At CoachSimple, we have helped thousands of sales professionals achieve success through automating the coaching and accountability process. Along the way, we have identified three critical stages of the coaching process that any firm must address in order to achieve success in their coaching program. These are Commit, Assess and Implement.
Commit - First, executives and managers must commit to this new "coaching culture" way of thinking. Whether it means committing to having coaching become a company wide cultural experience, committing to balancing both the quantitative and qualitative measurements or simply committing to staying consistent to the coaching process when external forces pull everyone off track, commitment is a critical first step and cannot be overlooked.
Assess - Next, it is vital to know where your sales professionals are currently in order to help them get where they want to go. Whether you distribute simplified "self-assessments" that allow them to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, or implement more standardized, third-party assessment tools, starting with an honest baseline of where they are at is a very important step in this process.
Implement - Finally, effectively implementing your coaching program is the most important step. Start by setting up a fixed schedule including annual reviews, quarterly updates and either monthly or bi-weekly check-ins and get agreement from your participants. Then, you must stay on schedule and have unwavering discipline as a manager or executive to create an expectation of on-going accountability.
As you know, salespeople will always have a critical presentation or a pending deal or a fire needing to be put out that can easily push scheduled coaching sessions out into the future. However, implementing this coaching process with discipline and accountability is critical and in many cases may actually alleviate salesperson stress by helping them better prioritize their time, identify the highest payoff activities and to de-prioritize less important tasks. Implementing with discipline and accountability, therefore, is the final and most critical step in this process.
Find out more about why forward thinking coaches and managers are coaching thousands of sales professionals in real estate, insurance, recruiting and other sales focused industries using the CoachSimple coaching platform. Please visit CoachSimple.net or call 858.381.2091