Key Initiative Series: Creating a Coaching Culture

Our customers use Coach for a variety of training initiatives - onboarding, product certification, manager training, etc. In this series, we will break down each of these initiatives and how to leverage Coach to achieve your goals.

The Importance of a Coaching Culture:

A study by CSO Insights revealed that sales organizations with an established culture of coaching had a 30 percent higher win rate; yet, only 26 percent of companies have a formal coaching program.

Implementing a coaching culture can:

• Empower Sales Leaders
• Boost Morale and Productivity
• Encourage use of best practices and improve performance
• Cultivate better client relationships, resulting in more sales and revenue
• Retain sales reps

So why aren’t more organizations fostering this type of culture? Creating a culture is challenging and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes repetition, reinforcement, and the right tools.

Leveraging Coach:

If your organization is moving towards a coaching culture Coach can help drive and reinforce that change. Coaching and managing are two different things, and providing coaching and training for managers allows them to understand what is expected of them, feel secure in their responsibilities and ultimately encourage and guide those on their team.

Here are some ideas and best practices leveraging Coach to get you started:

• Use PIQ to coach to Scenario-based conversations:
• How would you talk to a sales rep that isn’t performing up to standards?
• One of your rep says “X”...how do you respond?
• Have managers make a video walking through giving  feedback to a rep’s PIQ
• Have your managers complete the courses that their teams will be taking first

• Determine a company rubric for PIQ scoring- what does good look like? This will help keep scoring consistent across teams and enable managers to feel confident in their scoring and feedback

Measuring Success

Once you’ve established a coaching culture at your organization, how do you measure the effectiveness? In Coach there are a number of leading indicators you can look at to help coach your coaches:

• Number of reviews assigned vs. completed
• Number of reviews with feedback
• Average length of feedback
• Average review score

Want to see how these metrics correlate to performance? Coach has an open reporting API that allows you to leverage Coach data with your internal reporting systems to build custom dashboards tailored to your specific needs. Some examples of lagging indicators to measure effectiveness are:

• Reduction in Ramp Time
• Reduction in Sales Cycle time
• Increase in Average Deal Size
• Increase in Average Quota Attainment per Rep
• Decrease in Turnover
• Increase In Team Conversion Rates

Want to learn more about creating a coaching culture?

Check out our recent blog post where we dive into what a coaching culture is and why it’s important.