Coaching in many organizations is an after thought at best.  What we see all too often is that the quotas are set and salespeople are expected to reach them on their own (to some extent).  These are the organizations in which we see far too little coaching by the sales managers of their teams.  Why is this?  In a post from Dave Stein’s blog he asks you to name one professional athlete that doesn’t have a coach.  Even amateur athletes have coaches, so why do organizations not require and equip sales managers to be coaches?

Dave makes some interesting points and I recommend that you go read the entire post.  He may get you to change your mind about coaching salespeople if you don’t already.  An interesting comment that he gets from managers when asked about coaching is that they are “too busy.”  His point:

It’s the old, “I don’t have time for you to show me your word processing software because I’m too busy changing the ribbon on my typewriter, plus I need to go out and by some more White-Out.”

I think that Dave is right on the money when he said that managers don’t understand the impact coaching could have on their team’s performance.  I would take this a step further and say that most organizations don’t understand the impact coaching could have on their organizations as a whole.

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