This article comes from Lidia Arshavsky’s insightful talk, ‘Coaching for sales managers who are too busy to coach’, at our New York 2024 Sales Enablement Summit. Check out her full presentation here.

Anyone want to play a fun game? I call it "How Sad is Your Sales Manager?" Let's start with a quick true or false question: 52% of sales managers are at risk of burnout.

Wrong! The actual statistic is 79% - a shockingly high number when you think about it. With managers facing unprecedented levels of burnout and massive workloads, it's no wonder many struggle to prioritize coaching their sales teams. 

But at the same time, the data shows just how crucial coaching is for driving performance and team morale. Companies with a strong coaching culture see 15% higher revenue achievement, and top sales reps are 51% more likely to receive coaching.

So as sales enablement professionals, we have a critical role to play in equipping our managers to be effective coaches, even when time is limited. 

In this article, I'm going to share the specific framework and tactics I implemented to make coaching more accessible and impactful for our busy sales leaders.

Let's dive in! 

Assessing your managers' coaching capabilities

The first step is to truly understand your managers' current coaching abilities and pain points. Do they actually know what effective coaching looks like? Or are they just calling their one-on-one check-ins "coaching"?

When I took on the project of building a coaching program at Leapsome, I started by doing a deep dive into the needs of our team. Three key things became clear to me:

  1. We needed to shift the focus from just deal-coaching to developing core sales skills. It was all too easy for managers to get caught up in the minutiae of individual deals, especially at the end of the quarter. But that kind of coaching isn't sustainable or impactful long-term.
  2. The coaching approach had to be time-efficient - around 10-15 minutes per session. I knew our managers were crunched for time, so anything more complex wasn't going to fly.
  3. We had to keep things as simple as possible. There are tons of great coaching frameworks and methodologies out there, but for our particular team, anything more than three steps was just too much complexity.

Does this sound similar to the challenges you're facing with your own sales managers? Take some time to really understand their needs and pain points. That intel will be crucial as you build out a coaching program that actually sticks.

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Introducing the OPA coaching framework

Armed with a clear understanding of our managers' coaching capabilities and preferences, I set out to create a structured, yet simple framework they could easily adopt. I call it the OPA framework: Opportunity, Plan of Action, Accountability.

Here's how it works: