Sales Managers who are great coaches get much better results from their sales teams. CSO Insights and AchieveGlobal conducted a webinar recently entitled "Sales Leadership: Coaching for Top Performance."
John Petrucci, VP of Sales for State Auto Insurance, participated in the webinar and a succeeding Q&A session to tell how AchieveGlobal helped his organization roll out a winning coaching methodology. If you missed the webinar, you can view it here.
The following post, which originated on CSO Insights’ blog, covers answers to questions posed by webinar attendees. These answers came from John Petrucci from State Auto Insurance.
What is coaching?
Coaching is the process of giving instruction and providing advice to the folks who will be ‘in the game,' whether that's an athletic event or the game of business. It includes finding out where the individual currently stands in their particular skill sets, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and building on their strengths while mitigating their weaknesses. Weakness mitigation is often addressed through playing off the strengths of other players on the ‘team.' Have a good closer but a weak prospector? Team them up with a good prospector and weak closer. Coaches work to make the people they coach ‘better.'
Will you define what separates coaching from management or typical pipeline review?
Let's start with management. The classic definition of management is to plan, organize, control, and direct work. Someone can be named a manager today, and tomorrow that is what they'll do-plan, organize, control, and direct the work of the unit they are managing. Typically, they'll measure the work that is being done via a pipeline review-which looks at the results of the work they have managed. So let's say management starts in the middle and works toward the end of the ‘work process.' A coach, on the other hand, gives instructions and provides advice to the folks who will be doing the work-be that an athlete in sports or an associate in business. They prepare their charges for success, once the ‘work' is assigned. Let's say they start at the beginning, and move to the middle of the ‘work process.' Another way to say this is a coach work to make the ‘people' better, where managers work to make the ‘work' better.
How did you deal with the trust issue, or lack of trust?
One of the reasons we created the ‘coaches' coach' position was to address possible ‘trust' issues among our managers/coaches. The coaching relationship gives senior managers an opportunity to be vulnerable in a ‘safe' environment. Coaches want to talk about their ideas or decisions, but hesitate to go right to their boss about it. If they are ‘the boss,' they hesitate to let anyone know they might not have the answer. But they will talk to their coach about these same things. In our operation, we've seen an improvement in communication through this process that just wasn't present before.
How did you solve the time problem? I.e.; adding coaching to everything else on the list!
A very good question! You can't just ‘add' coaching without ‘removing' something else. Most ‘managers' buckets are already full. We didn't focus on coaching as a separate event - we worked to integrate coaching into all that we do. What we discovered is every interaction a ‘manager/coach' has with the associates they support is an opportunity to ‘coach' the person to better performance. We stopped focusing solely on the ‘process,' and started to ‘enhance' the associate as well. That's not to say process improvement isn't important, or that best practices aren't important. It is to say the most important investment a coach makes is in the associate. Once we got our ‘coaches' focused on the human element, they were able to weave coaching opportunities in throughout the day, and not focus on ‘coaching' as a stand-alone event. It didn't add to their list, it improved how they worked their list!
How much patience would you have with your "needs improvement" sales reps in this complicated period?
Once we began coaching in earnest-and our associates ‘felt the love' if you will of their coach working to improve their performance-most associates we considered ‘under-performers' opted out on their own. We had some we needed to counsel to look into other opportunities, both within and outside of State Auto. We had to let a few go. Remember, we also reorganized during this time frame, which left us with more associates than needed in some of our field positions. We didn't have too much time to deal with this issue, as the reorganization was forcing our hand. Under our current structure, coaching allows us a much closer-and much more timely-view of our associates, and we can address the weaker performers more quickly. In the past, there was some room to run and hide.
Changing behaviors is usually quite difficult. What did you do specifically to achieve this? Did you, for instance, set performance measures? What were they?
I believe I mentioned in the webinar we have best practices in place here at State Auto. We currently have 40 BPs our field associates can use. One of the measurement pieces was their ability to properly execute the BPs related to their business unit. There were forms they had to complete, showing the steps of the BP were completed. We encouraged their coach to ‘witness' at least one of the activities where a BP was being used, to provide confirmation the steps of the BP were not just being completed, but being completed like we would like to see them executed. That is where coaching came into play-when steps or BPs were not being executed properly. Another measurement piece was to track the number of sales calls, and which agencies the associates called on. When we did our agency segmentation in 2008, we discovered three of the six segments would help us grow, and three of the six would not. The three that could help us grow had about 17% of our agency plant. We needed to have our regional sales associates calling on those agencies. We expected, all things being equal, the agencies the associates worked with would grow, and not decline, in their business with us. We also expected them to make an underwriting profit. Those were a few of the metrics we employed as we started this journey.
What do you mean by organic growth?
For State Auto, organic growth comes from selling new policies to people not insured with us, and selling more insurance to folks already insured with us. It does not include growth secured from acquisitions or mergers.
How do you enable coaching using a CRM tool that equips sales managers with information to coach effectively throughout the sales cycle?
This answer comes from Jim Dickie, Managing Partner, CSO Insights
Over the past six months we have started to benchmark how sales organizations are using CRM solutions from firms like Revegy, Mindjet, and Pipeline Manager to develop and implement key account plans. These systems prompt the rep through the process of developing a comprehensive plan to penetrate an account. They then automatically track the progress the rep is making against achieving key selling tasks. If they detect an opportunity starting to get off track, they automatically notify the appropriate sales manager and they can then proactively reach out to the sales person and conduct a coaching session around the issues the CRM applications surfaced.