Because we’re talking about coaching reps, we think about showing how the coaching improves the rep’s performance.
It’s tempting to look at the CRM when you’re trying to improve coaching.
It’s a logical jump – in fact a lot of coaching platforms are built directly on top of CRMs because they are all about choosing a rep performance metric to improve, coaching to it, and tracking it.
I’d like to step back a bit though.
Let’s say we want someone to close more deals. We don’t coach them to “just close more deals”. We look at the behaviour they need to change that’s likely to result in them closing more deals – like getting clarity on their procurement processes, or moving away from a feature-led demo – and we work on that.
Closing more deals is the result we want, not the behaviour we can change.
If we apply this to coaching behaviours, we have to look at the coaching activities and not just the lagging indicator of the rep’s performance in the CRM. Are they coaching often enough? What are they covering? Does each session have a clear commitment they can follow up on next time?
When it comes to helping managers improve. we can apply some of the hard won lessons from coaching reps with the same success…