The first table shows the percentage of sales managers who are strong in the Sales Coaching Competency arranged by Sales Management Quotient.
I'm sure you can easily see for yourself that outside of the top 3 percent of all sales managers, expecting sales managers to be effective at sales coaching is pretty much a pipe dream. Only 10 percent of all sales managers are any good at coaching and most of them come from the strongest 15 percent.
Does it get any better when you look at the frequency of coaching? According to the salespeople who report to these sales managers, the majority of the coaching that takes place is on demand. The next table shows that when salespeople don't ask for help, few sales managers proactively provide frequent coaching with "never" being the third most common scenario following on demand. Only 10 percent are getting the daily or multiple times per week coaching we would hope for. Could that 10 percent be reporting to the 10 percent of managers who are good at coaching?
We asked these sales managers how much time they spend on coaching and the next table shows just how grim the coaching situation really is. Read this table from the bottom right and up where you can see that 63% of all sales managers fall into the weak category and slightly more than half of those managers are spending no more than 10% of their time coaching.
24% of all sales managers fall into the serviceable category and 70% of them are spending no more than 20% of their time coaching. Of the remaining 13% (elite and strong) of all sales managers, just under half are spending no more than 30% of their time coaching.
After all the preaching, teaching and beseeching, not much has changed in 10 years. Sales managers aren't spending nearly enough time coaching their salespeople and when they do, the coaching is pathetic.
There are a several reasons for this:
- Many of these sales managers maintain personal sales and their commissions far outweigh their sales management compensation and they don't have the time nor do they want to make the time for coaching.
- They think that coaching is what happens when they do a ride along or listen in on a phone call.
- They think that telling a salesperson what to do, helping with pricing or specs, or asking how a call went is coaching
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