How do you enable frontline managers?

It’s really common for us to assume that managers know what good looks like, that they put on the manager hat so now they must be able to know how to coach and how to facilitate. They don’t. Many of them were star performers we promoted, and they have no idea, so we need to take the action of providing them with the resources, giving them manager toolkits, helping them help us avoid skill-fade with the team long after onboarding has happened.

I can’t stress enough the importance of being on the same page with the sales managers, and I really work to develop ongoing relationships with them, and then put some of the ownership of program back to them. I’ve definitely made the mistake in the past of either running a training or a program or pushing something out to the team where I hadn’t worked with them first, and it just kind of falls flat. I really need them to help be the vehicle to either drive that change management piece, drive a new behavior, or whatever it might be.

What you find is that top-selling reps get promoted to managers and then they are not equipped…You talk about coaching guides, opportunity coaching, pipeline coaching, deal coaching, conversation coaching. How do you frame that up? What does a 60-minute coaching meeting look like? What are the questions that you should ask? Give them videos that show a roleplay of that kind of coaching session done right, and allow them to get feedback from their colleagues. I would say, bring your first line of sales managers together and enable them with coaching playbooks.