Who doesn’t love a success story? Every year at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America, our sales research team presents new and exciting research, topped off with a captivating B2B Program Of The Year Award presented in a fireside chat with a Forrester analyst.

For 2023, our B2B Program Of The Year Award session will include a conversation with Morgan Momcilovich, revenue enablement manager with Sprout Social, a global leader in social media management and analytics software. Over the last year, Sprout Social delivered significant impact to its growth engine by implementing a team of field sales coaches aligned with sales and success go-to-market teams. The program was funded, in part, due to the willingness of multiple sales leaders to give up quota-carrying headcount to develop best-in-class coaches who can directly improve the organization’s sales talent. This represents an innovative approach to driving scalable growth and stands in contrast to the traditional growth model of “Just hire more sellers!”

The Benefits Of A Field Sales Coach

According to Forrester’s Winter Sales Survey, 2022, collaboration with peers is among the top preferred sales training delivery methods, and field sales coaches, as a gold standard in aligning sellers with the “perfect peer,” deliver on that. A field sales coach in B2B is generally someone who has been a strong seller within the organization and takes a short-term (12–24-month) role in between individual contributor and manager positions as part of their internal career trajectory. This assignment is an interim role and without direct responsibility over reps, focusing more on the opportunity to both apply their experience to a wider team of sellers while simultaneously developing themselves into effective managers. Field sales coaches are a fantastic way to help get sellers informal — but accurate — guidance and resources that sometimes take longer to acquire by traditional channels. By directly coaching reps, this emerging role delivers value to the sales organization in the following ways:

  • Reinforces sales learning through practice and monitored execution
  • Helps successful reps transition into leaders
  • Builds leadership bench strength
  • Creates stronger interlocks between sales and other functions

A Dual Opportunity

High potential doesn’t always turn into high performance. Too many outstanding B2B reps fail to succeed once promoted to management, while others may not consistently earn Winner’s Circle status as individual producers but gain far more distinction as coaches and managers through a relentless commitment to helping others do their best. Implementing a field sales coaching program creates a dual opportunity for the organization: rewarding successful reps with a career trajectory that helps them contribute more deeply to company success while developing and validating the capabilities of these individuals before they take on higher-risk roles as sales leaders.

Join our enablement research team at B2B Summit this June to learn how Sprout Social has successfully implemented this leading-edge revenue enablement initiative — and to gain additional B2B sales education, networking, and fun!