How am I doing? The key to improving return on sales training is to teach your managers the value of performance coaching.

• Author: Meyer, Robert St.
• Position: Feature

What does a financial services institution do when sales performance falls short of expectations? The obvious answer is to train your salespeople. Yes, that will help. But if you really want to improve sales, you need to coach your people after you train them. And, not just any kind of coaching. You need to provide the right coaching. Otherwise you're throwing your money away.

Coaching is the sales manager's most critical activity. According to the Forum Corp., Coaching is ... fundamental to securing revenue growth and driving the effectiveness of the entire sales force."

Terri Levine, president of Comprehensive Coaching U Inc., gets more specific. "Coaching helps create enhanced performance environments," she says. "One Harvard University study found that over a 10-year period, net income growth in enhanced performance cultures can be as much as 756 percent higher than in traditional command-and-control environments." A study published in Public Personnel Management quantified the results coaching has on training. Conducted by Human Resources Solutions Inc., the research found that training increased productivity by 22.4 percent. When combined with coaching, however, productivity skyrocketed to 88 percent.

"Training is wasted without follow-up in the field," emphasizes Brian O'Connor, senior vice president of regional banking for Boston-based FleetBoston Financial Corp. "Most sales managers are former high-performing salespeople with little training in leading people and process. They certainly need the skills that are taught in a formal class. However I believe it is field-based coaching that reinforces the training and brings the newly taught skills to effective use."

O'Connor has data to back him up. FleetBoston created a comprehensive program that included sales-process redesign, team building, automated sales system integration, an intensive training "boot camp" and in-field coaching. The result? "We've been very pleased with our results," he reports, noting that sales have increased as much as 50 and 100 percent for some key product categories.

Historically, however, financial service organizations have not done well with coaching. The cause is three-fold, because banks:

* View coaching as a punishment, not a reward.

* Don't fully understand how to coach behaviorally.

* Don't know what to coach because of a lack of role definition.

Coaching for sales performance

There are three basic types of coaching:

Scoreboard coaching: This focuses on the numbers. This is what most financial services institutions use.

Stat sheet coaching: This looks at activities, such as the number of sales calls made.

Performance coaching: Targets roles, behaviors, and employees' proficiency at carrying out their critical tasks.

Let's use a basketball game to illustrate the differences. All coaches watch the scoreboard--"Keep 'em to 25, team!" This method generally is unsuccessful...