Coaching vs. Training

This year we helped our colleague Rob Scanlon launch a truly unique sales coaching and benchmarking company and product called PrivateSalesCoach (www.privatesalescoach.com).

This has been a fascinating experience on several levels which I will share across a number of blogs:

• A product that assists sales people in convenient and non-invasive ways to improve their odds in specific opportunities
• Executed through a simple, web diagnostic, that in less than 10 minutes answering questions provides instant advice for account strategies and next steps
• Benchmarks sales efforts against a best practice standard
• Provides qualitative assessments for how opportunities are being worked
• Can be applied in both direct and channel selling
• Low cost, hosted and easily implemented

A product that initially provokes skepticism and incredulity -- indeed I almost missed the opportunity to assist with this project due to my own initial negative assessment.

Dave Stein had a similar reaction when I first described this product.

Through this work I've gained a heightened appreciation for:

• The challenge of launching something new into the cacophony of today's market
• The difference between coaching and training -- as well as distinctions about coaching
• The importance of coaching on sales performance
• The value of sales benchmarks for sales performance and coaching
• The value of multimedia vignettes for leveraged selling and support of customer advocates conducting internal enrollment conversations.

It will be interesting to see how open people are to evaluate an innovative way to gain an early advantage with something others don't yet have.

Sales coaching and benchmarking appears to be of high interest for sales managers today. There is just not enough time or bandwidth for managers to touch every opportunity. How does a manager quickly assess which opportunities in the large portfolio of deals really needs his attention? How much time does it take to diagnose each opportunity with each rep to get the information needed to help? How much of this assessment is based upon a documented standard vs. intuitive gut feel?

Pilots use a "flight check" to make sure they don't miss any important steps, despite years of flying. Doctors send us for x-rays and lab work before meeting patients. That way they receive technical confirmation of a diagnosis and can spend more of their valuable time prescribing remedies and treatment. Many doctors today use online diagnostic tools to research or confirm a diagnosis despite years of education far beyond that of the typical sales rep.

CRM systems give us quantitative insight to sales opportunities, but do little to reflect a qualitative assessment of how opportunities are actually being worked, or what could be done to improve selling of each opportunity.

As we continue to support this effort I'll report on these questions and other lessons.