Rep: I’ll do my best
And the next week the situation may repeat.
An alternative is to get a clear and very specific commitment from the rep and highlight that you’re going to check on this commitment and expect a detailed report on what worked and what didn’t. It’s critical that the rep acknowledges this expectation and understands that a general answer (like “i worked hard”) would not be accepted if the situation doesn’t improve. Here’s how the dialogue may look like if this approach is used:
Manager: I’m very glad that you have a good feeling about your pipeline for this quarter. But unfortunately, the phone call number doesn’t look so good. As you know we expect everyone to do at least 90 dials per week and your average result is around 40.
Rep: Yes, I know. But the number of incoming requests from the customers is overwhelming and I often don’t have the time to call clients
Manager: I understand that it makes complete sense. But prospecting is not something that we can deprioritize. I’m not asking you to jump to 90 calls next week. But what is a realistic increase in your opinion that you would be able to demonstrate next week?
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Rep: I think getting to 50 is something I can do
Manager: OK, agreed. 50 it is then. Next week when we’re going to meet during the 1:1 I would expect to see 50 dials and I will also ask you to elaborate on what worked well and where you experienced certain challenges if any. Does this sound like a plan?
Rep: You bet!
Once leaders have a commitment from the reps’ side, holding them accountable would be an easier task. Firstly, the expectations are no longer vague. “Growing the number of calls” can mean anything, but, “increasing the weekly number of dials by 10” is something that can be easily measured. And if for any reason, a rep still demonstrates no improvement, all these commitments and agreements would serve as a clear justification for any measures that need to be taken (e.g. performance improvement plan).
Having critical areas of work documented
Another area I coach the junior leaders on is to never trust their memory and to keep all the critical pieces of information documented. I can not even remember how much trouble I got myself in in the past because of not making notes, so I don’t want the leaders to repeat my mistakes. Any agreements, next steps, plans, strategies, best practices, and more need to be thoroughly documented and kept in locations where they would always be available for reference. This is something that the leaders need to do themselves and coach their team members to do the same. A couple of examples from our team’s experience: (1) I always tell all the reps that an indicator that shows that they are in control of their book of business is that they have a next step for every single account represented with a task in the CRM. Even if it means having a task to get in touch in 6 months to do a quick check-in to confirm that nothing has changed with an account that had low growth potential. (2) a brief summary of each 1:1 meeting needs to be logged so it would be possible to circle back to any week in the past and check what has been discussed, what commitments have been made etc.
Providing guidance the right way
One of the common mistakes of junior leaders is that they sometimes get too excited about helping their team members and, as a result, end up doing the work for them instead of helping them. While it may not be a bad idea in specific situations, if it becomes a rule-of-thumb scenario, it leads to 2 negative outcomes. Firstly team members do not learn how to do things themselves. Secondly, leaders spend a significant amount of time doing IC work instead of engaging in their new direct responsibilities. As a result, the growth of the team’s expertise is slowed down, and hitting the targets becomes more challenging. Situations, where managers do the reps’ work, can be initiated not only from the managers’ side. For example, a rep may ask a manager to help out at the client meeting and end up listening in the background while the manager drives the whole conversation. In order to avoid such scenarios I always recommend the leaders to do a quick review after the help has been provided. Discussion points during such a review may include:
Please don’t get me wrong — I’m not stating here that the manager should only help the rep once and then decline all requests for assistance — certain skills and business scenarios require multiple iterations of support from leadership for the rep to feel confident and be able to perform at a high level. But there’s a big difference between showing once and then reviewing how the rep did something and providing feedback on what could be improved, versus jumping in every single time and doing the work for the rep.
Managing escalations
“I want to speak to your manager” is a phrase that none of the reps like to hear from their clients. However, these situations happen and are inevitable every now and then. Junior leaders need to be coached on how to manage escalations effectively. There are dozens of scenarios where the clients may want to escalate the situation to the leadership — from the expectations set incorrectly to the desire to get a higher discount. When managing such situations leaders need to demonstrate executive presence and handle them professionally. Obviously, there’s no single universal advice one can give to junior leaders to handle all escalations well. But here are some recommendations to start with:
When junior leaders escalate the situation to me further (e.g. when the client is not satisfied with their answers) I always CC them so they can see how I continue the conversation, what language I use and what’s the outcome of the escalation. We often discuss the situation afterward and review the details of it.
Obviously, the list above is not essential and only covers the tip of an iceberg (otherwise there wouldn’t be so many books on management and leadership available on the market). However, I strongly believe that coaching junior leaders on the points above enables them to drive their team’s results faster and serve their reps more effectively.