At the risk of making sweeping generalisations, people in sales do love being able to track things with numbers, probably a result of having such a glaringly obvious representation of our success up there as the revenue target.
Whatever the reason, there’s barely an activity in sales that doesn’t have a KPI attached.
So when we started researching “coaching metrics” there was no shortage of figures to make pretty charts from.
Except…
All of the metrics people were talking about were for XDR/AE *selling* activities. “Coach on x to change behaviour y to impact KPI y and increase rep performance.”
But coaching activity KPIs? Nope. There’s a fuzzy “managers should spend x hours/x% of their time per week coaching” but it’s tough to find anyone actually tracking it.
Why the gap?
Why don’t we do the thing that seems to come so naturally for us as sales leaders and measure, track, analyse the highest impact activity a manager can do?
Is coaching such a drastically different affair from selling that it’s not measurable?
Is everyone doing it so well that there’s no need to try and improve?
Or is it that selling activities are the universal comfort zone that we all focus on because it’s familiar?
I’m genuinely interested to find out why we take such a different approach to managing managers… 🤔