Sales leaders struggle to find the time to coach their salespeople to succeed.
Sales leaders with a span of control of 5 to 8 direct reports would be lucky to have two hours a day in an average week for thinking, coaching salespeople, and conducting pipeline, forecast, or account plan reviews. Not a pretty picture, right?
If the sales leader is committed to giving her salespeople the coaching time they need and deserve, something has to give.
We’ve helped sales leaders across various industries uncover ways to improve their productivity so that they can spend more time with their salespeople. We conduct full-day workshops on this subject, so I’m sharing a few recommendations that you can begin to apply today:
How to Make More Time For Sales Coaching
1. Don’t block out full days to conduct marathon pipeline, opportunity, forecast, account reviews, and coaching sessions.
Rarely will a sales manager have a day that won’t be interrupted by compelling opportunity, account, or service issues – they’ll often end up suspending, canceling, or rescheduling some of your sessions.
2. Align with the sales team’s travel schedules, time zones, and personal lives.
Individual and work schedules are often in flux, but less so within a two-week horizon. Ideally, there should be a mutual agreement with the team that there won’t be rescheduled coaching sessions within a two-week window. Coaching sessions can’t be the first meeting moved to accommodate other priorities; they should be the last. Also, the coaching impact diminishes if you have a 1:1 session at 7:30 am with a salesperson who is not a morning person.
3. Start declining internal meeting invitations, and ask others to record web or phone conferences to listen to later.
Sales leaders can’t decline all internal meeting invitations, but maybe start with one per week and increase to one daily. I know this one seems arbitrary, but the concept is that you can attend fewer web or phone conferences without missing much.
4. Color Code Calendar Meetings.
Not all meetings are created equal. By color-coding (Categories in Outlook, Color dot in Gmail) their calendars, sales leaders can visually see which events are a priority and how the flow of the day will go.
For example, coaching sessions can be purple. Business development, orange, and planning time, green. Low-value meetings that are easily rescheduled, light-blue, and so on. Different meeting colors provide visual cues about which events require prep time and how to allocate time for the week. By color-coding coaching sessions, you’ll be less likely to move their session in favor of impacting others.
The suggestions above are a few practical tips for sales leaders to find more time to coach salespeople, but they won’t increase the commitment level of a sales leader in spending more time with her salespeople.
Sales leaders must be proactive and structured to make more time for sales coaching. Things that are calendered get done!