Sell Your Team On A Coaching Culture

A coaching culture does not happen overnight. Big changes are often met with skeptical attitudes. Instead of announcing your new coaching initiatives at a company-wide meeting, spend some time planning how to announce this to your teams in a more personal fashion. Start by explaining why and how you’ll build a coaching culture as a team. Managers have established a foundation of trust with their reps, so the message may resonate better coming from them. Reps may also feel more comfortable in that setting to ask more questions.

The key to implementing a shift in coaching culture is to make sure reps understand that it’s all about making them better sellers. As a manager, use what drives your sellers to your advantage and let that be a factor in how you coach them. Are your reps motivated by money, a promotion, or something else? You can coach them so they make more money, you can coach them towards a promotion, or help them achieve some other goal.

Sometimes change can be met with resistance. Some reps may feel they don’t need coaching because they are doing fine without it. While resistance to coaching may be harmless to some degree, it can create a larger problem if that attitude spreads to the rest of the team. When building out your coaching culture, discuss guidelines for managing coaching-resistant reps. Whether it is failure to improve over X sessions, not sharing calls with managers, or ignoring feedback entirely, work with the leadership team to agree on how you’ll tackle reps who don’t want guidance. Try the following tactics: Pair reps with a new coach; Isolate uncoachable reps who negatively impact the rest of the team

Encourage peer-to-peer coaching to reinforce a learning environment; Ultimately, the only person who can decide if they want to be coached is the rep themself. Your job as a leader is to create an environment where they feel safe to learn and fail. Encourage the behavior that is needed for them to learn and grow