Why companies should outsource Sales Coaching… or at least hire Sales Coaches
Have you ever looked carefully at your manager’s agenda?
If so you already know what I’m talking about: all day meetings, training, job interviews, networking events and pipeline reviews leave little space for everything else – especially for Sales Coaching.
Let’s start by saying that in B2B selling there’s a widespread belief that managers have to be good coaches too: nothing against it but in today’s business world we cannot expect and we don’t have to expect that Sales Managers will coach too.
Yes, you read well: nowadays companies don’t have to pretend that their Sales Managers will perform Sales Coaching too.
During these years I closely observed the phenomenon and I noticed 3 main reasons why companies should always outsource Sales Coaching or hire one professional Sales Coaches:
- We cannot expect Sales Managers to do Sales Coaching.
As I wrote before Sales Managers don’t have time and they’re pressured from both the boardroom and the field: in other terms, they’re in a bottleneck.
Coaching is a long-term plan, a changing act so it cannot be performed in spare time. - Sales Coaching has become highly complex.
In other terms and as every other job we need specialists, we need ad hoc professionals who know how to do this. - Sales Managers have to manage: this is why they’re paid.
Regarding this last point it’s better to expand: most of the time a Sales Manager is a successful salesperson who has been promoted, so he knows the company and how to do things but sometimes he doesn’t know how to make the next step.
In other terms a Sales Manager who’s coaching will probably tell the salesperson how to do something instead of working to let her understand how to do the task better according to her capabilities.
He will act in this way because he did it in the past as a salesperson and because (as I wrote in the first point) he has just a few time to allocate for Sales Coaching and this is the shortest way to solve the request.
From a professional standpoint I really hope Sales Coaching will be outsourced or professionalised even more by hiring specific roles and I hope this will become a common practice: as salespeople we’re day by day learning less while selling becomes always more complex.
