2 big reasons why you still need to coach your best performers
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jan 23, 2012 @ 10:05 AM
One of my inside sales training course clients just had a breakout quarter. We trained their team in the summer, and the numbers went through the roof in calendar Q4. They still feel, however, that they could do even better, so we discussed how to make that happen. We trained their inside sales managers to coach their team members, but we found that they had only coached the reps needing to get over quota. They weren’t coaching their star performers, so I told them to start doing that as well, for two reasons:
1) Even star performers have holes in their games. I don’t usually like to make sports analogies, but the best in any sport get continual coaching. They’re already among the best, but like best performers everywhere, they want to get better. Every time I’ve personally coached a star performer, I’ve uncovered one or two things he or she could do better, because even great performers have forgotten a few things. In my experience, fixing those things allows them to do more in fewer calls, so their numbers increase faster, their close rate improves, and things stay in the pipeline for far less a period of time.
2) As a coach, you can learn by seeing and hearing what your best performers do to be successful. Then you can share those best practices with the other individuals you coach. Coaching, like any other skill, is a craft that can constantly be honed, and one of the best ways to sharpen it is to pick up what your best reps are doing, then add those skills to your coaching repertoire.
As managers, we tend to focus on helping the people who need it most, and tend to ignore great performers, who just go about their work, exceeding quota. Those superior performers, though, need input from you as well, and you need to find out what they’re doing on the telephone so you can convey it to others. Coaching everyone improves team communication, and will tend to give everyone a greater presence at peformance review time.
So if you’re a manager that coaches your reps (and you should be), please don’t ignore working side by side with your best. If you do, I predict that your numbers will increase dramatically enough that you’ll want to add it this concept to your Best Practices Playbook.