Managers aren’t coaching

Because upper management can now see every deal in CRM, frontline managers spend a lot of time cleaning the data, analyzing the data, beautifying the data, and learning all the intimate details of every deal (in case someone asks). As a result, sales managers are spending more time as data jockeys and less time with their team in the field.

Sales managers aren’t afforded the time needed to coach and help their sales team adopt, practice, and perfect best-practice selling behaviors; they’re not driving for incremental performance improvements. As a consequence, new sales reps end up learning by inefficient & costly trial-and error, while experienced sales reps just continue doing “what they’ve always done” (see Reason No.4).

This results in poor sales performance overall and stunted sales rep growth, development, and improvement … which leads to more poor sales performance. It’s a never-ending cycle.

Frontline managers already spend time with their reps collecting deal information, clarifying deal details, providing suggestions for next steps and obstacle removal, and visiting customers together. By reframing the situation, sales managers can repurpose that time into coaching opportunities. Any conversation with a sales rep can be turned into a coaching opportunity if the manager is paying attention and is disciplined in the way they execute that conversation.

Cultures are created from the top down through language, repetition, and action. Re-establishing your frontline sales managers as sales coaches will actually improve their understanding of the deals their teams are working, lessen the need to massage the way deals are recorded in CRM, increase the accuracy of their forecasting, and incrementally improve the overall sales performance of their team.