“I Don’t Have The Time To Coach!”

Coaching has the highest impact on maximizing sales performance!

There’s all sorts of research supporting this statement, I’ve written about it ad nauseam. There’s also the data that shows how little time managers spend coaching, often less than one hour a week—for their entire team.

But I continue to hear, “I don’t have the time to coach!”

I’ve been hearing this for decades.  I’ve been writing about this for decades, the first article I wrote was in 2009, and there have been about 5 subsequent articles with virtually the same topic.  And it’s still a huge issue and roadblock to driving sales performance.

Some of it is avoidance. Unfortunately, too many managers simply don’t want to coach. They’d prefer spending time in “important strategy meetings,” or pouring over endless performance dashboards and reports. They do everything they can to avoid coaching, and when they do, it tends to be highly directive, “Do this and get back to me.”

But a large part of this is real! Managers who want to coach are overwhelmed. They simply don’t have the time to coach, as much as they may want to.

Some of the issue is prioritization. This is a little tough love, but we need to put coaching at the highest priority, arranging our schedules around that. But it’s tough, particularly when your boss wants you sitting in a forecast review.

The second thing is we tend to think of coaching as something separate and distinct from everything else we do. I constantly hear of managers scheduling, “coaching meetings.” In a time crunch, we all know the meetings that will be cancelled first, the coaching meetings.

What we miss about coaching is that it must be integrated into everything we do. In a pipeline review, while we want to understand the health and quality of the pipeline, we can also coach our people in how they build stronger pipelines. In deal, account, call reviews; we can incorporate coaching into each of those meetings. We fulfill two objectives in each of these meetings; we fulfill the business management aspect of our jobs, and we leverage the opportunity to coach and develop our people in the meetings.

Sometimes, we don’t need to be doing the coaching. We can leverage other people in the organization providing mentorship or helping in a specific area. A salesperson struggling with understanding the customer problems in their discovery might spend time with a sales engineer with deep knowledge of that problem. Or connecting the person with a peer to talk about how they managed a difficult deal, giving ideas to the person being coached. Stated differently, coaching is often done best by connecting the person with someone else.

We also tend to think of coaching as taking big blocks of time. We schedule 30-45 minutes to coach someone, then move to the next person, then the next. I look at leaders calendars and they have blocks of time, running people in and out of their offices. And we tend to think of coaching as needing these big blocks of time.

One of the things we have been working with our clients on is “ad-hoc coaching.” It’s catching people in the moment. For example, a simple observation or question to a seller as you are leaving a meeting. Just a quick one or two minute, focused exchange that timely and relevant to what the manager observed in the meeting. Or the proverbial “windshield time” going to or from a customer meeting (I haven’t figured out the Zoom equivalent.). Or simply while standing in line at Starbucks.

It turns out we can do a lot of highly focused and impactful coaching in just a couple of minutes.

And this means we can integrate coaching into every conversation and interaction with our people. Coaching no longer is a separate and distinct “thing.” But it’s part of every interaction.

Then the final aspect of coaching has little to do with what we say or how we talk to our people about specific issues and challenges. This is modeling the behaviors we expect of our people. I’ve written before about a running joke with my Dad. I would catch him doing things he said I shouldn’t do. He would respond, “Do as I say, not as I do…” In reality he was a phenomenal role model. Our people watch us and how we behave. If we don’t use CRM, why should they? If we don’t show up on time, why should they? If we want them to ask more questions with their customers and all we do is prescribe what they must do, why will they ever get out of pitching mode?

If we want to have a real impact on the behaviors and coach our people, we have to practice what we preach. We have to demonstrate the behaviors we expect in every interaction.

We will always be time poor. We will always have more on our plates than we can deal with. But those are only excuses. Coaching has the highest impact on performance of anything we can do. Integrate coaching into every interaction, model the behaviors you expect. Stop with the excuses.

Afterword:  This is a great AI generated discussion of my post.  As usual, it’s really very good.  Enjoy!