Training and Coaching

What is Sales Coaching, and How Can You Use it to Your Benefit?

Building a strong team of sales reps isn’t just a matter of hiring the right people. While that’s part of the puzzle, the other includes sales coaching.

Even the best sales reps need consistent (and personalized) coaching to perform better and become a leader.

So, if you don’t already, you need to invest resources in sales coaching techniques to accelerate your team’s collective success.

In this blog, we’ll cover every aspect, including the sales coaching examples, best practices, and the tech stack you need to coach your reps.

What is Sales Coaching?

Sales coaching is the process through which sales managers attempt to improve overall sales performance. It is a continuous exercise where managers help reps achieve their objectives.

A sales coach can play the role of an advisor, teacher, mentor, and trainer whose purpose is to equip agents with the right support and resources for a consistently strong and efficient sales performance.

To understand this better, let’s look at sports coaching with sales coaching simultaneously.

A sports coach trains and mentors sportspersons to win every game. During a match, they watch their students from the bleachers or benches and motivate them through the game.

Off the field, the coach will note their observations and ensure to share feedback so that they can improve and deliver a better performance the next time.

There’s a lot that sales coaching can draw from sports coaching. For starters, you need a clear sales coaching strategy that is rooted in performance assessment, feedback, and mentoring. 

How Can Sales Coaching Improve Sales Performance?

Sales coaching offers a forum where sales reps can be trained to enhance their skill sets. In addition to learning, sales coaches and managers can help navigate through sales conversations and current concerns.

This helps impart new knowledge, incentivizes employees with the assurance of instant results, and appeals to kinesthetic learners.  

Effective sales coaching promotes a culture of learning and growth. A robust sales coaching program pinpoints growth opportunities not just for the individual but for the entire sales organization.

It figures out the impediments to success and executes a holistic strategy to modify the mindsets and underlying dynamics that hinder performance.     

4 Objectives of Sales Coaching 

The 4 major objectives of sales coaching techniques include:

1. Nurturing Sales Talent Within the Organization 

Sales takes talent and skill. One of the objectives of coaching sales teams is to get sales personnel ready to perform diverse roles in a dynamically changing market.

Coaching can be provided for both graduate-level new salespeople and experienced specialists and managers.

Sales coaching thus serves as a personality development tool that helps nurture fundamental sales skills such as confidence, persuasion, and empathy. 

2. Implementing Data-Driven Techniques that Serve Employee Needs at An Individual Level 

The main objective of sales coaching is to use data as evidence to point out where each individual sales personnel is experiencing challenges. This information can help coaches provide personalized coaching and knowledge.

The objective of coaching for sales is to act as a personal advisor to the sales employee, depending on their bespoke needs during different stages of their sales career in the company. 

3. Developing Best Performance Standards, Best Practices, and Processes for Each Sales Role

Having consistent standards, practices and processes can give companies a firm foundation to measure performance and create improvement plans.

Sales coaching seeks to build those best practices, standards, and processes by addressing problematic behaviors and instilling desired behaviors that are consistent across the department.

Additionally, sales coaching also brings in role-specific consistency, which improves team collaboration, communication, and performance tremendously. 

4. Increasing Conversions and Revenues

The ultimate objective of sales coaching is to improve the company’s ability to increase conversions and revenues.

Through coaching, every employee in the sales team will be clear about what is expected of them.

Like well-oiled cogs in a machine, they will fit together perfectly and work synergistically to reduce mistakes, bring down costs, increase conversions and bring up profits.

Understanding the Sales Coaching Process

Sales coaching is the process of assessing and guiding a sales rep one-on-one to enhance sales performance and ensure continuous sales success.

A good sales coaching program enables salespersons self-diagnose deficiencies, allowing them to take charge of their performance and improve their results.  

Let’s dig deeper to understand what it takes to sharpen your arsenal of skills and strategies. Here are the key steps involved in an effective sales coaching process:

1. Measuring the Sales Team’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Observations made by the sales coach regarding the individual who requires coaching is one of the essential steps in the coaching process. It helps the coach identify the gaps in the sales techniques of the rep.

The coach also evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the individual rep’s performance concerning your sales team’s operation.

This enables the sales coach to build a tailored plan to enhance individual operations that contribute to the overall growth of your business.     

2. Setting Effective Sales Goals

Setting clear goals is a great way to define targets and reward good performances. Based on the observations, the coach sets sales goals to motivate sales reps and encourage them to utilize more effective work techniques.

The ideal sales goals are aspirational but realistic. They should align with your company’s annual sales and meet the specific requirements of the business.

While long-term goals are important, smaller goals are also crucial to keep the team motivated.    

3. Implementing Required Skills

A structured sales coaching process makes sure that all individuals benefit equally.

Sales coaches facilitate several activities regularly to help simulate the interaction between sales reps and buyers. These activities can include role-play sessions, targeted competency workshops, win/loss reviews, etc.

Productive sales coaching needs an attentive and vigilant eye toward a salesperson’s best and worst traits.

During these exercises, the sales coach observes how well the reps reflect on their drawbacks and notes down the areas requiring improvement.   

4. Analyzing Performance and Providing Feedback

After conducting activities, the sales coach provides constructive feedback to the rep, which highlights both positive and negative attributes. It includes what the rep did well and also indicates the areas of improvement.

The sales coach then analyzes how the rep responds to the feedback. All the efforts that the rep is making to rectify problems are noted down to check if there is any significant improvement.

Before we jump into the tools and techniques of sales coaching, let’s try and understand some of the key benefits of sales coaching. 

Why Does Effective Sales Coaching Matter?

Sales coaching matters for the following reasons:

  • It shows progress or devolution within the team and supports performance improvement.
  • It helps sales teams identify things they are good at and things they are struggling with.
  • It allows them to learn new skills and techniques they can employ on the job.
  • It gives them the opportunity to practice industry best practices and creative strategies with experts.
  • It helps them adopt a learning mindset.
  • It fosters a supportive feedback environment.
  • It helps identify sales processes and practices which are outdated or need to be modified. 

Now that we have answered the question of why is sales coaching important, let’s take a look at the various sales coaching techniques.

Now that we have answered the question of why is sales coaching important, let’s take a look at the various sales coaching techniques.

Sales Coaching Techniques by Top Coaches

The main goal of sales coaching is to create an atmosphere of growth fueled by mentoring and guidance. If you are wondering how you can coach your sales team, here’s a list of sales coaching techniques to help you ace your coaching game:

1. On-Job Training With Live Call Monitoring

Sales coaching begins with assessing as well as guiding agents on the job. Jump on live calls between agents and prospects with call monitoring.

Coaching agents during calls is the best way to groom them for success. Direct them on how to handle customers during actual sales calls.

With call monitoring, managers can hop on calls between agents and customers. Then, they can take the following actions to coach agents:

  • Listening: Here, you can join live calls between customers and agents. Then, you may assess conversations between agents and customers without either of the two knowing.
  • Whispering: This is where the coach can whisper instructions to agents during sales calls and direct them on how to handle sales calls in real-time. All this happens without the knowledge of the customer on the other end of the call.
  • Barging: You may also choose to hop on calls and speak directly with the customers if need be. This can help the agents to learn how to speak with customers, build rapport and get to a close.

2.Give A Detailed Breakdown With Call Recordings

Sales and demo call recordings are a great source of information for managers while coaching agents. With a reliable sales contact center, you can avail of the call recording feature to serve as a reference point for coaching reps.

Managers can hold one-on-one coaching sessions with sales reps, taking insights from call recordings. They can hear entire call recordings and use them to highlight agents’ strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement.

Further, managers can take call recordings to point out the good as well as bad examples of sales calls. They can also use call recordings to build powerful sales scripts and pitches.

3. Leverage Call Center Analytics Data

Call center analytics capture all the data you need to support your coaching efforts. It forms the very context for coaching your reps. 

Call center metrics give you a holistic view of how your agents are performing. This data is useful for carrying out coaching sessions.

This includes tracking agents’ outgoing calls per day, missed calls, and all time spent on calls and other call activities.

A complete call center analytics dashboard lets you go into the depth of your agents’ performance and provides a complete background to their coaching.

4. Tactical Sales Coaching

Sales coaching questions the very art of selling. It is a process that is incomplete without working on the subtleties of selling. Tactical sales coaching involves focusing on the strategy as well as the nitty-gritty of the sales process.

This involves periodic reviews of the larger sales strategy. It also calls for deploying good practices around qualifying leads, prospecting, rapport building, sales closing, objection handling, and so on.

5. Sales Funnel Coaching

Navigating through the sales funnel is very tricky. Sales managers and coaches could do their agents a big favor by training them on how to handle prospects through different stages of the funnel.

The goal of sales funnel coaching is to prevent the waste of time and energy on leads that are less likely to convert. This is why prioritizing leads is an important skill agents must develop.

Take efforts to coach agents on how to identify high-ROI leads as well as how to push those leads down to the bottom of the funnel. It is equally important to guide them on how to pursue leads proactively.

Supply agents with tools to optimize the conversion process through the sales funnel. Eventually, this will contribute to improving your overall sales ROI.

Active Listening

Sales is always a solo task. Sales agents that are used to doing solo gigs are an ideal fit for team-building activities. A team with a healthy winning culture can achieve bigger milestones than a highly competitive team.

What can be better than active listening exercises to encourage collaboration and put sales agents in action? These exercises put sales agents directly in the position of their buyers.

When sales agents experience what it feels like to be the buyer, it encourages them to instantly jump into action with potential clients.

6. Peer-to-Peer Learning

Nothing beats the power of peer-to-peer reviews. It’s not only sales managers and leaders who come with valuable insights. Sales agents can learn a lot from their peers, as well.

Peer-to-peer learning may involve agents observing and reviewing the performance of fellow agents. Top performers in the team may go on to share their tactics and insights with others in the team.

Sales agents may work with their peers around important questions involving the sales process, such as:

  • “Is there a winning cold calling scriptI can use?”
  • “What is the best way to build rapport with prospects?” 
  • “How can I improve my win rate?”

7. Knowledge Sharing

Sales teams count on sales collateral for prospecting, closing deals, and so on. Supplying agents with an updated repository of knowledge is a key part of the sales coaching process.

Sales content like cold calling scripts, product demo scripts, and email templates are the backbone of all sales communications. An important goal of sales coaching is also to polish sales content.

In sales coaching, this takes the shape of managers sitting down with agents and running through their scripts. Sales managers can guide agents on how to make tweaks in these scripts and build a powerful sales content deck.

8. Role-Playing and Sales Simulations

Selling has never been straightforward. The needs, buying motivations, and personalities of buyers differ from prospect to prospect. So, unless sales agents practice in the field, they can never acquire true skills.

Role-play training exercises are powerful sales coaching tools that can boost agents’ confidence in handling objections in a safe environment and acquaint them with new product benefits and features.

When you give agents multiple role-playing scenarios, you’re enhancing their conflict resolution skills, helping them build empathy, and teaching them how to handle pressure.    

9. Providing Constructive Criticism

All the above-mentioned sales coaching techniques can go in vain if you’re not providing your agents with constructive feedback for growth and improvement.

Providing feedback is an art that sales coaches must master. Remember, your feedback can bring a sales rep’s confidence up or down. Critical feedback is easier to digest when accompanied by the acknowledgment of good efforts.

Constructive feedback is meant to help agents identify their strengths, work through their drawbacks and acquire good practices. This can be conveyed as sales performance reviews as well as one-on-one mentoring sessions.

We recommend you keep the feedback based on your observations clear, precise, and concise. Provide agents with actionable suggestions so that they can jump straight to executing these.

10. Encouraging and Reinforcing Positive Behavior

A support and coaching plan is critical to translate the newly acquired knowledge and skills into behaviors that drive high performance.

Your coaching program must aim to adjust the negative attitudes of reps and enforce positive behaviors in the workplace.

This is accomplished through expectations of positive and solid results, objectives, frequently scheduled check-ins, and genuine and extremely supportive feedback.  

The Role of Technology in Sales Coaching

Technology has empowered businesses to go the extra mile while coaching their sales teams. It has the potential to offer personalized, role-based coaching that is also quickly scalable.

Here’s how you can leverage technology anytime, anywhere to deliver effective sales coaching:

1. Virtual Workshops

To maximize learning retention and team interaction, it is essential to space sales coaching at frequent intervals. This not only helps agents acquire new skills but also allows them to practice.

The best way to adopt the spaced coaching approach is to conduct virtual workshops. If your business is struggling due to inefficient leadership or sales skills, following this approach can make all the difference.   

2. CRM Systems

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems integrate marketing and sales with consumer support in one window framework. A cloud-based CRM system is an effective tool that provides an end-to-end view of the consumer relationship.

Your sales team can obtain relevant, mission-critical, and updated information with the help of a CRM. This information can be used to make reps more proactive, agile, and productive while contacting customers and prospects.    

3. E-Learning Modules

Having a generic sales coaching curriculum that is not tailored to meet specific coaching requirements can render the entire process futile. Here’s when e-learning comes in handy.

E-learning courses can be personalized with interactive role-plays and cater to a wide range of learning needs.

When e-learning modules are customized to an individual’s learning style, it improves retention and empowers your sales agents to drive and convert more leads.  

4. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

Mobile devices offer portability that helps equip your sales team with all the required expertise, knowledge, and resources for converting leads and ensuring business success.

Several companies are implementing BYOD strategies to capitalize on the power of technology.

With BYOD, you can ensure that your sales agents can collaborate with customers and colleagues in real time, irrespective of their location.  

5. Video Conferencing

Advanced videoconferencing tools are a great asset for companies that are largely dependent on remote sales teams.

Such tools facilitate learning from any location across the globe and offer an excellent solution for group collaboration, mentoring, and coaching.

You can also use these tools to provide feedback to agents in real time, which in turn helps in improving their selling skills.

7 Benefits of Sales Coaching

Now, let’s consider the important benefits of sales coaching techniques: 

1. Identify Barriers to Performance 

Sometimes, when you are too close to the problem, you fail to see what the problem really is. This is true for companies too.

Sales coaching brings in a third-party perspective that has an objective view of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This helps identify barriers to performance. 

2. Boost Sales Productivity 

By identifying barriers to performance, sales coaches can work with teams and individual employees to create personalized sales plans, techniques, and approaches, which can help them improve their job outcomes.

Through smart, data-backed planning and coaching, sales teams can learn how to tackle challenges, and their productivity can improve. 

3. Build a Motivated Sales Team

Sales coaching also focuses on soft skills development. This includes nurturing traits like confidence, negotiation, presentation, empathy, persuasion, etc.

When employees receive coaching, practice sessions, and feedback about how they manifest these traits, they can feel surer of their sales skills, and this translates on the job, motivating them in the process. 

4. Improve Win Rate 

One of the benefits of sales coaching techniques is that they are tailored to each employee’s bespoke strengths and weaknesses.

When employees use these techniques, they will see how the way their thought process, actions, and selling style change to leverage their strengths and work through their weaknesses, automatically improving their win rates. 

5. Minimize Agent Turnover 

As win rates improve and sales personnel start to feel more confident and happier about their performance, any dissatisfaction with personal contribution reduces.

Additionally, sales coaching seeks to raise the performance and morale of the team and not just individuals. This reduces unhealthy competition. Together, these can minimize agent turnover. 

6. Increased Employee Accountability 

Sales coaching helps create increased transparency about personal contribution towards the company.

Through one-on-one coaching, employees will be able to know how they directly contribute to the company’s success and how the company’s success will benefit them.

This will promote greater accountability by the employee towards their own performance. 

7. Fostering a Curious and Creative Environment 

The world is constantly changing, and as competition intensifies, sales teams need to start getting smarter and more creative.

To do this, they need to have an insatiable curiosity to learn and step outside their comfort zone. This is what sales coaching helps them do by guiding them toward new practices, processes, and experiences.

Sales Coaching Tools and Tech Stack

The key to a high-performing sales team is access to the right set of sales management tools and resources. These tools will help you make your sales processes efficient and effective:

1. Sales Contact Center or Sales Call Center

It’s time to let go of obsolete tools such as your legacy business phone. If your sales team is advancing in terms of its skills and capabilities, use a sales contact center that matches up to it. 

Sales contact center software can be operated over the internet and can be accessed with mobile devices, laptops, and desktops.

This means you can use these systems anywhere without being bound by wires, as in a traditional landline phone. It has a range of features that supports your sales management efforts.

Some of the top features include a sales dialer to automate your dialing efforts, call monitoring to ensure the right pitch, call analytics to gauge the bandwidth of each rep, native CRM integration to minimize switching tabs, and much more. 

2. Sales Email Management Software

If cold emailing is a part of your prospecting process, good sales email software definitely comes in handy. You have to send cold emails, follow up with some prospects and respond to others.

A sales email management software not only helps manage sales emails but also allows you to personalize emails for prospects. It uses automation to build follow-up sequences, minimizing manual tasks.

Some of the most used and recommended sales email software in the market currently are HelpWise, Mailshake, and Mailchimp. We suggest you give them a try and get your sales emails in order.

3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

CRM software is vital to manage all important sales data. It is a place where the sales team can access and update details for every prospect.

Use CRM software to store and manage client details and progress more effectively. In this way, your entire sales team will be on the same page, whether they are operating remotely or on in-office premises.

The best part is that top CRM software like HubSpot and ActiveCampaign comes with automation to simplify workflows.

You can also use CRM integration with your sales call center and other software to minimize manual tasks and focus more on selling.

4. Appointment Scheduler Software

Demo bookings can be a big positive for your sales team. But, arriving at a mutually acceptable meeting slot can be time-consuming. This is where good appointment scheduling software comes to your rescue. 

Your sales reps can create a public appointment calendar listing all available time slots. As prospects pick from these slots, the agents are notified of the bookings created.

You can check out Easy Calendar to start booking and scheduling all your appointments conveniently. It also comes built-in with Sales Contact Center software such as JustCall. 

5. Sales Intelligence Tools

Arm your sales teams with sales intelligence tools to support their prospecting efforts.

Sales intelligence software will let your agents discover important data about prospects. This can help further in lead generation.

Agents can tap into sales intelligence and build personalized and powerful sales pitches. Some of the top sales intelligence tools include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, and Clearbit. 

Best Practices for Sales Coaching 

1. Establish Goals for your Sales Team 

The best way to go about sales goals-setting is by making them realistic, achievable, measurable, and time-bound. Here’s an example of how you can frame your sales goals:

Increase year-over-year sales revenue by 20%”

Sales goals may not only be related to business revenue. Goal-setting can also be associated with daily operations, team-building activities, and so on.

Encourage your sales reps to build the habit of attaching goals and breaking them down over the quarter.

2. Ensure One-on-One Time

Sales coaching tools can help you provide feedback and coach at scale. However, you should also find time to coach each agent in one-on-one sessions.

This provides a safe space where agents can share their inhibitions, and you can share personalized performance feedback and chart out a plan to advance their careers. 

3. Conduct SWOT Analysis Exercises

Get your sales agents to list out their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Sales agents are mostly busy prospecting and closing deals, and they hardly get the time to reflect on their performance.

A SWOT analysis exercise can be a great way to help agents identify their challenges and start working on them.

Being self-aware will act as an added advantage. By identifying their respective challenges, they can focus on several tougher areas of work and make progress while doubling down on strengths.

4. Build a Sales Enablement Strategy

If your agents are using the same tools, relying on the same obsolete resources, how do you think they will achieve sales success? Equip your sales team with all the right resources, guidance, and tools they need to ace sales.

The main aim of a sales enablement strategy is to make the sales process more effective. The right tools, resources, and training will enable agents to engage better with prospective clients and get more conversions.

5. Set up a Framework for Rewards and Incentives

Sales commission can be one of the main sources of motivation for your team. 

Closing sales deals can be tough, especially with multiple objections and difficult prospects; sales reps can feel demotivated and drained out. In such instances, what can boost their efforts are incentives.

A rewards and incentives framework around conversions can be helpful. Set clear criteria on how agents can qualify for rewards.

Get creative with your rewards – offer gift vouchers, subscription boxes, or direct cash bonuses. This framework can contribute to a more efficient and enthusiastic sales team.

6. Connect Agents with Senior Leadership and Other Departments

Operating in isolation from stakeholders and other verticals of the company can be difficult for sales agents.

In an ideal scenario, sales managers act as the link between sales agents and other departments. This includes senior leadership as well as other departments such as customer success and marketing.

Likewise, sales agents may also want to exchange important information, such as customer testimonials and/or customer feedback, that can aid the marketing or customer success departments. 

How to Design Effective Coaching?

Now, let’s address one of the most important sales coaching questions: what steps can companies take to design effective coaching for various sales roles?

1. Evaluation

Devise the sales coaching design by understanding your sales team’s current strengths and weaknesses. Chalk out what you want your ideal team to look like.

Then, plan how you want to transform your team from how it currently is into what you want it to be like. This can include everything from training modules to CRM technology and more. 

2. High-Performance Impact Training

Use a combination of instructor-led classroom training, practical exercises, simulations, and more to provide training.

Sometimes, companies use unique training methods, such as chatbots, to help sales personnel get acquainted with lead/customer behaviors, thought processes, needs and challenges.

By engaging with chatbots, salespeople can learn more about buyer psychology, which they can use to initiate more personalized selling at later stages of the buyer’s journey.   

3. Training Reinforcement Through Sales Coaching

Coaching focuses on making learning permanent by catering to personality development and professional upskilling needs. It is typically done one-on-one and addresses the bespoke needs of the employee.

The idea behind such coaching is to encourage the adoption of certain behaviors and rationale amongst sales teams, which will enable them to have higher closes and generate greater profits.

Hiring coaches – virtual or physical – to conduct live coaching, with lots of activities and simulations, can be a great way to help your team to go over whatever they’ve learned during training. 

For sales coaching to work, the coach needs to meet with each sales team regularly, follow up about their on-site or digital sales challenges, look at the sales data, and help the team find a solution that works for them.  

4. Instilling Accountability and Motivation

The success of any sales coaching is ensured when every person in your sales team becomes accountable for their growth and improvement.

To encourage this accountability and motivation, you can run “Salesperson of the Month” programs or tag financial benefits to their improved performance.

Even allowing top performers to act as coaches in sessions for new salespeople can be very intrinsically rewarding. 

Now let’s take a quick look at a few sales coaching examples to see how coaching can be introduced into different sales roles: 

●  Business Development Representatives (BDRs)

Sales coaches can run mock cold calling sessions, where the BDRs try to sell them a product/service.

By putting the BDRs through various challenging scenarios, the coaches can encourage the employees to use the techniques they have learned in training or have been taught by the coach to convince leads to convert.  

●  Sales Consultants

 Sales coaches can work with sales consultants to review their technical product knowledge, presentation skills, and their ability to handle tricky questions during conferences with prospects. 

● Customer Service Representatives

Customer service representatives can be coached on how to handle customer complaints via email, text, and calls. They can be evaluated and coached on how to redress issues while ensuring the customer has a positive experience.

● Sales Managers

Sales manager coaching would involve people management skills, report delivery communication, and stakeholder management. Here, coaches may also work on improving the individual’s management style.

How to Measure Sales Coaching Effectiveness?

1. Checking Employee Productivity Over Time

Companies can check how productive employees have been for the next couple of months after the sales coaching.

Here, productivity can mean anything from the number of cold calls/emails made in a day to the time taken to close a sale.

Ideally, you should see the sales cycle shortening and the number of leads generated or conversions increasing. The productivity should also reflect on the amount your company spends on sales activities.

Additionally, check the quality of leads a representative brings in and how long the rest of the sales team is able to keep them loyal to your brand and products. 

2. Noticing Sales Team Collaboration and Communication Differences

Teamwork is one of the most integral components of the success of a sales team. No sales employee works in a silo. Everyone in sales depends on the other team members to take the customer through the customer journey.

For this to happen seamlessly, any cross-team or cross-department communication and collaboration challenges must be sorted, thanks to sales coaching.

While these human issues may not permanently disappear, your employees must find, through coaching, safe and supportive ways to manage any dissension and work together as a team to bring conversions and profits for the company. 

3. Studying Sales Data Evolution

Sales data is a powerful indicator of the success or failure of sales coaching. This data tells whether the sales coaching was effective in sharing the knowledge, skills, and training needed to help your team to perform better.

When evaluating the sales data, check important metrics such as:

  • Number of leads contacted
  • Number of leads converted
  • Earning potential of each lead
  • Number of demos given
  • Number of quotes solicited
  • Number of conversions generated (can be any type of conversion)
  • Sales quota for monthly/quarterly/yearly
  • Quote-to-close ration
  • Revenue by product/territory
  • Average sales cycle time/cost
  • Total revenue
  • Cost of sales operations

4. Tracking Brand Mentions Across Platforms 

A positive sales experience can encourage prospects and customers to mention the brand positively too.

In fact, a good sales experience can bring in more brand engagement and mentions in the form of website or social media visits, leads, referrals, and conversions.

Since the objective of sales coaching is to ultimately impact top and bottom lines, brand mentions in favor of your company are a sign that sales coaching has been effective.

Your sales team has learned impactful techniques from the sales coaching. Plus, any ongoing coaching that’s geared toward fine-tuning sales operations and behaviors are yielding positive results. 

5. Monitoring Time Spent on Performance Improvement 

One of the roles of sales coaching is being part of the performance improvement plan of an organization.

A really great indicator that sales coaching is helping your company is that you spend less time using sales coaching as a curative measure and more time using it as a planning and preventative measure.

Once sales teams start implementing everything they’ve learned as part of coaching and they find it helps them, they are less likely to make mistakes, waste time on unnecessary tasks, let go of good leads, and experience failure in closing sales, i.e., needing fewer performance improvement interventions.

Common Challenges in Sales Coaching

Businesses face several challenges in sales coaching. Sales agents lack interest in coaching, don’t retain what they learn, or aren’t engaged. It’s no wonder sales coaching sometimes fails to accomplish the desired business outcomes.

Here are some common sales coaching challenges:     

1. Lack of Buy-in from Sales Leadership

Sales coaching is generally initiated in a company when someone identifies a need and a budget. Oftentimes, these coaching programs lack connection to or sponsorship from key stakeholders.

For sales coaching to be successful, the stakeholders and the sales teams need to take active participation before, during, and after the coaching.

This helps in communicating expectations and enthusiasm throughout. You must create opportunities for sales leadership to display their enthusiasm to ensure support and proper alignment.      

2. Resistance to Change

Resistance to change is a common occurrence in the sales coaching world. But why is it difficult to get sales agents to change?

The main reason is that many sales coaching programs aimed at bringing change are considered ad hoc initiatives.

They lack proper structure and don’t offer the clarity required for transitioning from the old system to the new one. Agents feel more comfortable using the old techniques and revert to their old way of handling things.    

3. Time Constraints and Ineffective Sales Coaches

Nothing can give better results than having one-to-one sessions with sales agents. Sales coaching requires consistent efforts, and these meetings must be conducted every week.

Due to other responsibilities, sales managers often lack time to provide the personalized attention that your agents require.

It’s also likely that many sales coaches or managers are inefficiently trained on how to conduct these meetings properly.  

4. Measuring Coaching Effectiveness

How effective is your sales coaching? What type of coaching ROI are you expecting? Managers and stakeholders seek answers to these questions.

Proper monitoring of sales agents’ retention and engagement is essential to establish the worth of sales coaching. Here’s when measurement comes into the picture.

Evaluating the effectiveness of coaching can be quite challenging. As several factors influence sales effectiveness, long-term evaluation of results becomes difficult.

Wrapping Up on Sales Coaching

Everything has gone digital these days. With the pivot to remote work and cloud adoption, agents have more data than ever before.

While sales managers can promote best practices, it’s nearly impossible for them to scale sales strategies across huge, distributed sales teams.

That’s when AI-powered tools come in handy.  With them, you can design, execute and scale the entire sales coaching program.

Despite being necessary, sales reinforcement is often overlooked while incorporating a sales coaching program. It’s important to ensure that agents can apply the newly acquired knowledge and skills on the job.

They must be offered continuous support through an effective sales reinforcement program, enabling them to use data-driven strategies to proactively find gaps and fill them.

As per a recent sales coaching survey conducted by Second Nature, around 96% of respondents believe that productive sales coaching exceptionally improved the performance of their sales agents.

 As we adjust to today’s new world of virtual selling, sales coaching becomes even more essential to keep agents focused on maintaining sales performance.

Tracking an agent’s performance early on in the process can help you identify and address issues that can adversely affect the business later on.

Conclusion

Employees flourish when they feel encouraged. Hammering results and performance are no longer sufficient.

You need to pinpoint what’s lacking and how it can be addressed without compromising enthusiasm and confidence. Sales coaching is a great way to empower your sales team to be successful.

Using the tips and tools mentioned above, you can design an effective sales coaching program to achieve the desired goals. But always keep in mind that sales coaching programs require huge commitments, both in terms of time and money.

It’s a long-term collaboration between sales leaders, AI-powered tools, and agents, ensuring the success of your teams as well as your clients. 

Sales Coaching FAQs

What can you expect from a sales coach?

A sales coach should be able to aid the sales team and reps in identifying their strengths and weaknesses.

A sales coach should ideally be a critic who can point out mistakes and provide the right guidance and techniques. They should be able to encourage reps to brush up on their existing skills and pick up new sales skills on the go.

They should also be well-versed in the tools that can help sales teams excel.

Why is sales coaching important?

Sales coaching is important to drive sales and add to your overall sales revenue and also to minimize attrition within sales teams.

Sales coaching ensures that teams aren’t just giving vague feedback to sales reps without really enabling them to meet quota.

A good sales coaching program bridges the gap between management expectations and existing performance by clearly outlining what’s needed for the team to get there.

What are the techniques of coaching?

Multiple techniques are included in a sales coaching program.

Some of the most used and recommended sales coaching examples are using live call recording, leveraging call center analytics data, using real-time feedback, and peer-to-peer learning, among others.

What does a good sales coach look like?

A good sales coach is all about transparent, honest, and empathetic communication. They are good listeners who communicate with the sales reps regularly, trying to understand the challenges they are facing and providing personalized resolutions.

They offer practical tips and objective feedback than just pointing out the mistakes. A good sales coach has many other key traits that are powered by emotional intelligence.

What should a sales training program include?

An effective sales training program is built entirely on the distinct needs and requirements of the reps. So, even before ideating the program, proper assessment of the team is critical.

Once you have important data points about the strengths and weaknesses of the team members, you can create a sales training program for them or choose an existing one in the market.

In general, a good sales training program should be focused on building hard skills, caring about customer experience, and conducting team-building exercises.

With over a decade of experience in the SaaS industry, Rahul currently oversees the Customer Success team for the Americas region. He has been a key figure in establishing, scaling, and also crafting the strategic vision for the department. Specializing in the digitization of customer success processes, Rahul excels at creating and executing operational playbooks aimed at boosting customer retention and renewals. Under his leadership, the team has achieved significant gains in NRR and NPS, elevating overall customer advocacy. Over the past four years, Rahul has held similar high-impact roles in various organizations, consistently contributing to their success.

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