Coaching is not only valued as an employee development initiative, it also plays an enormous role in business performance. A study by Forum and the Sales Management Association found that sales managers recognize sales coaching as the most important tool for sales effectiveness—more so than training, sharing best practices, and incentive redesign.

Coaching is so essential that high-performing firms deliver 15 to 20 percent more coaching than low-performing firms. These high-performing firms also focus more on coaching and training sales managers, which is significant because the most substantial obstacles to coaching are related to managers.

Measuring Sales Management’s Coaching Impact reports  that managers by-and-large recognize the importance and effectiveness of sales coaching, but they encounter several challenges in implementing it. Managers can be too busy, lack sufficient coaching skills, have not received the necessary training themselves, or may not be responsible for coaching. As a result, many sales coaching endeavors are mostly reactive; they are allocated to low performers and those who ask, and focus on the short-sighted goal of raising poor performance. The most effective coaching efforts are the result of proactive management that takes a focused, programmatic approach.

How high-performing companies use coaching

First, let’s examine what most coaching frequently focuses on, and the weaknesses of those topics. For instance, coaching often relies on informal feedback and is short-sighted—focusing on specific opportunities. Other common topics include account planning and management, developing new skills, and pipeline coaching. Unfortunately, focusing primarily on these topics results in unstructured and purposeless coaching.

Another weakness lies in less impactful results. These topics have short-term effects on performance and ignore crucial areas, such as executive endorsement, management accountability, success measurement, and pre-determined program objectives.

The most effective coaching programs target managers who are tasked with directly coaching salespeople. These programs focus on coaching the managers in addition to the salespeople and training managers in how to coach. Furthermore, the programs receive support from executive leaders and employee performance reviews include coaching in them.

High-performing companies also provide coaching more frequently, particularly in the areas of sales call effectiveness, crafting effective proposals, informal feedback, qualifying opportunities, and identifying poor performance.

Here are four tips on improving sales coaching at your company.

1. Establish expectations. Create a coaching culture within your company. Define sales coaching and describe how it impacts business.

2. Make coaching a critical initiative. Secure stakeholder buy-in as well as support from executive leaders. Sales coaching should be programmatic, so performance tracking and established indicators of success should be put in place.

3. Focus coaching on specific performance outcomes. Quality coaching has clear objectives and structure.

4. Train sales managers. Managers need the right skills to effectively coach others.

Check out the infographic below for more insight from the study.