The act of coaching is powerful, but it can be hard to know whether your efforts worked without tracking and measuring your coaching programs’ success (or lack thereof).
Sales coaching is much like other sales enablement activities in that it can be somewhat intangible, and tying revenue improvements directly to coaching sessions isn’t always a safe bet.
You can’t quite declare that a sales rep who went from missing quota to hitting it did so just because they spent time being coached by their manager. Ultimately coaching is about long-term behavior change, but there are ways to tell how successful your initiative has been.
This article covers:
- Using data and feedback to determine success
- Metrics to measure coaching effectiveness
Using data and feedback to determine success
As we highlighted, good sales coaching isn’t just about the revenue metrics. It’s also about changing the attitude towards self-improvement and self-reflection within your organization, and tracking that is also worthwhile and tangible.
Qualitative insights
Mark Garrett Hayes, Author of ‘Sales Coaching Essentials’, believes there’s a qualitative element to measuring the success of your coaching efforts.
“The easiest way to tie coaching to results is if you're running deal reviews with people, and they say, qualitatively, that a particular conversation with a sales manager helped - someone coaching them helped to make that breakthrough - or if a rep says that deal was not closable without the coach’s intervention.
“Generally speaking, coaching is something that is deeply embedded within the DNA of really successful organizations and sales teams, and it's really tricky, in some instances, to prove a direct correlation between coaching interventions, and actual revenue results.
“It's down to behavior, it's down to people using what you're giving them, and getting results from that and testifying to it.”
Daniel O’Dowd
Data-driven approach
Kate Philpot, Vice President Global Sales Enablement at Getty Images, says that you can use quantitative improvements in metrics such as win/close rate and quota attainment as long as you have the perspective that coaching is a long-term investment in bettering these figures.
“The only caveat is that we shouldn't expect change to happen overnight.
“Yes, incrementally, you should see shifts in the areas that your coaching has identified as areas for improvement and growth - but as we all know, it takes a long time for something to become a habit, and it takes just as much time for a habit to be broken and a new one to be created.
“Something that we spend a lot of time talking to managers about is to not expect a person to do a complete 180 after just one coaching session.”
Jeff Jaworski, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Americas at CoverGenius, echoed this sentiment, stating that over time you can compare the results of reps who have been coached to those who have not to see if on average, one group is more statistically successful than the other.
“If you're doing specific coaching programs, you can link it together with your CRM data. When you're working on a particular deal, you could tag that deal as a deal that’s going through coaching, and compare it to other deals that didn't go through coaching.
“Are we seeing any kind of differentials? Are we seeing higher pitch and win rates? Are the deal sizes larger? Is the time to close faster? You can get into real tangible things that will tell you whether coaching is actually driving business impact.”
This approach is more effective at creating data-driven sales coaching than pulling out individual metrics, as individual reps and deals will be impacted by too many factors.
The average can allow you to measure how effective your sales coaching program is across your entire sales team, encompassing different learning styles.
Utilizing conversation intelligence
Beyond traditional metrics, many conversation intelligence tools allow you to track the prevalence of keywords and phrases throughout a rep’s call.
For example, if you are coaching a rep to follow the MEDDIC framework more closely, setting up phrase tracking in this platform and analyzing whether the rep’s usage (be they your own or one of your channel partners') of key MEDDIC-related phrases increases over time could be a good way of tangibly proving a successful behavior change.
This can work with several frameworks, as long as you can identify the keywords that’ll appear in coached reps' sales calls with prospects.
Daniel O’Dowd
Metrics to measure coaching effectiveness
There’s no single, definitive coaching metric. As we’ve mentioned, coaching is about creating long-term behavior changes across the sales team and creating an environment where learning and self-improvement are sought out and desired.
This means each sales rep will have their own individual statistics that should be tracked to understand if their coaching is currently effective.
Setting a goal
Most important is deciding which metric you want to influence through coaching before the coaching actually begins. This is easily done with the GROW coaching model but applies in all scenarios.
During coaching, a sales rep may say “I want to improve my win rate”.
In that case, it’s straightforward to understand what performance data should be tracked - their win rate. If the rep’s win rate is better in the 3-6 month period after coaching than it was before, it’s a strong indicator that the coaching is working.
However, sometimes a rep won’t have an exact metric in mind. They might say something like “I feel like I struggle to get deals past the discovery stage, and want to get better at that”. Before jumping immediately into discovery call coaching, you should discuss:
- Why they don’t feel confident in these situations
- What metric you should use to track this issue (in this case, conversion rate from discovery stage)
- Where the rep currently stands with this metric
- Where they’d like to get to
This way, you can track the rep’s performance in this specific area over time, rather than relying on their feeling that discovery calls have gone well or badly.
Not only do you have a way of tracking their improvement, but you also create a sense of reward when the rep sees that they’ve hit a tangible goal or target - as opposed to an abstract idea of improving in the area.
Tracking sales rep’s goals
Better still, by keeping track of how each rep does in reaching their individual goals, you can build a picture of how effective coaching is across the entire sales organization. If most reps are hitting their specific coaching goals, that’s a solid indication that your sales leaders and/or coaches are doing a good job in transferring skills to their reps.
When you have data showing that coached reps are achieving their goals and improving real metrics like win rate or stage conversion rate, you’ll have an easier time justifying the time and resources spent coaching to anyone who is doubtful.
In short, there’s no one metric you can look at to determine coaching success.
Instead, carefully selecting the metrics each rep is aiming to improve on an individual basis can provide indicators of the effectiveness of your coaching initiative on both an individual and team-wide level.
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