Coaching is the #1 thing leaders do to drive the performance of their teams. Not surprising then that the Sales Executive Council found that sales reps who received 3+ hours of coaching per month had 17% higher goal attainment than reps who received less than 2.
But despite the huge impact of this behavior, few organizations hold their leaders accountable for doing it. What’s even worse is that there’s a huge disconnect between employees and their managers when it comes to what exactly constitutes coaching versus simply meeting 1:1.
Use data
As the coach of a professional athlete or the director of a feature film, you’d never think of giving your stars advice without watching replays of their performances first. The best coaches use data to drive these conversations because data is both insightful and objective.
Data can help facilitate awareness, performance improvement and can be a coach’s best friend in difficult conversations. The key is sourcing the right data to drive the conversation you’re looking to have. For example, if you’re planning to provide sales coaching around revenue attainment, pipeline development, and marketing campaign efficiency, you need to ensure that the reports and dashboards you’re using highlight those metrics. Using data to drive key conversations is a subtle by highly important concept.
As we kickstarted our B2B sales operations we would often get together to discuss areas of product and process improvement. These conversations would invariably lead off with someone tossing out a statement like, “Users are getting hung up on our registration process…we should change it” or “I think our sales funnel is leaky. What we need to do is…”.
While it’s a safe bet than tons of processes could be improved in any organization, the one counter-question that would consistently challenge us to maintain our data-centric focus was:
“Is that a hunch or a fact?”
Over time, driving our conversations and decisions based on facts vs. hunches forced us to have more focused conversations. It also helped us refine the metrics we used to run the business and resulted in faster improvement. The result should be no different in your 1:1 coaching interactions.
While it can be tempting to start coaching advice with “I think…” or “I feel…”, starting with “What the data shows is…” is always a better choice (especially when you’re delivering critical feedback).