Sales Coaching 2.0

Complex B2B sales are notorious for long lead times in making new sales hires productive. Given this it is absolutely essential that you have an established and proven sales process in place and the tools to track performance against these metrics so new hire activity and development can be monitored and directed as needed.

Outside the realm of traditional sales management metrics however these sales require significant custom knowledge on products and services as well as complex social networks (both customer and internal) that must be worked for successful opportunity closure. Harvard Business Review had an excellent article on this second point titled Better Sales Networks in their July 2006 issue.

Traditionally sales training and coaching by Sales Management has been employed to attempt to address this issue. This complexity can also be addressed by proper teaming of the new sales hire with seasoned field engineering talent and coaching of new sales hires by seasoned sales executives. Teaming quota and compensation are one of the sure fire ways to drive this organizational coaching behavior however one must be sensitive to the potential impact on the seasoned executive’s attitude and performance.

New Enterprise 2.0 tools for social collaboration have the potential to facilitate this sales coaching effort by supporting more effective remote delivery, by increasing the frequency of coaching activities, by allowing a broader audience to collaborate on the coaching effort, and by enabling ad-hoc teaming to more easily occur to support customer solution creation and opportunity closure.