Slow Down, Sell Faster!, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 12

Coaching for Success

Advice for Sales Managers(and the People Who Work for Them)

Recently, in conjunction with an opportunity to deliver our sales management leadership workshop, I was retained by a Fortune 500 company to examine their job description for the sales manager position. Fully 85 percent of the duties were directly linked to coaching salespeople. (I’ve reviewed many sales manager job descriptions over the years, and this was one of the better ones.)

I then conducted face-to-face interviews with a number of the sales managers and found that less than 5 percent of their time was actually spent on coaching. Five percent! Another way to say this is that sales managers were spending 95 percent of their time focused on 15 percent ...