Will you invest in your product or your people?
If your budget would only allow you to invest in one area of your business this quarter, would you invest in developing your products or your people? Would you enhance your systems or your staff?
Providing coaching to personnel from their direct manager could be an investment that continues to pay returns. The Sales Executive Council conducted research into the impact of coaching effectiveness within organizations1. The global study, including more than 3000 participants identified findings which include:
Read more on workplace wellbeing and culture….
- How to Ask ‘R U OK?’
- When being the boss’ favourite can hurt your career
- How Mindfulness Can Help Reduce Stress In The Workplace
- Developing the coaching abilities of sales team managers is an effective way of boosting sales performance of mid-range achievers by up to 19%.
- Retention of high performing sales people is increased when they consider their manager to be an effective coach. Below average ‘intention to stay’ was recorded for sales people whose managers were rated in the bottom third in terms of coaching effectiveness.
- Neither ‘Experience as a Manager’ nor ‘Experience in Sales’ had an impact on ratings of managers’ coaching effectiveness.
- Sales teams receiving less than 2 hours of coaching per month achieved 90% of their sales goals, compared to teams receiving 3 or more hours of coaching per month and achieving 107% of their sales targets2.
- Research into the retention of training information showed that training alone resulted in a 13% retention of training information at a 30-day reassessment of knowledge, whilst those who had ongoing coaching were able to retain 88% of the information2.
Unfortunately, despite considerable benefit to the sales team when managers provide effective coaching to team members, this is the area that consistently scored lowest on a Manager Skill Index examining 10 manager abilities3.
Which begs the question: will you invest in your product or your people? Still not sure? OK, one final statistic: Research has shown that organizations achieve a 1700% ROI when investing in training their managers to be internal coaches4.
- October 2005, Teleconference Series, Building a World Class Coaching Program: Upgrading Rep Ability to Engage Customers with Solutions Hypotheses.
- “Executive Coaching as a Transfer of Training Tool”, Public Personnel Management, Winter 1997
- “Why Do Salespeople Fail?” Industrial Distribution, 1 March 1996; Sales Executive Council Research Solutions
- Rock, D & Donde, R. (2008) “Driving organizational change with internal coaching programs: Part One.” Industrial and Commercial Training, 40, pp 10-18.
Alison Skate is a Workplace Mental Health Specialist for Workplace Mental Health Institute. She began her career as a psychologist in the Australian Army more than twenty years ago. Alison is a leadership coach and workshop facilitator.