How do you enable your sales managers to conduct skill based coaching with their teams?

The biggest obstacle to managers coaching is when their leadership pulls them in other directions, such as strategy meetings, conflicts, and other internal crisis. To enable to them to spend at least 50% of their time in coaching and development, which is the single most important activity to impact revenue- set the expectation that at least 50% of their time should be in coaching, train them on how to coach, and measure it. 

If we bring somebody new in from the outside, there's an onboarding approach we take everybody through that zeros in on some of the things that they have to know in the business day-to-day. We go through how they should think about the pipeline or the rhythm that they have to go through with their teams.

We have an enablement team that is mapped out to a lot of our markets around the world and they spend some time with those leaders 1:1 or in small groups and talk about what we need people to focus on in the business. We even have coaching guides that we put together.

We have to give managers a framework for coaching. We worked with Experian to develop a coaching model. We help the managers think through the types of questions they're going to ask and the types of feedback they're going to provide to raise the seller skills around that capability, like negotiation for example. We also get the engagement of the senior leaders in the organization for the right level of sponsorship.