I recently reviewed the sales manager’s job description for a Fortune 500 company and learned that about 85% of the responsibilities they assigned to their sales managers were related to sales coaching. Then my partner and I conducted in-person interviews with four of their regional sales managers, and asked “What percentage of your time do you actually spend one-on-one, coaching a salesperson?” Not one of the sales managers told us that they spent more than 5% of their time, one-on-one, coaching a salesperson.
So for this company, only 5% of a sales manager’s day was actually spent on tasks associated with achieving 85% of what the company expected a sales manager to accomplish. It was no wonder that this company’s recent “climate survey” had measured low sales morale, an unacceptably high sales turnover rate and poor ramp-up to quota for new-hires.