What do you see as the difference between coaching and performance management, and how do you work with sales managers to strike the correct balance between the two?
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Founder and Chief Sales Energizer in Services (non-Government)a year ago
There's a bit of art and a bit of science. Management has to be done. Tasks and activities have to be completed. You have to hold salespeople accountable to complete things per deadline. Manage what they do. Coaching is how they do it and they might complete everything as asked but get zero results, that's where coaching comes in. As the leader you have to determine if they are doing things in a way that gets results and if not, coach to change that. Founder in Services (non-Government)a year ago
If you think of performance management as the management of metrics and numbers, and coaching as the development of the person- that is the difference. Performance management is the pipeline reviews, the call recording reviews, the debriefs, the strategy sessions. Whereas coaching is the 1:1 work with the individual where asking questions for self awareness happens, where role play and practice happen. You need both, but they are not the same. I also look at coaching at the proactive activities you do, where performance management is the lagging reports of what already happened. Head of Sales in Softwarea year ago
I see the two as quite different. Some words I associate with each are:Coaching - Proactive, Developmental, nurturing, building skills and abilities, providing guidance, focused on improvement for optimization
Performance management - reactive, evaluating, measuring against internal goals/quota's/standards, formal, bringing up to the standard
Both are important, but I certainly do see them as different conversations, one being more ideal than the other. Maybe not the point of your question, but it would definitely inform you how to address it with sales managers and the type of conversations you're having.
VP of Sales in Softwarea year ago
I think this is a great question, touching on the difference between the what and the how… the what is quantitative and performance management is a wonderful tool to leverage. Mostly binary “did you meet the goal?”. I the other hand the how is super difficult and very subjective, and that is where coaching, on average, plays the biggest role…