What do you see as the difference between coaching and performance management, and how do you work with sales managers to strike the correct balance between the two?

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There's a bit of art and a bit of science. Management has to be done. Tasks and activities have to be completed. You have to hold salespeople accountable to complete things per deadline. Manage what they do. Coaching is how they do it and they might complete everything as asked but get zero results, that's where coaching comes in. As the leader you have to determine if they are doing things in a way that gets results and if not, coach to change that.

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If you think of performance management as the management of metrics and numbers, and coaching as the development of the person- that is the difference. Performance management is the pipeline reviews, the call recording reviews, the debriefs, the strategy sessions. Whereas coaching is the 1:1 work with the individual where asking questions for self awareness happens, where role play and practice happen. You need both, but they are not the same. I also look at coaching at the proactive activities you do, where performance management is the lagging reports of what already happened.

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It's the most challenging job in selling by a country mile. 71% of managers go into the job with zero formal training and the average tenure of our sales manager is 11 to 18 months.
In sales, it's a role that has been massively disrupted over the last 10 to 15 years and it's taking them further away from the things that are meaningful: coaching and developing their reps, inspiring, and creating a culture where the reps want to come in and perform, having a strong set of values that they all live and breathe, and setting high expectations and standards. Nowadays, the management role is kind of these odds and ends things that are just chucked on the manager, most of which is reporting. It’s so scary because we wonder why sales performance is so poor and we're taking the parent out! We need to go back to empowering managers and focusing on the things that we know are going to move the needle on pipeline and sales performance.

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I see the two as quite different. Some words I associate with each are:

Coaching - Proactive, Developmental, nurturing, building skills and abilities, providing guidance, focused on improvement for optimization

Performance management - reactive, evaluating, measuring against internal goals/quota's/standards, formal, bringing up to the standard

Both are important, but I certainly do see them as different conversations, one being more ideal than the other. Maybe not the point of your question, but it would definitely inform you how to address it with sales managers and the type of conversations you're having.

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I think this is a great question, touching on the difference between the what and the how… the what is quantitative and performance management is a wonderful tool to leverage. Mostly binary “did you meet the goal?”. I the other hand the how is super difficult and very subjective, and that is where coaching, on average, plays the biggest role…

What do you see as the difference between coaching and performance management, and how do you work with sales managers to strike the correct balance between the two?

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