Go For the Gold – By Coaching Your Reps!

[image error]It’s that time again – when the best athletes in the world converge on one city for the Olympics.  We watch the Olympic games for the quality of the competition and to see who gets to stand proudly on the podium, receiving the gold, silver, and bronze medals as the leaders in their event.

Interestingly enough, the SEC has profiled how an British company has taken this ‘medaling’ theme into their organization and used it to measure and reward their sales managers for their coaching  abilities.

The company is called Britannia, and no, they don’t sell encyclopedias.  Rather, they are a British financial services institution that has taken the idea of front-line manager certification to the furthest extent we’ve seen.

The reason for that is that they believe, rightly in our opinion, that ensuring front-line managers have the right set of capabilities to be effective is among the most important factors for their reps and teams achieving their goals.

(See my colleague Stacey’s latest blog on the penalty created by an underperforming manager for a more thorough review).

And so what Britannia did was to introduce a certification program, using a Gold, Silver, & Bronze Medal theme, to test for the quality of their managers’ coaching abilities.  Here’s how it works:

No Medal – Every single manager, no matter their tenure or performance, starts without a medal.  This is akin to the qualification rounds.  In this stage, managers attend coaching training and begin to use these new skills with their teams.


Bronze – To get to bronze medal status, managers not only have to attend coaching training, but they also have to demonstrate through two observed coaching sessions that they can effectively apply these coaching skills with their sales people.

Now, just as an aside, this is where most training certification ends – ensuring that the trainees can use the training.  But for Britannia, they’re just getting warmed up.

Silver – To get a silver medal, managers not only have to demonstrate their coaching abilities, but they also must be able to demonstrate how their coaching creates commercial outcomes.  So for Bronze, they focused on the skills, and to get a Silver, you have to show the outcome. But we don’t end there, because…


Gold – To get a gold medal, what all managers want and where expectations are set, managers have to retain their silver medal for at least six months.

And that leads to one of the most interesting aspects of Britannia’s practice.  At any time a manager can be down-tiered from gold to sliver, silver to bronze, and so on.  So Britannia is not only testing for whether a manager can acquire and use new skills – what they’re really doing is ensuring that these skills and behaviors are being used consistently over a long period of time.  Compare that to what most companies do after training, and it’s no surprise that Britannia saw the results they were looking for (not only commercial outcomes, but secondary effects like reduced turnover rates and decreases in customer complaints).

So the next time you watch a medal ceremony, think about whether you could see your managers on a medal podium – not by running the fastest time or jumping the farthest distance – but by providing their team an exceptional coaching experience.

SEC Members, see the full Britannia case study as well as a replay of our recent webinar on coaching certification programs. And for more on coaching, review our Coaching topic center as well as our newly updated Anatomy of World-Class Sales Coaching Practices.

You can also improve the effectiveness of your front-line sales managers with the new Sales Manager Leadership Academy offering.