3 Reasons every Enterprise B2B Salesperson needs a Coach
Enterprise B2B sales might as well be an Olympic sport: both require strategy, endurance, and perseverance. And, just as every athlete has a coach, every enterprise B2B salesperson should have one, too, in order to achieve their greatest potential.
Here, we’ll share three reasons why every business needs to invest in executive coaching for its enterprise B2B sellers. Spoiler alert: It boils down to outsized returns.
#1: Coaching creates behavior change.
Your mandate is growth, and today’s environment is plain tough. To hit their goals, your teams need to do things differently.
For one, your client service and account management teams need not only to service accounts, but to proactively seek out opportunities to grow them. Your business development team needs to get out there and generate more top-of-funnel leads themselves, rather than relying solely on marketing and channel partners to fill their pipeline. Everyone needs to move opportunities through the funnel more intentionally, and at a faster pace.
You’ve invested in sales training programs, sales enablement tools, and consultants. You hold bi-weekly pipeline reviews, conduct account planning meetings, and hold quarterly account reviews. You might have even built the use of these tools and processes into performance goals.
Yet, despite the effort and expense, you haven’t seen any substantial change in how your team members work - and limited, if any, positive change in revenue growth. You may be starting to wonder why your team may seem so unmotivated, even apathetic. Rest assured, it is highly unlikely that your team is either one. The reality is that achieving significant growth goals requires significant behavior change - and we all know that change is hard.
Trainings are an excellent way to share information, and account planning meetings provide an excellent opportunity to strategize. However, neither is an effective way to create sustained behavior change - especially when you’re asking your people to do things that are likely very uncomfortable for them to do.
What does create behavior change and an increase in productivity is one-on-one coaching. American University found, “Organizations that offer training alone experience 22% increase in productivity, but when combined with coaching that figure rises to 88%.”1 So, if you are committed to hitting your targets, it’s time to take a look at one-on-one coaching.
#2: Your sellers are the face of your business.
Gartner reports that, “59% of sellers said their leadership doesn't understand how to motivate them and 67% said their leadership is overly optimistic and disconnected from seller reality.”4
Yikes - If in fact this is true, that’s a lot of negative energy that could be holding back roughly two-thirds of your sellers from doing what they need to do to achieve their OKRs.
Let’s assume you have a pretty impressive portfolio of accounts, in terms of number of logos, but that there is a ton of potential to grow individual accounts, both in terms of breadth of products and/or services your sellers sell them, as well as the number of buying centers you are selling to, at each account.
You’ve pulled your client service and account management teams together, and given them a new mandate: They will be responsible not only for servicing existing customers, but for “hunting” within them in order to grow existing accounts by 8% year-over-year. Their initial reaction, whether they say it aloud or not, is most likely, “No way. I never signed up for this. I love my clients and there’s no way I’m going to “hunt”. Besides, 8% year-over-year is crazy.” This is a completely normal reaction, and pretty much what I would expect to happen anywhere.
Clearly, there’s a gap to address between what you believe is possible and what needs to happen, and what your team believes to be true.
Now, imagine you are a customer of yours. You have hundreds of vendors, and may consider a handful to be “partners.” An elite two or three may be “strategic partners” - sellers you trust so deeply, that you consider them not vendors, but trusted advisors. With hundreds of vendors to manage, it’s no surprise that entire departments have sprung up for the sole purpose of managing vendors. The reality is that, sellers who don’t have an orientation to seek out win-win solutions, a positive mindset, and skills to develop and execute sales strategies, will not have access to decision makers and influencers, and thus, their success will be limited.
Obviously, in order to achieve the growth you seek, your sellers will need to have access to decision makers and influencers, to build deeply trusting and genuine relationships with them, and to be aligned with your vision for growth.
One-on-one coaching for your enterprise B2B sellers is how you’ll begin to address this schism and to support your sellers in their professional development. Coaches empower sellers to become clear on their purpose, to define their goals, and to develop tangible action plans to achieve them. With purpose and action comes confidence and positive energy. And positive energy attracts like energy (i.e., fruitful business relationships). Investing in your salespeople and fostering a positive mindset, motivation, and confidence is absolutely fundamental to any growth strategy.
#3: Professional development is an excellent way to retain talent.
It’s no surprise that the more salespeople are asked to do things differently, to do more of it, and to do it faster, that they’re burning out.
According to a survey by Gartner, eighty-nine percent (89%) of sellers report feeling burned out from work, and over half (54%) of respondents report actively looking for a new job. 2
The good news is that employees who get professional development opportunities have 34% higher retention than those who don’t, according to a recent article written by the Harvard Business Review. 3
In his book, Drive, author Dan Pink identifies three drivers of intrinsic motivation:
Purpose, the idea of doing something in the service of something larger than ourselves;
Autonomy, as it relates to what we do, when and how we do it, and with whom we do it
Mastery, as it relates to what it is that we are doing
Professional development, and one-on-one coaching in particular, provides sellers with an opportunity to cultivate their intrinsic motivation. Through coaching, a client may choose to explore, or to revisit, their core values and to re-discover their purpose. They may choose to explore skills they need to develop mastery in an area - and to take action towards developing them. They may choose to explore what it is that they are experiencing at work that may not be congruent with their values, and to explore ways they could potentially address these areas.
With the support of an executive coach, sellers can not only explore ways to re-energize themselves in the work that they do, but to tackle initial feelings of burn out before they get out of hand. One-on-one coaching for your sellers allows your sellers to pursue professional development that they find meaningful and valuable - which in turn can drive employee retention.
Executive coaching for your sales team
Sales Coaching is individualized and collaborative, and aims to empower sellers to take ownership of their growth and perform to their fullest potential.
Through effective sales coaching, sellers set and execute goals (and plans to achieve them), understand what drives them, and develop important skills and knowledge. Frequent, collaborative interactions and supportive connections foster accountability and follow-through to achieve sustained behavior change.
The potential return on investing in executive coaching for your enterprise B2B sellers is tremendous - so, what’s holding you back from exploring it?
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