An article from the Harvard Business Review.
Sales training, when coupled with ongoing coaching works, period. According to the Sales Executive Council, sales professionals that receive fewer than two hours a month of coaching average 90% of their assigned quota. Those that get more than three hours of coaching per month average 107% of quota.
However, not all coaching effort brings the same results. If you’ve got unlimited budget, no worries. If you’re like the rest of us and have a limited budget and limited bandwidth to improve your top line revenue, where’s the best place to put your money and effort?
In a January 31, 2011 Harvard Business Review Blog, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson studied the effect of coaching on the top 20% and the bottom 20% of sales teams and discovered that it is the middle 60% that will bring the biggest bang for the buck. Interestingly enough though, there was a corollary benefit to coaching the top group in the form of retention.
I have long maintained that sales management should be finding different jobs for the bottom 10% to 20% of their sales team each year. If the attention given to coaching, cajoling, threatening, and babysitting the bottom group was invested in the remainder of the sales team, you’ll have a better chance of making your number and you’ll have a happier sales force.
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