John Hoskins, Founder; David Pearson, CEODavid Pearson, the CEO of Level Five, a leading sales coaching company, often asks his clients this question.
“It’s a no-brainer that choosing the team with outstanding leaders is the right choice and will have the fastest impact on performance,” says Pearson. “We believe the frontline sales leader is the linchpin to an organization’s success, and businesses must first prioritize developing their leaders to become masterful coaches who can then develop their sales teams.”
The Level Five Coaching System focuses on equipping sales leaders with the process, skills, tools, and resources needed to drive the performance of their teams. The system enables leaders to improve the quality of sales call interactions that create value and accelerate customer’s buying process. “When we ask sales leaders from the same company to individually define what a quality sales interaction looks like, we get answers all over the board,” says Pearson. “When we ask salespeople the same question, we get equally irregular answers. How can you ever achieve quality if your sales leaders and salespeople don’t have a clear definition as to what a quality sales call looks like?” Level Five Coaching ensures companies have a common language and understanding of a quality call. This shared understanding sets a standard and metric for creating value on calls and facilitates effective pre and post-call planning and debriefing.
You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure.
Level Five has conducted extensive research on sales call quality with scores of clients. They found that 60% of all sales calls are scrap & waste -- they fail to move the buying process forward. Pearson adds, “When organizations clearly define sales call quality among their leadership and sales ranks, scrap & waste declines, and performance improves immediately.” Unlike one-off training programs, the Level Five Coaching System prevents salespeople from reverting to old habits, provides ongoing review and reinforcement of critical foundational skills, and guarantees long-term success and ROI from the investment because we measure results every 90 days.
“Sales training often provides only temporary boosts, and without strong leadership to guide and reinforce the learning, behaviors quickly revert,” says John Hoskins, the founder of Level Five. “Our goal is to develop frontline sales leaders as masterful sales coaches. Effective coaching is a leading indicator of sales results. Prioritizing call quality over quantity prevents sales leaders from spending too much time managing lagging indicators.”
Prescription Without Diagnosis Is Malpractice
The process begins with an assessment of the sales leaders and salesforce. Leaders receive anonymous feedback from their teams, evaluating them against thirty sales coaching best practice activities and behaviors. Leaders develop their Coaching Developmental Plan, that is reviewed with their leader monthly. The assessment is repeated in 6 months to measure progress. Leaders then work with their teams to develop individual coaching plans that are tracked and measured with Level Five’s proprietary 90-Day Coaching Plan.
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With Level Five, we are getting to closure faster and getting to the right people at the right time, and the team is moving through the buying process much quicker and closing with much more velocity than we were before. Engineering & Technical Solutions
Because coaching time is limited, leaders think ahead about who they will coach, what they will coach, and how much time they will spend with each rep rather than simply reacting to immediate issues. Investing in the system leads to more qualified opportunities in the pipeline, improved win rates, and forecast accuracy. Clients also experience up to 30% reductions in turnover while improving top-line results and better margins.
A Comprehensive Change Management Solution That Guarantees Results
Level Five’s comprehensive change management program unfolds over 180 days, setting this solution to salesforce effectiveness apart from others. Its experts work closely with clients to implement a system that is integral to their business operations. This system functions as an operating framework for their sales organization, and the process takes place during the normal course of business, limiting time out of the field.
When leaders create individualized coaching plans for each team member, it allows them to shift from reactive coaching to a much more proactive and planned approach. Leaders assess each team member’s strengths and areas of development against Level Five’s forty value-creation sales skills. By focusing on a few skills at a time for each person, salespeople can focus on a specific skill and see immediate improvement. Every 90 days, leaders reassess their salespeople against the shared quality standard. Once the salesperson has mastered a skill, they can add additional skills. “This is how we learn,” Pearson says. “We have found that when we coach salespeople to consistently deliver Level 4 and 5 sales calls in our system, they sell between 2x and 3x more than those who are in Levels 1 through 3.”
This continuous feedback loop is critical to Level Five’s approach, delivering measurable results within 90 to 120 days. The company’s confidence in its method is evident in its guarantee: After 90 days, clients can cancel the contract if they don’t see their sales KPIs improving.
Moving Sales Leaders from "Buddy" to "Performance Partner"
The foundation of Level Five’s methodology lies in the “Level Five Leader” concept, which outlines five distinct stages of leadership effectiveness. Clients repeatedly tell us that 50-60% of their frontline sales leaders are bosses or lower in the hierarchy. This is because even tenured leaders haven’t had the benefit of training, or they have a lot of new sales leaders who were top-performing reps but never had training on how to be sales leaders.
Level Five helps sales leaders look in the mirror and assess where they currently fall on this model. We then provide specific behaviors and tailored guidance to help them transition to being a Performance Partner. The program encourages leaders to undergo a significant mindset shift and develop the skills necessary to foster a coaching culture of continuous improvement within their teams. We “Move the Middle” in your leadership ranks to create a team of masterful sales coaches capable of developing a best in class saleforce.
By helping sales leaders evolve from being “Buddies” to true “Performance Partners”, Level Five enables sales organizations to transition from traditional sales training events to a focus on leadership development and ongoing coaching. This approach drives sustained improvement across sales teams.
“In the end, it’s not just about closing the sale—it’s about building lasting relationships with customers and creating a high-performing sales coaching culture that delivers consistent year-over-year revenue growth and attracts and retains the “cream of the crop” sales reps,” concludes Hoskins.
If you are a Chief Sales Officer or responsible for developing your sales leadership team and would like to receive a complimentary copy of our book, The Level Five Coaching System, please contact John or David.
