MetLife and The Next Level Sales Consulting: Sales Coaching Excellence Program
MetLife in partnership with The Next Level Sales Coaching developed the Sales Coaching Excellence Program in response to a recognized need to provide a comprehensive, consistent, and effective sales coaching platform for the sales organization. Its objective was to provide a sales coaching strategy, tactics, and tools to frontline managers to improve the performance and sales results of all sales associates. Managers received training on several coaching practices including conducting high impact sales meetings and monthly goal setting meetings, giving performance feedback, and delivering sit-along coaching.
MetLife launched the Sales Coaching Excellence Program for its internal sales associates in January 2010 and for external sales associates in June 2011. The program has quickly contributed to the company’s culture, and the participant size has grown substantially due to the program’s success. It has also had a direct impact on MetLife’s business growth. Since its inception, the program design incorporated key performance indicators to track and measure both leading (behavioral) and lagging (performance) indicators. The leading indicators include metrics such as total outbound calls, number of contacts, number of WebExes conducted, and talk time. The lagging indicators include metrics such as closed pick-three business, closed business ratio, and monthly sales.
Since implementing the Sales Coaching Excellence Program, MetLife achieved 136 percent of its sales plan and experienced a year-over-year percentage increase in critical sales activities, thus meeting or exceeding 100 percent of expectations.