Have Resume, Can Coach Salespeople

A client asked me to conduct a final interview on his top sales management candidate.  I asked him what he wanted me to accomplish in the interview and he said, “Make sure that he can recruit, motivate, coach and hold people accountable.”

And so it began.  The interview was uneventful. The candidate sounded good, said all the right things, backed up what he said, and had some terrific examples.  And then we got to his coaching experience.

He mentioned that 1/3 of the salespeople he had hired for one particular company had been promoted.  When I asked what the criteria was for one to be promoted, he said that they had to hit quota for four months.  Quota was a point system, and when I was finally granted the code to better understand how it worked, it boiled down to 7 sales per month at an average of $500.  That didn’t sound very impressive so I asked him to tell me who he spent the most time coaching.  You won’t be surprised to learn that he coached the under performers – the salespeople that did not meet quota. 

In essence, the salespeople he didn’t coach met quota on their own and got promoted.  The salespeople he did coach didn’t meet quota.  So I asked him to tell us what one of those coaching conversations sounded like.  He said he would take them into a conference room and tell them that they weren’t hitting the numbers. Then he would provide some incentive, like a use of the company car for a day, and urge them to step it up.  I mentioned that it sounded more like motivation than coaching and asked him again to provide us with a coaching example.

In his second attempt, he made a more urgent plea with the salesperson to hit the numbers, encouraged them further, and offered an even better incentive.  I told him that it still sounded like motivation and I needed an example of what a coaching conversation sounded like.

He changed the subject.

Coaching is a nice word that can describe a lot of the things that sales managers do.  But unless a sales manager can pre-call strategize through role play, debrief a completed sales call, identify where the wheels came off, identify the cause and tie it to the effect, generate a lesson learned, role play how it “coulda/shoulda” sounded, and role play the approach to salvage the opportunity, the salesperson has not been properly coached.

The most important outcome from a coaching conversation?  It is so helpful that the salesperson can’t wait to come back for more.