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How To Outline, Execute, and Measure Coaching Orchestration™ for Sales and Sales Development Managers
There is more to sales management than helping reps close deals or answering objection handling questions live during a call blitz. Whether you manage a field sales, inside sales, or sales development team, focusing on the full responsibilities that fall inside the sales manager job scope means that only 20% of your time should be devoted to accountability-related responsibilities like making sure your reps hit dials or their outbound activities. It also means shifting from a reactionary sales management role to a proactive role. Instead of jumping from emergency to deal negotiation back to emergency, here is how to structure a successful outline of measurable sales management to tell you how you are performing as a sales manager.
What are the core responsibilities of sales and sales development managers?
Accountability to activities and objectives
If you don't already have sales scorecards set up for your reps, this is an easy way to track adherence to both activities and objectives. You should outline the exact number of both expected activities and objectives that the reps need to hit daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. If you aren't sure what the activity targets should be, you can do some math magic walking all the way back from revenue targets to get there. Get the full math formula here. Curious to see how other organizations set up their scorecards for their reps? We have sales scorecard templates here from sales leaders across different industries.
KPIs to track if a sales manager is successfully driving accountability to activities and objectives
- Percent of team to daily activity goal
- Percent of team to weekly or monthly objective goal
Coaching for performance improvement
There are a lot of different types of coaching that sales managers should implement to drive successful performance and skill development of their reps. A skilled manager can deploy employee 1:1s in tandem with peer<>peer call coaching programs, team coaching agendas where reps are tagged in as SMEs to upskill the whole team, weekly or monthly pipeline reviews, and more. Full Coaching Orchestration™ deploys different coaching tactics simultaneously to help scale manager time while lifting team performance. Need some inspiration for what to ask in employee 1:1s or how and why to document responses? Check out some sales coaching templates from well-known sales managers across different industries.
KPIs to track if a sales manager is successfully driving a successful coaching program
- Percent of reps to quota attainment (different from total team goal attainment)
- Percent of reps to quota shows not just that you have a couple of A-player all-stars, but shows the manager can effectively leverage different coaching programs to get a majority of reps producing.
- Number of coaching activities completed
- You can, and should (!!), track how many coaching sessions, call reviews, and team coaching programs your coaches are running. Much like rep daily activity centers on dials, emails, etc. Manager activity needs to focus on coaching.
- Quality of coaching
- Quarterly surveys where reps rate and rank the quality of the coaching they receive.
- Healthy pipeline across all reps
- Shows managers can execute proficiently on the established sales process.
Leadership and motivation to create a world-class sales culture
There is an expression that says something like, "the thing every leader has to have to be a leader... is followers"! When you are a sales manager, you are responsible for managing, but you are also called to lead, motivate, and inspire your team to reach peak potential. It is about earning some level of discretionary effort from your team to go above and beyond their basic day-to-day duties. Can you motivate a team to be bought in to the company mission and become so intrinsically motivated as individuals that the accountability comes from the reps and not from the managers? This is critical to creating a world-class sales culture and high performing team.
There are many different ways and tools sales managers use to create intrinsic motivation throughout the team. Gamification tactics like leaderboards are a great practice to build visibility, accountability, and healthy competition. Recognition programs like accolades where reps earn quota club, biggest deal sold, most talk time, etc. are incredible process pillars to have in place for not only tracking but for driving encouragement. Having different types of motivation tactics that work on different sellers are critical to creating an intrinsically motivated sales force.
KPIs to track if a sales manager is successfully motivating and leading a team
- Retention and promotion of tenured reps
- Qualitative feedback survey
Hiring all-stars and keeping your bench full
A big time investment managers need to make is in recruiting and hiring. Building a bench is critical to ensuring consistent team performance and a consistent improvement in overall sales talent throughout the organization. If tenured reps are getting promoted due to stellar performance and company growth, then managers also want to be sure they are pulling in top-tier talent from the bench.
KPIs to track if a sales manager is successfully recruiting and hiring
- Ability to inspire candidates
- Percent of onboarding reps to quota or plan
- Adherence or creation of an interview process
- Time to role being filled (if the bench is full, shouldn't take long!)
Employee development and mentorship
Part of the responsibility of a sales manager is development of the rep as a whole person, and that means a responsibility to help them grow in their professional career. Whether it be connecting the rep with your own professional network as a manger or sponsoring them to enroll in development programs, you should always be seeking to help your team grow to the next big role. This commitment to your team will develop a commitment from them back to you as the leader pushing them to perform to their highest ability while in-seat on your team.
KPIs to track if a sales manager is successfully developing and mentoring reps
- Creation or sponsorship of company professional development programs to encourage rep promotion
- Number of reps promoted
- Average tenure of reps the manager has hired
What are the key components to building a culture of high performance?
Accountability
As a sales leader, you are responsible for setting clear expectations for your sales reps and making that performance visible to all. By defining the metrics that matter, setting clear targets and goals, managing and coaching to daily progress, and ensuring your reps have everything they need to be successful, you create a culture of positive accountability that will drive more sales activity and greater revenue attainment.
Encouragement
Meetings set and closed/won deals don't happen out of the blue. Reps expect to be incentivized and recognized for good work—it comes with the territory. In response, revenue leaders often fall into one of two encouragement categories: 1.) they encourage their reps too frequently and don't link the praise to specific achievements or 2.) they fail to encourage their reps at all. To gain balance, the most important optimization you can make as a leader is to automate encouragement and diversify the ways you gamify sales and motivate your reps.
Amplification
To operate at top efficiency levels, you need to break down team silos and improve cross-functional awareness and communication. In a work-from-anywhere world, the best sales technology amplifies rep accomplishments to drive culture and facilitate sales hand-offs. Using your main productivity tool like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or in-office TVs, rep milestones from Ambition can be amplified automatically to promote recognition, foster healthy competition, and accelerate go-to-market strategy.
Coaching
Humans are at the heart of your business and the way you invest in them matters. The problem is, sales managers like you are often overlooked and overwhelmed—with systems, data, and 6-8 reps to manage. To build a world-class revenue team, supporting the manager role is the difference between success and failure and rep retention and turnover. That's why programmatic coaching exists—to facilitate, document, and improve the interactions and conversations between your most important business assets: your managers and reps.
What is the data practice behind running sales and sales development?
Almost everyone has heard of paralysis by analysis. In an increasingly data-driven world, we can track almost anything we want. For sales managers, choose very specific metrics that allow you to focus on how well the reps and team are tracking to goal, and even more importantly, know what you can and need to do to change the metric if it isn't where it should be.
Sales Development
Activities
- Calls
- Emails
- Social connects
- Contacts in sequence
Objectives
- Conversations
- Meetings set
- Meetings held
- Meetings converted into pipeline
Efficiency
- Call-to-connect rate
- Conversation to meeting set rate
- Meeting set to meeting held rate
- Meeting held to qualified rate
Inside Sales
Activities
- Conversations
- Meetings held
- Additional contacts prospected / added to open deals or opportunities (encourage multi-threading)
Objectives
- Opportunities created
- Opportunities advanced in deal stage
- Amount of pipeline open in specific stages
- Sales expansion on existing accounts
- Shows they can continue to leverage relationships to upsell
Efficiency
- Days to close
- managing an efficient deal cycle
- Meeting to next-stage rate
- Working early stage deals in addition to what is going to close this month or quarter
- Win rate
- Are they maximizing their pipeline to fullest potential across stages
- Average Deal Size
- Make sure they aren't discounting or going too low/small in the deal
