Video: 3 Tips for Fostering a Coaching Culture

Episode summary

In this video, Helen Waite shares some of the key takeaways from our Road to Readiness Roadshow stop in Chicago. This video focuses on fostering a coaching culture in sales orgs and offers some practical tips for how to create one at your own organization.

Key highlights

• Leadership buy-in: To establish a coaching culture, it’s imperative that senior leaders, from the CRO to managers and reps, actively participate in coaching. Leadership buy-in sets the example for the entire team. Some organizations even tie coaching to sales manager compensation to incentivize regular coaching.
• Coaching for coaches: Sales managers are often promoted from successful sales reps, but they may lack the necessary coaching skills. Providing coaching for coaches as part of onboarding and ongoing training is essential. Regular training sessions, whether quarterly or during annual kickoffs, help managers continually improve their coaching abilities.
• Better together mindset: Encouraging collaboration among managers and reps fosters a coaching-friendly environment. When managers work together and reps collaborate, it creates a safe space for conversations, enabling continuous learning. This “better together” mindset ensures that coaching isn’t a competitive activity but rather a collective effort to help the entire team achieve their goals.

Transcription

Our second stop on our Road to Readiness Roadshow in Chicago brought together sales leaders from ChowNow, Couchbase, Cisco, SCI, and more. A lot of the conversation was around a coaching culture in your organization. So here we’ll share three tips for fostering a coaching culture.

The first tip is leadership buy-in.

You’re not going to get your entire team to adopt a coaching culture and coach on a regular basis unless your leaders are doing the same thing. So enablement can’t drive this function alone, you need to make sure that your senior sales leaders, your CRO down to your managers, and your reps are all bought into coaching on a regular basis, so everyone can get better.

We’ve seen success in organizations even building coaching and as part of a sales manager’s compensation, just to encourage and make sure that they’re doing that coaching on a regular basis.

The second tip is coaching your coaches.

We often see that sales managers are typically sales reps who did really well and were promoted. So it doesn’t always mean that they have the skills needed to learn how to coach their reps effectively once they do become a manager.

Make sure that you’re coaching your coaches as part of your onboarding and training for your new managers. And then making sure you’re doing that on a regular basis, whether it’s once a year, providing training to all of your managers on how to coach their reps effectively. It could be on a quarterly basis, or twice a year during your kickoffs, making sure that you’re not only doing a coach the coach as part of your onboarding but also including that on a regular basis for your managers to make sure that they’re always learning from each other, learning how to be better coaches for their reps.

And finally, the third tip is developing a better together mindset.

We heard as part of our sessions, that it’s really important that your managers work together and that your reps work together. And that really fosters a coaching environment where you can have a safe space to have conversations, whether it’s manager to rep, or rep to rep.

Your managers can learn from each other, and so can your reps, and that can help making sure you’re coaching on a regular basis. If they’re all learning from each other, better together. And that coaching can really help the team all hit their numbers together and it’s not kind of pitting team or region against each other. So having that better together mindset helps with that culture.